ezPublish experiences [closed]

Question

Facing a need for a single CMS we can use for rapid deployment of customized CMS solutions, I am wondering if anyone can share any constructive feedback, experiences, pros and cons of this, seemingly powerful, piece of software.

The whole story/marketing pitch sounds solid, and from a quick glance at the CMS itself things seem to be put together in a coherent and pretty flexible way. I am however looking for first hand experiences as they usually reflect the real situation way better than anything else.

If you have used (or are still using) ezPublish for something, I would love to hear about it.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I'v used ezPublish for quite a while and I can say its very flexible and allows a range of different solutions to quickly be developed with it. The ability to add content types is what makes it awesome.

It can be a little bit slow at times, but with proper caching set up it can also be really fast.

Answer 2

Having in mind all good points of eZ Publish you should be aware of bad ones. From programmer point of view: Most of the system was written in php4, and was rewritten in a hurry, to make it works with php5. Lack of design patterns and object oriented approach in kernel, makes system hard to develope with, and to read its code. To add some heavier functionality not supplied by CMS, you can use extension system. Problem is programming extensions is slow and painful (documentation only in code). There is quite good technical documentation on www.ez.no but most of it is for webdesigners.

Answer 3

The biggest downside: The learning curve is very steep and long, and there aren't enough knowledgeable eZ Publish developers available in North America.

However, from the beginning I've been fond of its overall architecture, which seems to be elegant, flexible and generally well thought-out. Over time, some things have been bolted on in ways that don't necessarily fit perfectly. But it's pretty amazing what you can accomplish with the core functionality, and overriding and extending the core is clean and maintains good separation.

I would say that if you are in it for the long haul and can afford to train your developers (really, you can't afford not to) then eZ Publish is a reasonably good choice. Once you figure out the platform and develop your own kit of tools, it should be fairly quick to deploy custom solutions.

I will also concur with an earlier answer, that the class system really shines. Caching is always an issue, so don't forget to learn the caching system. Your site can fly on eZ Publish, but you must understand caching to make it do so!

Answer 4

I have Used eZ Publish for some years now. It was quite difficult to learn it at first and understanding the structure, but when you are on the way then everything would be simple and fast, especially with their new kernel on Symfony2.

Answer 5

I would recommend using eZPublish 5, as I suppose you no longer talk about the older versions, only if you have at least some basic knowledge of eZ version4. That is because the admin is still using the legacy and all the settings are done using .ini files which you really have to know. Nothing hard, but learning curve is definitely steep.

Also using eZFlow will require working with both .ini and .yml configuration files, so you need to understand both config structures.

Further on, as I have been at a presentation for the new admin, which unfortunately will be using YUI as JS framework, and having seen the release plan for this year, I can say you will have to keep the legacy admin if you want to benefit of all the functionalities as there is an enormous amount of work to be done to have everything migrated on Symfony 2.

Even with the announcement of eZPlatform(eZ 6), I am not that confident we will have a really STABLE version anywhere this year.