eZ Publish 4.0 Launches; Gets Even More Media Friendly

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Dec 5, 2007

Just out the door, eZ Systems announces the latest version of their flagship web content management product — eZ Publish v4.0. Can you hear the cheers from the Open Source community now? Or how about from the online publishers, who eZ Systems' execs assert they are “200% focused on.”

The eZ Publish web cms solution is a freely downloadable bundle that enables a range of web publishing and social media operations. The product is based on open source PHP technology and offers a development framework for web publishing, media portals, intranets, extranets and e-commerce websites. This release marks the first stable release of the 4.0 version.

eZ Publish v4.0 offers the following enhancements:

Compatibility with PHP 5: Full compatibility with PHP 5, including a new PHP enterprise components library.
Improved UI: An updated website interface that includes a new graphical design interface and other enhancements.
Performance Improvements: Increased performance and memory reduction with an improved internal XML handler. Improved clustering performance.
Other enhancements: Enhanced ISBN and multi-option data type handling.

The scope of the 4.0 release is not overwhelmingly large. But this is a tradition with eZ Systems — they (wisely) seek to have measured transitions from release to release, thereby easing the potential pain and lowering the migration risks for end clients. Good thinking, we say.

More Coming Soon, and Now

The company has some notable core changes in the pipeline for the product. eZ Components, a free, high quality bundle of PHP application building blocks, is a big part of this. And the 4.0 release takes incremental steps towards further integration and reliance on eZ Components.

But for the big stuff — such as a new settings engine, a new template engine and a replacement of the original, native workflow engine with the eZ Components Workflow module — the fans must wait. These things are still down the road a little ways.

In conversation today with CMSWire, Roland Benedetti, eZ System's Managing Director for Western EU, informed us that the new workflow engine is still undergoing some functional enhancements and is currently slated for the 4.0.1 release; time frame TDB.

Your thirst for progress will not, however, be left unsated. For the Norwegians have been busy.

eZ Find - Better Searching with Lucene

Also released is an updated search module called eZ Find. This is a new extension for eZ Publish 3.x and 4.x providing capabilities such as relevance ranking, keyword highlighting, native support for eZ Publish access rights and the ability to search sites that contain millions of objects.

The eZ Find add-on is based on the Apache Lucene project, which is, in our opinion, a fine choice of technologies. eZ Find can be configured to search multiple eZ Publish sites and for the technical tinkerers, may be extended to search external sites, remote repositories, or whatever you can convert to a Lucene document. Sky's the limit if you can code (details here).