Ez Publish News & Articles

Installing everything needed for a CMS can be quite daunting, so it comes as welcome news that eZ (news, site) has developed an all-in-one installer for those just starting out or switching in the open source CMS world.

Julien Pauthier presented an review of Prisma Presse's adoption of eZ Publish. Prisma Presse is the second largest media group in France with 20 print magazines and numerous editorial websites. In 2006, Prisma had no strictly on-line editorial, and the various sites were classic in-line PHP implementations, each publishing content in a catch as catch can manner.

Casting an eye over the scene, Prisma decided they needed a centralized Web CMS solution which would be scalable (but they weren't certain to what extent), modular and based on common technology that is supported by most hosting providers (i.e., LAMP).

As the editorial staff did not have a preference for the content structure, they also wanted something which solidly organized the content. Prisma decided that an open-source solution would fit their bill. Interestingly (and oddly), Prisma thought scalability would be less of an issue with open source, due to the non-proprietary nature of the CMS.

After an initial period of testing, Prisma went on-line with major sites (gala.fr, voici.fr) working from a centralized eZ Publish based CMS. Initial challenges included increased hosting costs (voici.fr receives 225,000 UV/day), and difficulty finding external expertise and support.

Internally, setting up their CMS required formalizing their editorial workflow, establishing restrictive development guidelines, and an estimated 6-month period to bring an experienced PHP developer up to speed with the eZ Publish CMS.

Some of the ways Potier has seen the installation pay off for Prisma are in reduced maintenance and support costs due to centralization, a shorter roll out time for new sites (femmes.com was brought out by Prisma in 40 workday man-hours), and a reduction in training hours for editorial staff due to the shared backoffice among all their sites.

Here at the eZ Conference in Paris I had an opportunity to speak with Roland Bennedetti, eZ Publish Product Manager. Given the company's previously heavy focus on web publishers I was curious if the theme remained the same -- whether eZ Systems considers eZ Publish a media-focused Web CMS.

According to Roland, "Media is important, because it's going to be the big driver for the evolution of Web CMS, but eZ doesn't target media over other sectors."

When asked if he could see how some people might get that impression, the response was that  "maybe our literature gives that impression, but that depends who we are talking to.

"For example, the non-profit sector is big for us, because we are open source. When we address a non-profit client, we obviously don't talk about the same things as when we talk to clients who are in finance. They have different goals. It's like this. Media is important, but eZ doesn't target a specific sector in that way."

The company has found success in the publishing sector, with a significant number of European electronic publications running on the platform.

At one of their previous gatherings -- perhaps it was 2007 in Paris -- CMSWire staff saw a slide with the message something to the effect of " We're 200% Focused on Media". It seems the focus has been successful and now perhaps the company is seeking to branch out further.

The buzz this morning at the dungeon-esque eZ Conference Developer's Track (it took a while to find the smoky back room) was on implementation of CMIS to integrate Alfresco's document management interface with eZ Publish.

Christian Lundvang from NXC presented on the topic with some help in the question period from Sergey Puschin.

Lundvang demo-ed how documents can be created using Alfresco's MS Word interface or Alfresco administration and then accessed in the eZ Publish Back or Front office. He then presented a case of creating and publishing a document from eZ Publish into the Alfresco space.

While Lundvang did not show a counter case of requesting the eZ Publish content repository using the CMIS interface, it is reportedly in the planning and under development.

The demo and discussions showed the strengths of the standard but also highlighted some potential limitations as pointed by some attendees. For instance, eZ Publish could store more structure contents than simply document oriented content: a folder in eZ Publish might have its own set of meta information when it is a very simple container in both Alfresco and the CMIS standard.

The CMIS standard, which has been advanced as a work-in-progress under the Oasis umbrella, has been provisionally adopted by a number of systems including Alfresco, Nuxeo and Day software. The current version of the standard, 0.61, has been implemented by NXC first to enable integration with Alfresco but it could then be used for any integration with a CMIS compliant solution.

eZ undoubtedly looks to this project as an example of how an eZ partner, like NXC, can contribute to the eZ Publish model: The extension, a collaboration between NXC and eZ Systems, will be integrated into the eZ Publish 4.2 release slated for September.

The eZ Conference and Awards kicked off today in Paris, France. The Norwegen open-sourcers are celebrating their 10th anniversary at this year's event, which for the first time, they are holding outside of Norway.

The choice of Paris is a nod to the growing importance of international markets in general and France in particular for eZ Systems (news, site). But that's not the only advantage of Paris. "Getting to Skien [Norway] is expensive and difficult. eZ has a lot of partners in France, and [the location] is good for them," says Bertrand Maugin of eZ France, and this year's event coordinator.

Today's program includes a late morning talk by Christian Lundvang of NXC on the CMIS Interface for eZ Publish, but for now it's the keynote address with Steve Powers, a senior Analyst with Forrester.

With eZ Systems (news, site) starting its eZ Conference and Awards bash today, it warms up with news of a new integration deal for its open source web CMS eZ Publish with WoodWing's (news, site) publishing solution.

If one thing's for sure, it's that it ain't exactly 'eZ' (sorry) to score major investments—especially in economical freak-out times like these. That's why all of our kudos for the day go to eZ Systems (news, site) for successfully romancing Hasso Plattner Ventures. Co-founded in 2005 by Hasso Plattner, the Germany-based venture capital fund was created to "support young entrepreneurs with the successful transformation of their ideas into marketable products."

eZ Systems is certainly in the expansion stage. The Norwegian company has managed to find and maintain a successful place in Europe and as we recently reported, has been making moves to beef up its North American team. Additional efforts include those made last year to extend their presence in Japan.

Ez’s main bread and award winner is eZ Publish, which enables its users to manage their digital content for use in Web publishing, media portals, intranets, e-commerce and extranets.

“eZ combines an excellent technological solution with the advantages of an open source business model, as a look at their top tier clients shows, said Eran Davidson, CEO of Hasso Plattner Ventures. “We are confident that eZ Systems will continue to grow on a global scale during the next year.”

With all the crisp new cashmoney from Hasso Plattner, it’s hard to imagine that Davidson is anything but exactly right. Keep tabs on eZ here to see where they make their next move.

As nearly every article we publish on the topic attests, there is no best CMS -- there's only best fit given the context, if that. At the recent DrupalCamp in Helsinki Exove, a Finnish technical consulting company focused on open source solutions, presented their take on how to choose the best CMS given the client's project context.

They looked at 4 web content management systems: Drupal, WordPress, eZ Publish and CMS Made Simple.

Given the context, it's no surprise that their point of reference was Drupal. But what convinced us to mention the presentation was their concise yet useful take on how the 4 products differed and in what circumstances they encouraged the use of one versus another. Let's have a look.

CMS Watch (news, site) has just released the 17th edition of their independent research report on Web Content Management: Web CMS Report 2009.

In this latest release, CMS Watch notes that there is another wave of web content management vendors from Europe entering the North America market. These vendors are offering a greater variety of options especially in the areas of .NET and open source. And these are not new vendors, many have been around awhile, just focused on the European market.

According to Tony Byrne, CMS Watch founder, European and UK-based Web CMS vendors have been trying to break into the US market for over a decade. There are been two previous waves: successful in wave 1: RedDot and Day Software, successful in wave 2: Sitecore and Tridion.

This "third wave" includes some well-known vendors:

• Telerik and EpiServer: Offering solutions to the SMB market and challenging existing vendors like Ektron and Sitecore
• eZ Publish, TYPO3 and Drupal: All three are developing strong partner relationships in North America

And while they think this is a good thing, CMS Watch is advising caution and due diligence. “Crossing the Atlantic in either direction is very hard for a Web CMS vendor,” adds Byrne.  “Building effective support structures is a process that takes years, so North American customers should carefully weigh any newcomer’s current abilities as well as long-term staying power.”

You can get the full report here.

The J. Boye Conference's 2009 Web Idol competition was fiercely fought, with eZ Systems, Ektron and SilverStripe presenting Web Content Management Systems and Isys demonstrating an enterprise intranet search.

While Isys, SilverStripe and Ektron presented compelling demos, Bård Farstad's eZ Publish Web CMS proved the winner, with an elegant drag-and-drop interface and on-the-fly photo integration.

After snapping a few shots of the judges, Bård uploaded them into a gallery he created with a few clicks.

For light- to medium-weight sites and rich blogs -- eZ Publish supports video, naturally -- this Web CMS makes creation, well, eZ.

Just when you thought the dust had settled following the recent launch of eZ Publish 4.1, open source content management vendor eZ Systems (news site) has initiated an aggressive recruitment campaign for its core development team eZ Labs, indicating that the next version of eZ Publish may come sooner rather than later.

eZ Systems is turning 10 this year -- a notable achievement in the open source content management world. And with the upcoming eZ Conference and Awards in Paris this June, we figured it was an opportune moment to have a chat with the eZ Systems folks and see just how the commercial open source world works, from their perspective.

eZ Publish (news, site), from 10 year old Norwegian vendor eZ Systems, is an open source web content management system and PHP component framework licensed respectively under the GPL and New BSD open source licensing schemes. The product has had much success in the online media space in Europe and is now making strong moves into the U.S. market.

Version 4.0 of eZ Publish was released back in December 2007. And there's been a rather notable pause as v4.1 was readied. But the company asserts that this was for good reason and that 2008 was largely a year of consolidation. Let's have a look at what they've delivered in 4.1.

Even in an “economic downturn” some companies are thriving. The open source enterprise solutions provider, eZ Systems, has been on the move in North America over the last few months. And their progress is paying off to the tune of new strategy and hiring plans in the United States.

Care to celebrate Friday with a story about eZ Systems, the self-proclaimed content management ecosystem? Either way we leave you no choice. The company recently released a significant update to their eZ Find search plug-in. The latest update enhances relevancy controls and allows you to search multiple eZ websites and non-eZ Publish data sources. Read on, there's more.