Ez Publish News & Articles

eZ Systems’ (news, site) 2010 New Year's resolutions are all customer-serving: look-and-feel editing, XML export and collaboration in eZ Publish 4.2 open source web content management system.

Normally in this space we look back over the current month and forward into the next month at what the various open source CMS projects are up to. But rather than blindly putting out an update for January, we thought we'd look farther ahead into what everyone wants to accomplish throughout next year. Call it our open source 2010 predictions with less guesswork and high hopes.

Welcome to the December 2009 installment of our what's coming from the open source CMS projects in the next 30 days.

If you're looking through here and feel that your project was left out, we invite you to send us an email at pr@cmswire.com with a pointer to who we should contact at your project for updates.
 

eZ Systems (news, site), the self-proclaimed leader in commercial open source content management, has a new head honcho to guide the company through the fierce waters ahead.

The eZ Publishing community (news, site) has just landed themselves a new Community Manger.  

Nicolas Pastorino is no stranger to the company. He steps into the Community Manager role having already acted as eZ's Expert Consultant at eZ Systems Western Europe, an eZ Labs Engineer and a member of the Product Management team. 

"We need a full time Community Manager," says Bertrand Maugain VP Marketing at eZ. "Nicolas's experience from some of the most demanding projects as well as from eZ Labs development team will be very important in that new position." 

The news of Pastorino's new job follows the release of eZ Publish 4.2, which is said to focus on usability, scalability and performance, as well as the announcement of eZ's new Business Partner Program.

"One of the key responsibilities of the Community Management team is to help accelerating such a process via a brand new platform, meant to be a central communication means, strongly connected to the currently existing community tools and websites," said Pastorino. "It will be launched on November 2nd."

Following on the heels of the 2008 Open Source CMS Market Share Report, this year we collaborated with water&stone to produce an improved 2009 version. The report is an interesting study of 20 dominant systems in the market. It's really not about which CMS is best, nor about relative comparisons beyond brand strength, sentiment and adoption patterns. We're aware of this.

Traditional and Social Media Analysis

What the study did was sniff around the nooks and crannies of our increasingly electronic and publicly broadcast lives and endeavor to quantify the relative brand strengths, brand sentiments and adoption patterns for the top 20 most popular content management products. In addition, we ran a survey on CMSWire.com a little ways back. With this tool we were able to directly pose questions to our readership -- and more than 1200 of you took to the task (thank you!).

This year's analysis looked at Alfresco, CMS Made Simple, DotNetNuke, Drupal, e107, eZ Publish, Jahia, Joomla, Liferay, MODx, OpenCms, phpWebSite, Plone, SilverStripe, Textpattern, TikiWiki, Typo3, Umbraco and WordPress.

Key Conclusions: 3 Dominate, Many Are Vibrant

What jumped quickly out is that The Big Three -- Joomla, WordPress and Drupal -- led the survey set across a wide range of measures. However, the top slots are not static, Joomla has gained market share over Drupal, and WordPress with its hosted version has what looks like a smoother path to adoption.

The report identifies less obvious stars. Alfresco, a vendor focused on both document management and web content management, performed well across a number of categories, and led the Java-based open source CMS race over its nearest rival, Liferay. DotNetNuke led the .NET-based open source CMS category, though Umbraco is up and coming.

The report goes on to identify reasons why DotNetNuke's position may soon be changing. In addition to naming the market leaders, the study identifies projects whose market share and brand metrics indicate they are at risk or facing a closing window of opportunity. A metric we found of particular interest was the product evaluation rates versus the adoption rates.

The 90+ page report is available for free and includes profiles of each of the systems covered.

Well, we said it was coming and now it's finally here. eZ Publish 4.2, the most updated version of eZ Systems' (news, site) open source CMS, was released earlier this week. 

Complete with a new Edge Side Include (ESI) integrating extension called eZSI, eZ Publish 4.2 focuses on usability for both end-users and editors, as well as scalability and performance. Let's take a look:

Welcome to the October 2009 installment of our what's coming from the open source CMS projects in the next 30 days.

If you're looking through here and feel that your project was left out, we invite you to send us an email at pr@cmswire.com with a pointer to who we should contact at your project for updates.

Enterprise search seems to be a hot topic today. PolySpot (news, site), a French company that provides such solutions, recently announced that they’re going to be collaborating with the ever-popular eZ Systems (news, site).

Like several other solutions on the enterprise search block, PolySpot's technology filters through numerous types of resources including secured files stored either within the enterprise or externally. By hooking up with eZ Systems, users can access eZ Publish's digital content management resources through the PolySpot interface. Seemingly big fans of the open source CMS, this partnership also nicely highlights PolySpot’s recent eZ Publish connector.

"We are very excited about this collaboration,” said Roland Benedetti, vice president Product Management, eZ Systems. “Simply connecting eZ Publish with PolySpot Enterprise Search represents an exciting opportunity for our common users. They will then be able to benefit from a comprehensive and coherent information access system on which IT departments can rely on.”

For more information on Polyspot, check out their homepage here (you can switch it to English). For the latest goings-on with eZ, stick with us.

If you're into open source content management systems, then this ought to catch your eye.

Today at 5 pm Central European Time, 11 am Eastern Time you can join eZ System's co-founder and CTO, Bård Farstad, for a preview of their coming 4.2 release of eZ Publish (news, site). This version contains some interesting enhancements including:

• significant scalability improvements
• a new eZSI extension, providing full support for the Edge Side Include standard
• eZ Find search engine updates including an Apache Solr foundation, faceted search, external content source support and automatic content relations
• an improved content rating system for public users
• eZ Flow updates including improved admin integration and new content blocs

 If eZ Publish is your CMS cup of tea, head on over and sign-up now. Note that the production release of version 4.2 is targeted for the end of this month. We'll have more on that soon.

Welcome to the September 2009 installment of our what's coming from the open source CMS projects in the next 30 days.

If you're looking through here and feel that your project was left out, we invite you to send us an email at pr@cmswire.com with a pointer to who we should contact at your project for updates.

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.