Basic
eZ publish definitions:
Content class
eZ publish uses
classes to define the structure of your content. You can think
of a class as instructions on how to store one separate content
type. For example an article typically consists of an
introduction of body and a picture. These elements of the class
are called attributes.
Content object
An object
represents one piece of content on your site. Each object is
based on one of the classes in the system. For example, you can
create an article based on the article class definition.
Content tree
The content tree
is used to organize your data. Each time you create a new object
you choose a location for it within the content tree. For
example, you could create an article and place it inside a
folder named “News”. This makes it easy to find and navigate
your content.
SecuritySecurity
Audit trail/ Version control
eZ publish keeps
track of all changes that are made to your content. The time and
the author of the changes are logged for future usage.
Content approval
eZ publish
provides a collaboration system on the site content. The
collaboration system allows you to set up your content or parts
of your content to go through approval before it is published.
E-mail verification
You can configure
eZ publish to allow people to register new accounts in the
system. When they do so, eZ publish will send an activation
e-mail with an activation key. This ensures that both the e-mail
address is valid and that the correct user is registering him/her
self.
Granular privileges/ Role based permission system
eZ publish
contains an advanced privilege system that allows you to grant
privileges on many levels. The most important levels is on the
class level, the object level, and on separate parts of the
content tree.
LDAP authentication
eZ publish is
provided with a plug-in for LDAP-based authentication.
Pluggable authentication
eZ publish
provides a plug-in enabled authentication system. This means
that you can use third party databases with login information to
authenticate users in addition to the internal user database in
eZ publish.
Sandbox
eZ publish offers
a preview mode where you can see your content exactly they way
it will look on the user site. This allows you to experiment
without breaking the live site.
Session management
eZ publish
persistently keeps track on all the users who are logged in. The
administrator user can end user sessions at any time.
SSL compatibility
eZ publish is
completely SSL (Secure Socket Layer) aware and you can choose to
run your entire site with SSL.
Versioning
eZ publish
provides a system-wide content versioning through the content
object system. Each time an object is edited a new version is
made. You can revert to previous versions at any time.
Support
Commercial manuals
There is a book
available on the eZ publish CMS. Buy it here: http://ez.no/products/books/ez_publish_book.
Commercial support
Verinet provides
commercial support for the eZ publish CMS. You can find more
information about our support on the main page.
Commercial training
Verinet provides
commercial training for the eZ publish CMS. You can find more
information about our training on the main page.
Developer community
eZ publish is an
open source product with an open source philosophy. This means
that all development related processes are done in the open and
in a collaborative way.
Plugable API
eZ publish has an
open architecture which allows plugins for all the basic
components of the system. This includes custom class building
blocks, custom functionality through the workflow system and
custom functionality in the template engine.
Professional hosting
Verinet offers
professional hosting for eZ systems through 10 hosting centers
in Denmark and 15 international centers.
Public forum
eZ systems
provides a public forum for discussions about eZ publish in the
community section and has also dedicated personnel to in the
forums to help people out with problems.
Public mailing list
eZ systems
provides public mailing lists for development discussions.
Third party developers
Most of our
partners and community members develop plug ins and custom code
for eZ publish.
User conference
eZ systems
arranges annual eZ publish conferences.
Ease of use
Friendly URLs
eZ publish uses
the content of the objects to generate their URLs. This means
that you can recognize the contents of a link by reading it. eZ
publish URLs never contain long an cryptical strings that you
can not understand. This makes your eZ publish-based Website
better readable for humans and highly indexable for search
engines like Google.
Image resizing
eZ publish takes
care of automatic image resizing for the user. The user can
upload images of any size and eZ publish will automatically
scale it to the requested size. The scaling can also easily be
changed to fit the individual needs of the user
Macro Language
See template
language
Prototyping
eZ publish
provides a flexible override system which allows you to
customize how each class and object is handled. This makes it
possible to optimize the creation process of these types.
Subscription/ Notification
eZ publish
provides a powerful subscriptions systems that allows your users
to subscribe to updates of your site. Whenever a part of the
site is changed or new content is published the users will
receive a notification mail.
Template language
eZ publish
provides an advanced templating language that allows you to
display your content exactly the way you want it, using
state-of-the-art logic if needed.
Undo
eZ publish stores
all changes that are made to the content objects. This means
that you can always revert to a previous version if a user
accidentally changed an object.
WYSIWYG editor
To make it easier
to input advanced office-like documents with headers, font
changes and pictures, eZ publish provides a What You See Is What
You Get (WYSIWYG) editor. Using the Online Editor you edit
objects through a well known interface similar to that of the
big office suites.
Performance
Advanced caching
In addition to
caching of HTML output eZ publish also caches many of the
internal structures like role and permissions, settings and
compiled templates. The result is that a minimal amount of PHP
code is run on each page request.
Database replication
eZ publish can be
set up to take advantage of database replication facilities.
This enables eZ publish to perform read queries from any slave
database servers while write requests are written to the
database master. The result is that the database request load is
divided between several servers which makes eZ publish scale
better.
Load balancing
eZ publish
supports load balancing between several apache servers . To
achieve this eZ publish provides special tools to synchronize
the contents of the servers.
Page caching
eZ publish
provides several very advanced caching mechanisms that cache the
output in various stages. The result is that a minimal amount of
PHP code is run on each page request. For completely static
pages eZ publish provides static caching that avoids starting
PHP altogether.
Static content export
eZ publish
provides tools to export your entire site directly to HTML. This
is useful if you want to serve your pages from static HTML
servers or if you want to distribute the contents of your site
on CDs.
Management
Asset management
eZ publish
provides a central repository where users can upload images,
videos and other files. The items in this repository can then be
embedded in/as objects throughout the site. If you change a file
in the repository it will be changed in all the objects using it.
Content scheduling
Sometimes you
want to publish/hide content on your site automatically at some
point in time. eZ publish handles both gracefully on a per class
basis.
Content staging
Content staging
means that you create content on one server and then move it to
another server. eZ publish allows you to do this using the
package system. Any content can be exported to an XML package
and then imported on another eZ publish server.
Inline administration
eZ publish
provides an administration back end where advanced users can
edit the contents of your site in a specialized interface.
However, for less experienced users it is better to have content
administration directly in the user interface. You can achieve
this functionality in eZ publish simply by adding log-in
functionality to your site and by adding edit buttons for logged
in users with the correct rights.
Online administration
eZ publish can be
managed completely through the web using the administration
interface. The administration interface is optimized for use
with modern browsers with javascript. However, all functionality
is also provided for older browsers or text based browsers.
Package deployment
Using eZ publish
you can package both content and extra functionality easily. You
can import both the functionality and the content on any other
eZ publish installation.
Sub-sites / roots / multi-sites
eZ publish allows
you to have several sub-sites within the same content tree.
These multi-sites can be self contained with their own menu
structures etc. You can also have completely separated sites
using the same eZ publish installation.
Themes / skins
eZ publish allows
you to import and export both templates and CSS styles. This
allows you to build dynamic “themes” that can be exported if you
like. You can easily create your own skins by editing or
creating a new CSS)
Trash
When you delete
objects in eZ publish, they are stored in the trash. You can
restore objects from the trash at any time with the version
information intact or empty the trashcan at any time.
Web-based style/template management
eZ publish
provides a web based template and style management package in
the administration interface. From here you can manage all the
templates and styles in your system to your needs. For more
advanced users the same functionality is also available directly
from the file system.
Workflow engine
eZ publish
contains a powerful workflow engine that provides the means to
add business logic at key points in eZ publish (so called “triggers”).
The workflow system can also be used to add custom functionality
or generic functionality.
Interoptability
Content syndication (RSS)
eZ publish
provides a powerful RSS module that allows you to create RSS
feeds from any part of your content tree. You can export all
your content this way and you can have as many RSS feeds as you
like. Similarly eZ publish also supports RSS import into any
part of the content tree. This way you can import syndicated
material from another site and use it on your site.
UTF-8 support
eZ publish
supports native UTF-8 character encoding. This allows you to
have multi-lingual sites without the need of having different
character sets for each language.
WAI compliance
All templates
provided by eZ publish support the W3C WAI specification making
it easier to create WAI optimized sites.
WebDAV support
eZ publish
supports WebDAV out of the box. This allows you to upload and
download content from the eZ publish server directly from your
WebDAV client.
XHTML compliance
All templates
provided by eZ publish are checked for and follow W3C XHTML
compliance. This makes it easier for you to create XHTML
compliant websites.
Flexibility
CGI-mode support
Although not the
native mode for eZ publish, you can use eZ publish with CGI mode
for testing and development purposes.
Content reuse
eZ publish allows
you to publish the same object in several different places in
the content tree at the same time. Any updates you make to the
original object will be visible on each location in the content
tree. This allows you to reuse content while keeping it up to
date easily.
Extensible
user profiles
The user profiles
in eZ publish are based on classes just like any other content
in the system. This allows you to add content attributes to the
users so that they exactly fit your needs. You can even have
multiple user types with completely different attributes.
Interface localization
eZ publish uses
the open standards i18n and l10n to provide full support for
translation of the templates in the system and to provide
support for local date/time and currency formats. By default, eZ
publish is provided with translations and locales for all major
languages (http://ez.no/community/translations)
Metadata
eZ publish allows
you to add as many attributes to the classes as you like. If you
want to add metadata (data about the data) to your objects you
can add attributes to the class type that supports this. Of
course, as metadata is data about data, it can be modeled as
content objects as well. This system is very flexible as it
allows any type of metadata and the control over which objects
have which metadata.
Multi-lingual content/Translations
eZ publish allows
you to define as many languages as you like. You can create
objects in each of these languages.
Multi-lingual content integration
eZ publish also
allows you to have the same object in different languages at the
same time. Simply translate an object into another language in
the administration interface. Both translations are contained
within the same object. Based on the users preference eZ publish
will display one version or the other.
Multi-site deployment
eZ publish uses a
very flexible setup based on siteaccesses. Each siteaccess
defines a website with a design and a database. Usually you have
two siteaccesses that use the same database (the user interface
and the administration interface). However, you may choose to
set up as many siteaccesses as you like with completely
different design and databases. This allows you to deploy
several unrelated sites on one eZ publish installation.
URL-rewriting
eZ publish uses
an advanced URL rewriting system that allows you to create
“short links” to any page in your system. E.g if you have an url
http://mysite.com/news_section you can add a rule that the URL
http://mysite.com/news forwards to this page. This mechanism is
also used automatically by eZ publish. E.g if you move a node
the old URL is not removed. Instead it forwards to the new
location.
Built in
applications
Blog
eZ publish
provides blog functionality as one of the installation options.
Simply choose to install the blog package during the install.
Contact management
eZ publish
provides contact management functionality as one of the
installation options. The contact management functionality lets
you store and share information about your contacts.
Discussion/forum
eZ publish
provides forum functionality as one of the installation options.
File distribution
Distribution of
files is very easy using eZ publish. eZ publish has a built in
file class which you can use to create file objects. These are
treated like any other content on your system which allows you
to distribute files just the way you distribute articles or
static pages.
Form creator
In each class you
can choose if the attributes are form fields or not. This means
that you can build a class that contains form fields for texts,
strings, integers, dates etc. When the user views objects of
this type he will be presented with a form containing all the
fields and ok/cancel buttons. The result of submitted
information is sent by email and stored in the system.
Link management
eZ publish
extracts and tracks all links that are used in the system. The
links can be administrated from the administration interface.
You can change a link there at any time. This link will then be
replaced throughout all objects using this link. You can also
use this functionality for searching for dead links at your site.
Photo gallery
eZ publish
provides gallery functionality as one of the out-of-the-box
installation options.
Polls
Poll
functionality is installed by default.
Product management
Products are
handled like any other content in eZ publish. This allows you to
display and organize your products in the content tree like the
rest of your content. Any object with a price attribute is
considered a product and can be built in your eZ publish shop.
Search engine
eZ publish comes
with an integrated search engine that works on all objects on
your site. Objects are automatically indexed when they are
published. When a user performs a search eZ publish will only
consider the objects that he/she has permissions to access. The
search system is plug-in based, thus one can make a custom
search engine if you like.
Site map
Using the sitemap
feature, you can create a tree structure displaying the contents
of your site. eZ publish provides a customizable sitemap that
you can tweak to display exactly the contents you are interested
in.
User contributions
Allowing users to
contribute with news or other information is vital to some sites.
eZ publish supports this functionality through the class/object
mechanism. Simply set up a class for incoming ideas and allow
your users to publish them but not to see them. The content
administrators can then go through the ideas and publish them to
the real site if they like.
Commerce
Pluggable payments
There are many
different types of payment system on the internet. eZ publish
supports PayPal out of the box but you may need to user another
payment provider. eZ publish supports this through a pluggable
payment system. The system allows you to write support for any
payment system out there with a custom PHP module.
Pluggable shipping
Shipping costs
can be very different from implementation to implementation.
Through the workflow system eZ publish allows you to write
complex custom shipping support for your shop.
Pluggable TAX
Similarly to
shipping costs VAT costs vary a lot from country to country. eZ
publish has built in VAT handling that satisfies the needs for
most users. However, you can write custom TAX handling using the
workflow system if you have special requirements.
Shopping cart (basket)
The most common
way to provide shop on the internet is to present your products
and to let people put products into a virtual shopping cart.
When the user is done shopping, he will take his shopping cart
to the payment system. eZ publish supports exactly this type of
functionality. Users can put any product into their shopping
cart and manipulate the contents of the shopping cart if they
like.
Wish list
eZ publish allows
users to create a wish-list that they can use to keep track of
the items that they want to purchase in the future. The wishlist
can also be used by a user to show other people what he/she
would like to get. |