CMS HOSTING Content Management

The Enterprise Content Management System

eZ publish key features

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.