1. Hello, 2. How

Tuesday 02 March 2010 6:41:11 am

Hi,

i'am so totally new to ez Publish, that i even dont use it to the very moment iam tyoing this. but i have some experience wiht other cms like typo3, drupal etc. and i am a professional webdeveloper on PHP projects and mvc-patterns. so this might not be a complete coldstart for me.

we are thinking of using ez Publish for a large project, but prior to an official recommendation i would like to know from ez Publish veterans how is the 'taste' of ez Publish beyond the advertisional official website blabla.

is it as easy as it pretends to be? especially when you are try to do things that might be a little more complicated than just setting up and run a cms-driven website?

in particular the project will include personalized pages for frontend-users. registered users should be able to select and save information-feeds from the website to arrange the on thier own personal startpage. ist the template engine capable of making this possible?
would such an action have to be based on custom content classes and custom extensions?

thank all of you responders in advance, i am looking forward of jumping right into the ez publish experience.

Friday 05 March 2010 8:41:40 am

Hi Lars,

my personal experience after about 2 years (not full time) ez develoment using ezpublish and ezcomponents is:

• ezp has the very best separation of content/design i know
• ezp is a real cms / cmf
• ezp its completely based on classes/interfaces
• ezp is very flexible thus inherits a bit of complexity
• ezp/ezc utilizes great OOP design principles
• ezp is capable of running high volume sites (cache, proxy, cluster, master-slave)
• ezp will not run greatly on shared-hosts, consider using a vserver or dedicated server (php.ini-settings, dns, cron, ...)

Take care of:

• api documentation and/or howtos plus example-snippets are not really good/actual/complete
• take a look into the ezp kernel files itself to see how to implement things or get the full api
• consider sign to ez premium for your client

I needed about a year to get really into ezp (not developing full time) and to get the clue of how things really work... You definetly need to create your own content-classes. The ones shipped by ez are ok but are too common and would not fit your needs. Drupal seems to share the same features with ez (content classes, fields, i18n, ...) but lacks great sourcecode/classes as ezp/ezc has. ezp has a steep learning courve. So don't expect great results within a week - well that depends on your skills ;-)

The community is willing to help, some core developers of ez.no are active too. The user/tech documentation needs to be read a few times before getting it all in your head. Some tips'n'tricks by community members are only available on 'the old' documentation pages on ez.no (for ez 3.9.x) and did not make it into the official current docs.

To your plans:

• The template engine is pretty good and extensible, but i personally am waiting for great ezc based templating engine which can be replaced by php-based-templates instead of using 'smarty like' template code
• but keep the templates clean and separate business logic from views
• consider write your own template-fetch functions or functions itself
• You will also need to write extensions / modules to fulfill the requirements
• according to user customized pages: search for 'teamroom'

I would not describe myself as experienced, but i know how to get things done in the ez-way. So everything written here is my personal view.

btw: welcome to ez community :)

ezp=eZPublish; ezc=eZComponents - TheFramework, like zend but better ;-)

chris

Hannover, Germany
eZ-Certified http://auth.ez.no/certification/verify/395613