Enterprise content management (ECM) is a set of technologies used to capture, store, preserve and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes.
This definition is taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Enterprise_content_management.
In this chapter, we will introduce the eZ Publish software. We will then prepare the development server by downloading the software and creating a database, and we will follow the installation wizard to have eZ Publish running on our server.
eZ Publish is an Enterprise Content Management System. It helps to build corporate websites, intranets, web shops, and media portals. Moreover, eZ Publish is 100% open source, available either as a free download or as an enterprise solution—eZ Publish Premium—with support, guarantees, and maintenance.
This software is designed to be used by small, medium, and large companies. It provides a lot of advanced features that can be used, by default, to create professional and secure solutions.
The software allows websites to be fully extended and modified, and unlike other CMSes, it's a truly scalable system.
eZ Publish supports, out of the box, the following features:
- The management of users' roles
- The ability to assign roles and policies to different content categories or types
- Definition of workflow tasks for collaborative creation, often coupled with integrated event messaging
- The ability to track and manage multiple versions of a single instance of content
- The ability to import content from other sources (that is, an OpenOffice document)
eZ Publish is more than a simple CMS; it is a Content Management Framework (CMF). This means that it is much more flexible, extendable, and reusable.
A content management framework is an Application Programming Interface (API) for creating a customized content management system.
The eZ Publish kernel is crafted on top of eZ CMF, a content management framework fully developed by eZ System. This framework makes the eZ Publish functionality stable, secure, and well engineered. And thanks to the CMF, it is possible to extend and personalize the CMS features to provide specific tasks or create mashups and integrations with other open source products, such as CRMs, financial software, or e-commerce platforms.
The most recent releases of eZ Publish also use eZ Components, a set of independent components that will eventually replace all of the core functionality of eZ CMF. With eZ Publish 4.0, it is possible to develop extensions using these components that give a powerful API for each use.