As we have said in the preface, it is very important to understand that eZ Publish offers (as downloaded) three main features:
- It comes with a number of ready-to-use website packages
- It has lots of hardcoded, solid, and useful functionality
- It is flexible—behavior and components can be extended or overwritten
Website packages are designed by the eZ System to use the main engine to help users deploy different sites with different scopes: a community site, a static one, or an intranet application. The three main packages are Plain Site, eZ Webin, and eZ Flow.
Whereas the first one is only a skeleton, on top of which a developer can craft his or her own application, the other two allow developers to use a lot of functionality without touching an IDE.
eZ Webin is a package that contains all of the functionality required to build a complete Web 2.0 site. It is fully documented by eZ System, and this documentation can be found at http://ez.no/doc/extensions/website_interface. eZ Webin is very useful for creating a site from scratch.
To build our site, we will use this package in the next chapters, customizing the site wherever needed.
eZ Webin includes:
- Tag clouds
- Blogs
- Forums
- Events management
- Calendars
Vibrant sites are all about content flow—getting the most engaging and timely content streams onto the site's critical portal pages. Built on top of eZ Publish as a result of collaboration and experience with media customers, the eZ Flow extension (http://ez.no/doc/extensions/ez_flow) enables editors to build complex page layouts and pre-plan the publication schedule to ensure a constant flow of rich content. In short, eZ Flow brings modern portal management possibilities to eZ Publish.
eZ Flow is a web package that provides the following added functionalities:
- Layouts based on zones and blocks
- Custom layouts
- The ability to fetch content from different sources
- The ability to search, order, hide, and push content
- Scheduling of content flow
- Multiple block-specific templates
- Previews of portal pages
- An intuitive Flash player
- Embedded video advertisement
- Live video streaming and recording
- Ranking and related media
- Native integrations with ad servers
- Connectors for web analytics