Welcome to our book on building websites with eZ Publish. Before starting to learn how to use it to create a site, let's take a short moment to better understand the overall context of content management on the internet.
In recent years, we have seen the evolution of the Content Management Systems, or CMSes. This kind of software from a simple set of tools for managing text and pages of a website, has had to adapt and evolve to become more flexible. Nowadays, CMSes need to be extensible, and use plugins or vertical modules to cater for different needs.
The concept of a web page has moved from being a mere graphical representation of information to a point where we can decouple the content from the presentation. In turn, we can also decouple content from its publication media. Today, a single item of content can be represented in boundless ways (for example, through the use of Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS), and can be made accessible from almost any device, through such things as RSS, Microformat, and so on.
Disciplines such as IA (Information Architecture) have made great strides in determining how content should be managed. New information structures have been developed across the years, from the simple and limited hierarchy of categories, to multi-structured and more complex data organizations now used in any context.
In short, the Internet has become a 360-degree communication platform, which increasingly uses various media in a single context. But the internet is also all about content, which can be represented in a lot of different ways.
This is a big problem for developers who have to create and manage sites. These new concepts have introduced new challenges for the management of websites.
In fact, the rigidity of managing information, as characterized by the old CMS generation, has led many developers to seek new solutions—solutions that are customizable according to the needs of the moment.
eZ Publish was born for new media and enterprise content publishing. This product can be used by all levels of developer to build corporate websites, intranets, web shops, and media portals. eZ Publish is 100% open-source, available either as a free download or as an enterprise solution (as eZ Publish Premium with support, guarantees, and maintenance for companies that need advanced help).
In the first year of its life, eZ Publish moved from a Content Management System approach to a Content Management Framework approach. A Content Management Framework, or CMF, can be defined as an application programming interface for creating a customized Content Management System.
In this book, we will be building an enterprise website with eZ Publish. eZ Publish is well-suited to a project like this due to its structured content model and versioning capabilities, as well as pre-built functionality that ensures rapid and professional deployment with minimal fuss.
eZ Publish has some key features:
- It comes with a number of ready-to-use website packages.
- It has lots of predefined, solid, and useful functionality.
- It is flexible. Any behavior or components can be extended or overwritten.