eZ Systems releases Content Management products built on the Symfony Framework
After more than three years in the making eZ Systems, CMS/CXM vendor, launches a new generation of products:
- eZ Platform: A fully featured Open Source CMS
- eZ Studio: An extension to eZ Platform with enhanced functionalities
The old product known as eZ Publish is now retired to maintenace only, with support for customers in support spanning out until 2021. The previous generation stems from development done in 2002, giving the codebase aa supported lifetime of some twenty years in total.
The combo of products build on the Symfony Framework, allowing for developers to utilise their existing skillset and shared code from the Symfony ecosystem. Developers versed in Symfony2 development will find the system immediately familiar. Using an IDE such as PHPStorm provides autocompletion and other convenience methods when interacting with the data model provided by the repository.
Using eZ Platform does not limit data models; Doctrine ORM or ODM, for example, remain at developers' disposal for custom development needs outside of the content management domain.
eZ Platform, an Open Source Symfony CMS
eZ Platform builds on the core concepts of eZ Publish. At it's heart lies the content repository model which allows for content structure creation and management using a number of features such as a solid multilingual content concept, a tree structure, context tagging and content relationships.
The CMS is a Symfony2 Framework application that adds a content repository and other features features, including a REST API powered administration interface. Core concepts are the content repository and siteaccesses.
Websites are configured as views to the content repository (or repositories) based on domain, path or a mixture of the two. Repositories are powered by a battle-tested SQL storage, supplemented by an optional integrated Solr search engine for advanced search capabilities.
Other highlights include a sophisticated role, policy and group based permissions management with inheritance and a semantic content model where richtext content is stored as channel neutral XML with naturally rich metadata of content relationships and so on, enabling options like Graph Database indexing in the future.
More than anything else eZ Platform should be viewed as a UI framework and an integration platform for many different data sources. Merging data from different backends and providing a consistent view and configurable delivery enables it to be much more than a CMS.
eZ Studio extends Platform beyond Content Management
eZ Studio is a proprietary extension that extends the functionality of the core content management features provided by eZ Platform. Initial features include advanced landing page management, a flexibile workflow system and integration to a content recommendation system.
The product uses platform capabilities such as the flexible content model and powerful internal APIs such as repository signals as well as external APIs using the RESTful interfaces. In addition to content management, eZ Systems offers a complimentary set of functionalities such as marketing automation tools and content recommendation features.
The first round of both eZ Platform and Studio are going to be further iterated with releases every two months adding functionality and bug fixes, following the semantic versioning model.
Learn more about eZ Platform and eZ Studio:
- Introducing the first releases of eZ Platform and eZ Studio
- eZ Platform source on Github
- eZ Studio site
- eZ Platform site
- Technical documentation