EZPublish rocks

April 3, 2007

Myself and a collegue have been playing around with open source (non Java - LAMP or similar technology based) CMS and related softwares for quite some time now.  Among the CMS software - We have gone in detail thru Joomla!, Plone and EZpublish (and are yet to cover Bricolage and Typo3 - which I belive will cover the spectrum).

Brief notes on them

Joomla! - rocks on its simplicity to set up a website. However it stops short of being a CMS. (for instance - you cant put metadata to images), It stops short of having a workflow and versioning. I think I will prefer it for setting a personal website over anything else that I have seen.

 Plone  - a lot more professional and a complete CMS - has proper workflow, has versioning extensions, has proper access control etc.  However it feels too much 2004, too much file sharing platform and less of a WCMS and it takes time to learn and work with.

EZpublish - is just great. It will give any professional CMS a run for its money - sample these:- make an article appear in more than one places, run multiple sites of single install - reusing content if you wish, mutliple views of a site, great community support, real upgrade path which works - while upgrading versions. It even offers commerce. - And commercial support too. I guess it offers all that mid sized WCMS implementions needs.

I think i will recommend it as a starting point for those looking for PHP based WCMS - chances are that you will not have to look any further.

(I was looking at feature fit for the following scenario:

1) Product catalog for a multi-brand/multi site/multi geo organization

2) Publishing of online news and periodicals by a mid sized production team

3) Intranet site listing organization information like policies etc.

If your need doesnt fall into above and is much different like collaborative document creation and sharing, legal content filing etc. - then you may find this information useless.

)

It looks so good that I am wondering whether to continue to look at typo3 and bricolage at all or not!

I have been playing with Java based open source CMS as well - though opinions that are for a different day.

In case any of you need notes I gathered on these products ( which in no way would be anything close to a professional summary - likes of what CMSWATCH does) - drop me a message at pranshuj at mindtree.com

Posted by Pranshu Jain Filed in Content Management

4 Responses to “EZPublish rocks”

  1. myownstory Says:
    April 8, 2007 at 4:18 am

    first of all, your site is amazing. I just love it. It has so many interesting reviews and articles that I’m going to follow it closely. And thanks for this review, I’m going to use it someday on my own site ;)
    Thanks again.

  2. xirui Says:
    April 9, 2007 at 7:41 pm

    Nice article, great blog.

    I’m waiting for your opinions on Java-based CMS :-)

  3. Bart Nelis Says:
    April 15, 2007 at 11:55 pm

    If workflow and versioning aren’t that important , you might want to have a look at MODx (www.modxcms.com, open source).
    Other interesting CMS’s and CMS frameworks are:
    drupal, midgard and xaraya.

  4. Guido Buelskaemper Says:
    May 4, 2007 at 7:56 am

    Thanks for your insights–they cover my expectations on the above products, although i don’t know them in greater detail. I work with Bricolage–actually on a company’s more than 10 different websites (shared content, different webservers, workflows… ;) and in my opinion Bricolage fits best on this task.

    So i’m interested in reading your reviews on Bricolage and Typo3 including the comparison with the other cms frameworks!

    BTW–Great blog!

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