Ez Publish, to use or not to use?

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Arnoud van Steen	Tuesday 23 June 2009 5:23:17 am Hello, After working with Ez Publish for about 5 months I want to let you know about the impression we (me and a few colleagues) currently have of the system. And we have some questions to ask about its future. First, its functionality seems to be quite impressive, the contentmodel is flexible and the authentication model offers a lot of possiblities and seems to work well. The options in relation to translating content are a bonus also, I dont think you'll find the same set of features in another CMS out there. We're worried about a few aspects of Ez Publish though. One is the lack of documentation and the stance of Ez Publish' developers concerning this fact. To properly develop further on this platform detailed documentation is much needed. This is properly discussed in this thread here: http://ez.no/developer/forum/developer/where_is_database_description_for_ez_publish It seems that becoming a partner of Ez Publish is not going to solve any problems regarding the lack of documentation either since apparently its simply not there. And it wont be there for a long time to come? The time that has to be invested in the platform to get to know it well enough seems out of proportion with the functionality it does offer. Another is the performance issues that Ez Publish has, especially when developing on the platform and clearing the cache for each change you make. . Besides that the admin interface is especially slow. It seems the flexible contentmodel has its drawbacks here as Ez Publish is very sluggish in its use. Another problem we have with Ez Pubish is the updates, when they do come out. I've not yet managed to properly update a working installation to a newer version, but had to reinstall Ez Publish for the new version each time. Especially the lack of proper instructions make it impossible to know what exactly is happening, or has to happen for the update to succeed. And last but not least, the community supporting Ez Publish seems very limited. When problems need to be solved google only refers back to this website. There's nothing else besides a few years old wiki. We work for a company that serves large international companies for their web based needs. It seems irresponsible to use Ez Publish as a basis for the webapplications we will be building for them in the future. The risks due to the lack of documentation alone cannot be justified to those clients. When we build a big webapp, we want it to be responsive and to run smoothly. And updates will need to be performed while a platform is running, reinstalling Ez Publish for every security update is not something we look forward to when its running on production with a lot of content in its database. So my question is if any of these points are being worked on or if improvements are planned for the nearby future. Or do we have to let Ez Publish go? Kind regards
André R.	Tuesday 23 June 2009 6:39:44 am Even if the details are spare, I'll try to respond to your performance concern. "especially when developing on the platform and clearing the cache for each change you make" There are plenty of cache settings and developmentMode settings that can be disabled / enabled / tweaked during development so you do not have to clear any cache. In production you shouldn't have to clear cache as well if you work with the view cache system for instance. One common "issue", is when you hardcode node fetches in node templates, you'll have to clear cache if these hardcoded nodes change. But this can be avoided if one uses object/attribute relations instead, so cache is automatically cleared for this node, when the related node changes. "Besides that the admin interface is especially slow" The admin interface can become slow if the server either by spec, tuning or heawy trafic is slow. So it needs to become lighter and take advantage of ajax here and there, something that will happen gradually in the next versions. But any code, on any platform will become slower if the server is slower. So my question would be: what is this running on? And do you have a lot of traffic on it? I'll let others respond to your point on documentation, community and updates. eZ Online Editor 5: http://projects.ez.no/ezoe \|\| eZJSCore (Ajax): http://projects.ez.no/ezjscore \|\| eZ Publish EE http://ez.no/eZPublish/eZ-Publish-Enterprise-Subscription @: http://twitter.com/andrerom
John Moritz	Tuesday 23 June 2009 8:44:48 am I agree 100% with arnoud. Documentation is no the best i´ve seen on the CMS Market, and ezSystems as Company behind ezpublish should try to" fill the holes". I also agree with the bad Documentation when new Versions come out. For example i run 4.1.2 and there is a 4.1.3 Version. I think the only difference is 1File, the notification.php. If i track the documentation how to update, i have to do a lot of work. But maybe its enough to update the notification.php? Since today i´ve not updated. But ezPublish is the best CMS i have ever used. It´s intelligent! I like it very much, and the more i work with it, the more i like it. Because slowly i understand what the documentation is missing to "teach" me. Some month ago, there was no link to the ezpublish api on the documentation site. Just by accident i found it. This was a small step for ezSystem, but a big step for me to understand better! A lot of people in here says, the learnig curve for ezpublish is big, and i say no its not, its just the lack of documentation.
Gaetano Giunta	Tuesday 23 June 2009 9:12:31 am Adding my little grain of salt: - learning proper usage of cache is the best investment you can make in eZP-land. After mastering the subject, you will have a much improved development experience and produce sites that run much faster and get all the relevant pages updated without needing a hand-triggered cache-clean ever - do not use windows servers for production, as eZP is faster on linux, and if you use windows for development please get a recent machine and NO antivirus on it - about problems with updating, it might be worth sharing your experiences on the forums. We do our best to make the process smooth and painless, but catering to all possible combinations deployed on every site is nigh to impossible. - other largish international companies already use eZP, you can look them up in the site. Quality of docs could improve, at least on the technical/advanced development side (I think that user-level docs are quite good right now), and community could grow larger, sure, but let's not forget that a lot of other oss cms do not even have a backing company that offers paid support (which large customers usually like) - incidentally for paying customers we even offer automated patching, which alleviates the updating burden... [EDIT] not using an AV software on a windows machine is probably not the best advice I ever gave. I must confess to running windows without an AV for all my professional career, and only getting infected twice, but I know my running processes one by one. If you are not the kind of person that likes to spend free time in that kind of "extreme sysadmin" sports, forget it - just get a workstation that is fast enough for you. Principal Consultant International Business Member of the Community Project Board
Carlos Revillo	Tuesday 23 June 2009 9:48:52 am A lot of people in here says, the learnig curve for ezpublish is big, and i say no its not, its just the lack of documentation. Well, i still think is big. At least, bigger than others. Some months ago i posted about this. But, on the other hand, maybe learning curve is bigger than others because ezp offer more than others. so, maybe if you talk about drupal, you can say "Ok, just installed and in a few minutes i got a brand new site. it also was easy to add my custom modules". And that's fine and i really love it. but when you start to think about other things (caching, internazionalization, workflows, cronjobs, and so on) and you're with drupal you have to say "i'll need to look for a custom module for this. this is not in the core". with ezp, you have to study a bit, but you have it. documentation can be improved, sure... but, btw, what other cms documentations do you really like? :)
Jozef Baum	Tuesday 23 June 2009 3:21:56 pm "do not use windows servers for production" Gaetano Giunta Nor for development and testing environments. Frankly: today, I cannot imagine even one good reason to have MS-Windows instead of an OS of the Unix family (Linux, *BSD, Solaris) on a server. I think those who can do not consider IT as a science, but as a religion. "not using an AV software on a windows machine is probably not the best advice I ever gave" Gaetano Giunta To me, that is not probable, but one of the few certainties we have in live, like the certainties that one day we will die, that we will always have to pay taxes (or have to spend even more money to be allowed to live in a fiscal paradise like Monaco), and a flying plane will always come back to earth (but it may be in very different ways).
Jozef Baum	Tuesday 23 June 2009 3:58:26 pm "But, on the other hand, maybe learning curve is bigger than others because ezp offer more than others." Carlos Revillo It's true that eZ Publish has more to offer than others. But you don't need to use (and thus to learn) everything it has to offer, at least not from the beginning. "so, maybe if you talk about drupal, you can say "Ok, just installed and in a few minutes i got a brand new site. it also was easy to add my custom modules". And that's fine and i really love it." Carlos Revillo Oh, but that's not more difficult with eZ Publish. When you just install it, you have already a website, depending on the site package you choose. The problems come afterwards, when you have to develop functionality that doesn't exist in the CMS or that only exists in the form of poorly written extensions, whereas eZ Publish offers it, developed in a professional way, out of the box. One thing I consider to be a big advantage of eZ Publish is the uniform look of a site it allows for. With eZ Publish, you don't have to send the visitor to a website with a complete different look and feel for a gallery, a forum, or a webshop. "what other cms documentations do you really like?" Carlos Revillo I have worked for many years as a first line manager (yet hands on) in the Business Information Systems department of a large bank. It's always the same. Developers like to develop. They are reluctant to testing. But documenting is something they definitely don't like. After all, they know how it works, so what could be the problem? Let us look for example at another CMS which is considered as one of the big ones: TYPO 3. You can download a TYPO3 Quickstart package, which is meant to be used with their "Getting Started" tutorial. The only problems are that the TYPO3 Quickstart package is about TYPO 3 version 3.8, whereas their current stable version is TYPO3 4.2.6, and as a browser, you need Microsoft Internet Explorer with no later version than IE 6, otherwise the richt text editor doesn't work. TYPO 3 offers some video tutorials created by Kasper, who clearly cannot be accused of having some pedagogical knowledge. The same can be said about the documentation he has written. On the lower level, it's the same. Conpresso doesn't allow for UTF-8, and if you force it to use it, the admin interface becomes distorted. OpenEngine 2.0 is not yet documented, so my shared webspace provider still offers to install OpenEngine 1.9. When Joomla upgraded to version 1.5, always no documentation of the new version was available.
Jozef Baum	Tuesday 23 June 2009 4:25:07 pm "Or do we have to let Ez Publish go?" Arnoud van Steen You are free to do so. But the question is: do you know a better free open source alternative to eZ Publish? Today, there are about 2000 content management systems out there, and I have now already spent about 2 years examining the best ones of them. I am aware of the drawbacks of eZ Publish, but also of the drawbacks of other content management systems, and of the benefits of eZ Publish. You state you are working for a company that serves large international companies for their web based needs. Please realize that your company is by far not the only one doing so with very successful implementations of eZ Publish. One alternative for you is: spend about 10 years with about 100 developers to develop a CMS that seems better to you than eZ Publish, and then implement it for your customers. The only drawback is that it will take you many years before having some return on investment.