Contentful vs. eZ Platform

Coming from WordPress, Contentful feels like content management as it should be. There's no clutter to get rid of, you can simply start building from scratch, and the end product is perfectly tailored to your or your clients needs.

Incentivized

For a new site: 1. Are there any hosting requirements? eZ Publish works best on a traditional LAMP stack. 2. What is the expertise of the development and systems administrations individuals? There should be some PHP development experience and a solid level of Apache and MySQL hosting. 3. Who will be managing the content of the site? What is their bandwidth for training? For ongoing content changes?

Incentivized

• Contentful provides organized, flexible data models with support for a variety of data types and content editors (e.g. WYSIWYGs, form fields, raw text areas).
• Contentful has great built-in versioning features with history and draft states so it's easy to make updates and revert when needed.
• Contentful has an intuitive user interface and good support for multiple spaces (which can be helpful for companies that need separate projects for dev/staging/production).

Incentivized

• Content Taxonomy: Content is managed in a tree. Though taxonomy vs folksonomy is a near-religious debate among professionals, clients seeing the system for the first time just seem to "get it" more often.
• Content Flexibility: Common content types such as blog posts and articles are available out of the box. However, customizing these and creating new content types is very easy.
• Developer Friendly: Developers need only a little PHP experience to get started. Of course being an expert doesn't hurt and opens the door for the development of custom modules.

Incentivized

• Preview of changes prior to publishing
• The ability to use a spell check plug-in when working on content (it doesn't work well with Grammarly)

Incentivized

• The template language: Outputting content or doing something special with it requires use of the templating language. Myself along with other developers I have trained, found this to be one of the biggest hurdles.
• Layout of physical files: The system decides what settings files and templates to use based on a hierarchy of modules. The same file can exist in multiple modules and you can find yourself deep within very similar looking folder structures, causing confusion during debugging.
• Community: eZ has a solid set of community contributors but the gap between it and Drupal or Wordpress is pretty large.

Incentivized

Contentful was affordable and much simpler than the Java based systems and preferred over a PHP solution

Incentivized

eZ Publish isn't as large in community size and number of installations as other content management systems. However, it's just as capable and met our needs:

• Developers, system administrators, and project manager can all speak the same language during the development and maintenance cycles of a site.
• End-user training is very straight-forward.
• Vendor support is available.
• Client IT departments can access if need (developers/designers/sysadmins).
• The community is there (forums) and there are solid contributions (extensions) from both the vendor and the community.

Incentivized

• There was no negative impact as such.
• Positive impact is increase in sales.
• More work is delivered due to reusability and other features within a time and less manual effort.

Incentivized

• Common knowledge: By making eZ a core offering, developers, system administrators, and project managers were able to communicate with each other effectively.
• Training: Due to its content taxonomy, end-user training often went well.
• Support: In our case, we had Gold support from eZ Publish which saved time and helped with customizations.

Incentivized