ezPlatform, formerly ezPublish is a content management solution from eZ Systems. The vendor says their solution provides organizations with the technology and framework to build a suite of digital experiences including news and media sites, brand sites, multichannel apps and the Internet of Things, intranets and web portals. This solution is multichannel, multilingual and multisite ready.
ezPlatform features user defined content and classes, version control, templates, workflow…
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Optimizely Content Management System
Score 8.6 out of 10
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Optimizely Content Management System (CMS) is purpose-built for marketers, and fully composable for developers. The CMS supports the end-to-end content lifecycle, helping users to deliver on-brand, high-impact digital experiences that 'wow' audiences.
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 …
Optimizely Content Management System is much more feature rich, and less complex that the other CMS platforms we have used. Optimizely Content Management System is more intuitive in how the content is structured and how easy it is to pull blocks of content to create the layout …
It does feel a bit more legacy, but sometimes legacy can be good for companies. For both the companies we mapped against, it was clear the idea of server maintenance was out of question for us and we wanted a service that would provide uptime and us just doing the work of …
None quite like this, but I have had experience with HTML sites and CSS and WordPress and Wix, but nothing quite on the level of what Optimizely produces.
Optimizely stacks up by offering a more well-rounded and user-friendly experience. Especially with it's integration into the rest of Optimizely's offerings, this CMS opens the door to letting marketers manage their entire marketing experience on one platform where its …
I truly headless system and the ability to edit this platform over others gave Optimizely Content Management System this edge when it comes to creating a future-proof e-commerce solution. There are lots of other systems out there, but there has been great success with utilizing …
Being able to keep one catalog source that can spread to our multiple business units and being able to have our development team create custom widgets for new functionality.
I didn't see Konakart in the dropdown options, so I want to make sure we compare against this platform as well. With other platforms, the features are either so basic that you can't get very advanced in your site UX, or the interface is so unfriendly to it's users that it's …
We as a business wanted to have ecomm built into the CMS website and we have looked into the options of WordPress and SiteCore and decided to go to Optimizely Content Management System the way it brings ease and also with out comprising on the security
We selected Optimizely Content Management system for their ease of use and their other offerings like content marketing platform which helps us to keep everything under one roof.
We found we have more freedom with creating content and updating content was easier as we were able to build blocks and pages much quicker and easier than we were previously able to.
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?
Very much if a business is doing a rebrand, for example, or a digital transformation, the DXP product is super competitive. The managed services that provided around the infrastructure and all of the moving parts really, really works well. It just makes life as a developer very easy when ultimately you just have to do the code and deploy it out and don't worry about the environment infrastructure. I think it's really, really well and fits in really well with that. Areas where it's not so great in my experience, I would say, well, I've already mentioned kind of the CMS to SaaS product, but also just in general it feels like we're going through a bit of a transition period with the documentation at the moment. So when new features are rolled out or the product catalog expands, the documentation isn't always the best or streamlined. That can make life as a developer a little bit work at the times.
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.
Folder structure - I was on Magento 1.x & 2.x for 10 years, which had no folder structure for blocks or images - it was very difficult to find things. We couldn't keep anything straight without it.
The fact that it knows what block or image is being used and links to where it's being used is pure gold. It prevents deletion of needed elements.
I like that I can drag a block or image somewhere new and it doesn't break anything.
Our search of blocks and images is now working, that's very helpful.
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.
promo types, several have been released that do not work as they are advertised/labeled which has caused us to make custom promos for just about all of them where we've actually fixed the functionality. The OOB types are completely unreliable
promo exclusions/sorting -- this is very buggy, and some of this would normally be "out of the box" like no two order discounts should ever be able to stack. This gets incredibly difficult to manage when you have 75 active promos at a time.
asset management - replacement files with same name aren't recognized even when the first version is deleted, this creates a mess in asset folders - nothing can be successfully deleted from epi asset library
html automatic edits -- issues when typing in either content page links or asset links, epi always adds random characters to the end (?"Epieditmode=false,6789" for example, which doesn't break content, but does make it more difficult for the team to use non-epi html tools to build or edit
auto dimensions on images -- when adding an image in the html, you have the address exactly, but any other way causes the editor to put width and height dims on the code, making the image warp in mobile, this is adding steps to undo the automatic edits, they are completely unhelpful
blogs - we are running a blog in Opti that is compeltely manual, every "related article" and every "articles about x topic" block is hard coded, there is nothing dynamic in the content library which is frustrating, and creates a huge time suck for articles across the site, every time there is a new one, that's 10+ manual page updates
Since I work on the implementation side of things, and do not directly own licensing for Ektron CMS, I have to base this rating off of how I think it will be received or presented to customers looking to start a new site deployment. I try to remain CMS agnostic, though my specialty is with the .NET and Microsoft stack. Because of the experience I have working with Ektron, I tend to be more forgiving with the shortcomings as I am familiar with how to work around them or past them from experience. Being familiar with the community available also helps, as you become familiar with the best approaches to find solutions to your issues. Each product has it's ups and downs and all of them are only going to be as good as the company or development team implementing them can make them. This is EXTREMELY important to remember when choosing a CMS, as it can make or break your expensive investment.
From our editors perspective they find the CMS system easy and to clear to use. Our developers find it very easy to design on and appreciate the level of service support available. It's also always evolving and getting better every year. We find this investment reassuring and encourages us to try keep pace and see how we can continue to push the envelope and continue to improve all aspect of our websites and online touch points.
I attended multiple trainings/tutorials early in the process. The vendor-supplied content about Optimizely was engaging for users/attendees (I often analyze training content, compliance programs, governance plans), which helps our OCM people by having good "word of mouth" about the product long before a rollout ever happens. I actually when the user-focused portion of the Optimizely Academy twice in 2022 to ensure I had a grasp on operability and to be able to support the training and OCM efforts
Ektron is one of the best solution for .Net platform. Over the years have improved the performance issues that the previous versions had. My only complain is right now you can't do Page builder pages if you choose to have a MVC architecture
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.
Optimizely Content Management System takes the best bit of previous platforms and simplifies them without removing the more advanced features but not making the necessary to get things going. allowing for any user to jump in and start working is a massive help but empowering power users to take advantage of all its features.
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.
