eZ Publish review based on experience with an Alexa Top 250 site

Rating: 6 out of 10

July 8, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

eZ Publish can easily satisfy the needs of customers who want a classic "brochureware" site. However, it can satisfy the other end of the spectrum when clients:

Need to allow their internal IT department access to the site and its hosting
Have dozens of active content editors and need to schedule publishing

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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?

Josh Bair

Senior Application Developer in Information Technology at University of Chicago Booth School of Business (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience