An Introduction to eZ Publish Concepts
Tuesday 22 May 2007 1:00:00 am
eZ Publish is a highly flexible and customizable Content Management System (CMS). It can be used to build everything from personal home pages to multinational corporate web solutions with role-based multi-user access, online shopping, discussion forums and other advanced functions. Based on Open Source technologies and principles, it can be easily extended and customized to interact with other solutions.
This article is the first in a series focusing on concepts and features discussed in the newly released book eZ Publish Content Management Basics. The series is targeted at beginners who have little or no experience with the system. In this article, we present an easily comprehensible, non-technical explanation of the key concepts of eZ Publish, including the separation of content and design, the object-oriented content model and the content node tree.
Content Management System
The role of a Content Management System is to organize and store content, regardless of type and complexity. Pieces of information in an eZ Publish installation are defined both by their content class (that is, the type of content, such as an image or an article) and their location in the content hierarchy. The main goal of such a system is to provide a well-structured, automated yet flexible solution, which allows information to be freely distributed and instantly updated across various communication channels (such as the internet, intranets and miscellaneous front- and back-end systems). In short, a CMS collects, manages and publishes content on various types of websites.