Build a WebDav-Enabled Intranet With eZ Publish

Every company and organization needs to communicate internally, and an intranet is a valuable tool in this continuous process. This article shows how you can configure eZ Publish to share information, and to restrict information over your intranet. It also shows how you can replace your existing network file system with an accessible virtual WebDav-enabled versioned file system.

Get eZ Publish Running

eZ Publish site. In this article, I used the 3.5 version of the system.
I will not cover the eZ Publish installation process, since it's well-covered in other sources, such as the official eZ Publish install documentation . During the installation, you will be asked to select the site type; choose "intranet". The next step in the installer is to select the functionality; there, select:

• files
• forum
• image gallery
• news

The intranet site type is pre-configured to require users to log in before they can use the site. This differs from the other site types, for which all content is public by default. The image below shows how our intranet site looks immediately after installation.

Post-Installation Configuration

Once eZ Publish is installed you can instantly start to publish content such as articles, files and images. But, we want to change the look and feel of our intranet to fit the corporate profile. Let's do this before we start to add content to the site.

eZ Publish provides many possibilities for the application of design styles, with the easiest being simply to change the CSS. Since eZ Publish is tagged with a so-called "table-less div layout", you can change most of the design just by altering the CSS definitions. If you're not as comfortable with CSS as you'd like to be, see SitePoint's HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS.

For the purpose of this tutorial, we're going to use one of the sample themes that come with the eZ Publish installation. To change the style sheet with one of the 20 supplied themes, go to the Design tab in the Administration interface, and click on "Look and Feel". There, you can change the site tile, edit some meta data, upload a new logo, and change the theme. I changed the title to "SitePoint Intranet" and picked theme 20.

By changing the template, you can make the site look different, but if you have very specific demands that cannot be met through alterations to the CSS file, you can always edit the templates yourself. All the visual parts of eZ Publish are defined in templates and can be changed: the eZ Publish site has detailed information about altering templates.