Friday 05 March 2010 8:41:40 am

Hi Lars,

my personal experience after about 2 years (not full time) ez develoment using ezpublish and ezcomponents is:

• ezp has the very best separation of content/design i know
• ezp is a real cms / cmf
• ezp its completely based on classes/interfaces
• ezp is very flexible thus inherits a bit of complexity
• ezp/ezc utilizes great OOP design principles
• ezp is capable of running high volume sites (cache, proxy, cluster, master-slave)
• ezp will not run greatly on shared-hosts, consider using a vserver or dedicated server (php.ini-settings, dns, cron, ...)

Take care of:

• api documentation and/or howtos plus example-snippets are not really good/actual/complete
• take a look into the ezp kernel files itself to see how to implement things or get the full api
• consider sign to ez premium for your client

I needed about a year to get really into ezp (not developing full time) and to get the clue of how things really work... You definetly need to create your own content-classes. The ones shipped by ez are ok but are too common and would not fit your needs. Drupal seems to share the same features with ez (content classes, fields, i18n, ...) but lacks great sourcecode/classes as ezp/ezc has. ezp has a steep learning courve. So don't expect great results within a week - well that depends on your skills ;-)

The community is willing to help, some core developers of ez.no are active too. The user/tech documentation needs to be read a few times before getting it all in your head. Some tips'n'tricks by community members are only available on 'the old' documentation pages on ez.no (for ez 3.9.x) and did not make it into the official current docs.

To your plans:

• The template engine is pretty good and extensible, but i personally am waiting for great ezc based templating engine which can be replaced by php-based-templates instead of using 'smarty like' template code
• but keep the templates clean and separate business logic from views
• consider write your own template-fetch functions or functions itself
• You will also need to write extensions / modules to fulfill the requirements
• according to user customized pages: search for 'teamroom'

I would not describe myself as experienced, but i know how to get things done in the ez-way. So everything written here is my personal view.

btw: welcome to ez community :)

ezp=eZPublish; ezc=eZComponents - TheFramework, like zend but better ;-)

chris

Hannover, Germany
eZ-Certified http://auth.ez.no/certification/verify/395613