Build a WebDav-Enabled Intranet With eZ Publish

Toolbars are an eZ Publish mechanism that enable you to configure the boxes with functionality on the top, right, or bottom of the default eZ Publish installation. These are, of course, template-based, so you can alter or add additional toolbars, or change their positions. The Intranet site style comes with a tool that shows the most recently published files by default.

Let's use Toolbar Management, found under the Design tab, to make eZ Publish show the last file, the last news article, and the last images published. To do this, edit the right toolbar, adding three node list tools. Select the source from which the objects are fetched by clicking the item source browse button. Change the number of items to 1, and enter a new title for each box. The screenshot below shows the toolbar configuration page.

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.