Web 2.0 for the Enterprise
Saturday 07 October 2006 11:21:00 pm
In recent months, my company (Young Media Concepts) has developed several online communities using eZ publish, an Enterprise Open Source CMS. eZ publish provided an excellent basis for building Web 2.0 applications. For example, the following features were easily built on top of the standard eZ publish functionality:
- Mobile integration: User authentication and notification via SMS.
- Wiki: Wiki functionality simply requires the creation of an appropriate template and configuring the ability to edit an article and to view the version history.
- Blogs: Blogs can be implemented as simple eZ publish content objects. User-configurable RSS streaming is easily developed by adapting the existing RSS support.
- Forums: Discussion forums are part of the eZ publish standard functionality.
- Social Networking: The combination of granular access rights management with object relations enables users to confirm each other as "friends" and grant their friends access to more personal data such as email address or telephone numbers.
One of the most useful advantages of eZ publish is the ability to adapt and extend the data structure even after going live. In our experiences, we found it simple to modify data structures "on-the-fly", allowing us to quickly fix problems and meet changing requirements in the early stages of site deployment. This even leads to relatively short development cycles (about 4-6 weeks for a site with the features described above).