Why to choose eZ Publish CMS as a platform for web projects

As an eZ Publish developer I am often asked to explain why we as a company work with eZ, why have we chosen eZ in the first place and why will we continue to work with it in the future. So I will try to summarize our reason. Dear reader, feel free to contribute with yours.

The open source

This part is very easy explainable. eZ Publish is an open source project. This in fact can mislead the end user to believe it is cheap or even free of costs. Well, we as developers know that “bread & milk” do cost and we need it to be able to work 16 hours a day :). For me open source is not a topic about the money, but it’s a topic about time. What if I used some closed source CMS and needed to develop some new important feature which required a look into the source, maybe even to modify the source (bug fix, small feature, a hack, etc.). So I would need to contact some employee from the vendor to take a look for me?
Tough, documentation for eZ could be better (as for any other software product), for a experienced developer it is faster to just look into kernel how things are done. This became an everyday practice for us, like breathing or paying taxes. So I am not even going to imagine what if we didn’t have the kernel open sourced.
But please, don’t neglect the documentation because of me :) For new developers it is better to use the classic documentation.
If there is a problem beyond my knowledge there is the eZ community where always a smarter guy (or girl) can be found. The sum of the whole community knowledge is big because of the open source, that is a fact. Even innovation is boosted as people are easily sharing their extensions with the community: give some - take some. This will be even more emphasized with eZ Publish community edition, with all of the commits & pull request on github. All in all, it is great feeling when you find a extension already made, almost exactly what you need, hack it a bit, send the hack to the developer, and solve the problem much faster then planned.
But it is even greater feeling when you get hacks from some developer who used your extension you shared with the community.
Like I said, it is not a topic about money :)

The foundation

It would not be a great experience to build a nice house without really solid foundation. From my experience eZ has rock solid foundation for WCMS projects. There are many reasons for such a statement:

• meta model of the database: classes of objects - enables to easy solve huge number of client request without refactoring,

• extensibility in all directions - we scarcely hit a limit (modules, views, different kind of plugins, etc),
• clear & easy upgrade path - this is normal for eZ but quite rare for other CMS products,
• very clear directory structure & override mechanism - enables fast & easy switching people from one eZ project to other, maintenance is faster, parallel work is possible, etc.

I am sure there are more reasons to support my claim, but these I found important for us. As we try to provide flexible service to our clients, giving them new features as fast as possible at fair prices. So eZ platform gives us our every day “bread & milk”.

The balance

The fact that there is a company behind which steers the product development sometimes looks like it does not belong to this story. But I think it gives a good balance between fast innovation with the open source way and secure & stable growth supported by the product vendor. This is one of the reasons why we have chosen eZ Publish as a platform 7 years ago.
So if you come across a large client who want stability and security and he can pay it, you have the Enterprise Subscription so the story can live on. As our dear eZ crew will get its “bread & milk”.

The success

If you mix all the ingredients together and add some effort from your side the success should come. The clients would be happy as they have a great tool to chase their own success, developers should be happy if their clients are happy. The more stories like that the more eZ Community will grow.
And that is the main topic here.

eZ Community, LETSGO!