Forums / General / eZ publish vs. Drupal

eZ publish vs. Drupal

Author Message

Anne Onamouse

Saturday 04 August 2007 3:07:54 pm

I'm evaluating CMSs and am comparing Drupal (http://drupal.org) to eZ publish. I'd really appreciate opinions from everyone <b>:)</b> - especially people who have worked with both.

kracker (the)

Sunday 05 August 2007 4:07:56 pm

I've seen this text before, it's not unique; check it, <i>http://drupal.org/node/164594</i>

It's all been said but who can say when you can't see it so clearly, <i>http://ez.no/community/forum/general/ez_or_bespoke_solution#msg143000</i>

<i>//kracker

Sage Francis : Sick of Waiting Tables : I Apologize (Ft Sole)</i>

Member since: 2001.07.13 || http://ezpedia.se7enx.com/

Bruce Morrison

Sunday 05 August 2007 5:25:51 pm

Same question posed on the forums of the 2 products being compared. I'm not sure how karcker can tell that they are copied(not posted by the same person)...and what the objection actually is.

Anyhoo, I can't comment as my head is in eZ 24/7, though I would hope that anyone with relevant experience does post. I for one would be interested in responses and at least searches for "eZ publish vs. Drupal" would bring up some relevant information and not give the impression of a hostile community.

Cheers
Bruce

My Blog: http://www.stuffandcontent.com/
Follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/brucemorrison
Consolidated eZ Publish Feed : http://friendfeed.com/rooms/ez-publish

Anne Onamouse

Sunday 05 August 2007 5:43:37 pm

I am honestly trying to find different perspectives to help understand the strengths and weaknesses of eZ and Drupal. That's why I posted almost the identical post at both eZ and Drupal. The posts are anonymous in an effort to provide a neutral venue.

Areas I consider extremely important:

Structured content handling
Roles and policies
Administration interface
Manageability (handling upgrades)
Design management

Thanks to everyone who contributes.

Mihai007 Pop

Sunday 12 August 2007 6:39:14 am

Try using the following website: http://www.cmsmatrix.org/

This will give you a list of cms solutions. Check the boxes near Drupal and eZPublish and click on "compare"! It will give you a good idea of what each is capable of. The comparision is based on a list of features. If you don't understand the features then hover the mouse over the feature name: it will pop-up an explanation.

Personally - if I could change the general design layout as easy as it was in eZPublish version 2.x but with the capabilities of version 3.x then I would be happier. But hey - I am still learning :)

I still vote for eZPublish...!

Heath

Sunday 12 August 2007 7:01:11 am

<i>@Mihai007 Pop</i>

I took a look at the site you mention, <i>http://cmsmatrix.org/</i>

I noticed the following problems with the above website.

1) <i>Difficult to use</i>; It's not possible to link to a comparison. This makes it difficult to share a comparison on the web.

2) <i>Out of date</i>; The information listed on eZ Publish is very much outdated! With the last updated date for eZ publish as listed at, <i>5/10/2006</i>!

2.1) <i>These fields are in need of modification and update</i>; Application Server, Approximate Cost, Operating System, Web Server, Login History, NTLM Authentication, Problem Notification, SMB Authentication, Certification Program, Test Framework, Drag-N-Drop Content, Mass Upload, Zip Archives, Document Management, Events Calendar, Events Management, FAQ Management, Matrix, Point of Sale, Inventory Management, Subscriptions.

I also noticed a similar thread on this subject, <i>http://ez.no/community/forum/general/accurate_ezpublish_specs_on_cmsmatrix_org</i>

Cheers,
Heath

Brookins Consulting | http://brookinsconsulting.com/
Certified | http://auth.ez.no/certification/verify/380350
Solutions | http://projects.ez.no/users/community/brookins_consulting
eZpedia community documentation project | http://ezpedia.org

Carlos Revillo

Sunday 12 August 2007 12:18:01 pm

Hi. i have been working with ez for two years and only one month with drupal, so maybe i'm not the right person to talk about this, but here is my opinion... (i'm still learning two of them, so maybe i'm wrong sometimes).

Asking Anne i would like to say:

<b>Structured content handling</b>

I prefer ezPublish for this. in eZ we have only nodes. nodes can be folders, articles... you know. and you can make nodes children of another childrens, so we have our tree content.
Also, we can do new content types easyly through our admin zone, Setup -> classes.
Drupal have nodes, and have also menus. you can have nodes, but, as far i know, you can't do a node child of another one...

You can add modules (cck) to achieve other content types creation. when you add this to drupal, you say.. "wow, this rocks!". but if you don't want to use another modules, you have to add this new content type programming yourself. (let's me say that drupal is quite well documented in drupal.org).

Also, in eZ you can protect some tree content parts by sections, for example. i still don't know how to do this with ez. (maybe with a module).

<b>Roles and policies</b>

I like two of them with this.

<b>Administration interface</b>

I prefer eZ in some things and i prefer drupal in other things. Let's see. when you install ez, you select your "public" zone and your "admin" zone. two of them have distinct desings so i think is easy to know where you are. in drupal, when you install you are redirected to an unique zone. you add content and you can see new contents, and new menu appearing in the same place you are adding roles and other things. when you logout, obiously you cannot access some zones but you're still seeing the same design.

Again, there's a module who can present admin zone with a theme and other zones with another one.

In the other hand, all the stuff ez uses have sometimes desesperated me. content tree node spends so much time to load, and this also happens with almost all the admin zone.
Also, i love the way you can integrate rich html editors in drupal. you can use tinymce and configure all the buttons you can without editing any file!.

<b>Design management</b>

Here, i thing i like drupal. you only have to add a folder with your css and images, and things you need and activate this new theme in your admin panel, but you don't have to edit ini files and things like that.

obviously, then you have to edit your tpl files to get the right content. but in drupal you can use php in your templates and you don't have to learn all the things i have needed with ez. you know, all this {fetch("content","tree",hash...} is a bit confusing when you start with ez.

Again, theres a drupal module (views). It's really fantastic to get content you want without editing any tpl or php file!.

Let me add another things.

<b>Multilanguage.</b>
Ez wins here. Drupal 5 still doesn't have support on multilanguage. Maybe Drupal 6 will have. Again, there's a module to achieve content translations, but while it gives the funcionality quite well, i don't like it so much.

In eZ, you edit an article, for example. you can see it in your content tree. you can edit and if you want you can add translations, but in your content tree you will see one of node. in drupal, as far i know, you can translate content, but in your content list you will see all the "versions" of a node. i mean, if you have an spanish/english site and you write an about page and then translate it to spanish, when you see your content list you will see two entries, "Acerca de" and "about".

<b>Seo.</b>
I really love Drupal here. well, in ez, if you add the article... "One word is less than two words" you will see a url like "one_word_is_less_than_two". this is the default behaviour. in drupal you will see the same url (with "-" and no "_") but you can write your own url for every node if you want!.

Drupal also wins tagging content.

At last, i would like to talk about <b>apis.</b>

I think drupal wins here. I think if you learn ez api you can do a lot of things with few lines of code, but the database design forces you to learn ez api. i mean, if you try to get content from ez database, you can use eZContentTreeNode... you know... then you can use node->dataMap for getting content fields... try to do this without using ezApi. your sql statment is quite complicated... try to enable debug sql queries to see what i'm about.
Drupal also has his api, but if you don't wanna learn it, you still can use php statments to get content or to a lot of things....

hope to see more opinions, and please, tell me if i'm wrong with some of the above. and sorry for my english. :)

kracker (the)

Sunday 12 August 2007 1:48:31 pm

Hello Carlos,

<b>Thank you</b>, for reformatting your message (as much as you have already).

I thought we had seen you around ez.no before under a different account history.
<i>http://ez.no/community/forum/general/icons_and_classes/re_icons_and_classes</i>

<b>Congratulations!</b> As your comments are a very <i>unique, distinct, useful, helpful and thoughtful</i> comparison of the two solutions in question.

I would <i>still</i> ask you to take another attempt at further clarification of your forum reply text to be more readable, more coherent and more paragraph breaks.

Your English is very understandable, yet your formating is still a bit difficult to read.

//kracker

<i>sole : mansbestfriend pt 3 : myownworstenemy : the mosquito song</i>

Member since: 2001.07.13 || http://ezpedia.se7enx.com/

Carlos Revillo

Sunday 12 August 2007 2:14:11 pm

yes i had another account in the past. is there any problem with this?

i also saw you posting similar messages to this... are you a robot or any new kind of ez funcionality to prevent long paragraphs? ;)

Maybe the forum guidelines could explain us how we can formatting all this post. i'll try it anyway.

Anne Onamouse

Monday 13 August 2007 4:38:27 am

Carlos,

Your observations are excellent! Thanks.

I have about three years of experience with eZ and about a month with Drupal as well. I built up the same little demo with both systems. Drupal took 18 downloads to get the same features as one eZ download.

One of the key features I was looking for was the ease with which you could distribute content administration of the system, so you could carefully control which editors could edit which content. I used the organic groups module, and I had trouble with it - it didn't work as I expected it to.

It looks like Drupal uses a "taxonomy" module to manage the content tree. That seemed okay, but the relationship between the content and user management seemed more difficult to work with under Drupal than eZ.

eZ can support a rich editor, especially on the site visitor side, it is just a matter of integrating it into the templates. I've never done it, but I don't think it would be difficult. You could use tinyMCE and have an extended textblock for a datatype. On display, the content is delivered unprocessed.

One thing I did like about Drupal is that you could create a new datatype through the admin interface and then allow it to be used with different content types. Since this is often done with select lists, eZ can support it with object relationlists.

I think the most serious drawback of Drupal is the module management. If Drupal is upgraded, especially if it is a security upgrade, the modules may also require upgrades to function. Thus - an upgrade is not a single upgrade, but involves checking every module file.

Drupal is emerging as a leader for site management, and I think it is due to ease of use for the content editors. It also has a great community, and is excellent code.

With respect to the APIs, I agree that eZ's API can be difficult. I've found the best way to work with it is to find similar code in the kernel and follow it as an example. On the other hand, since there is so much functionality already in eZ, I can usually avoid eZPHP.

The Drupal themes are really equivalent to eZ sitestyles. If the site is designed to work with the default eZ pagelayout.tpl, the visual interface can be managed through the admin console, much like Drupal.

Heath,

I agree that cmsmatrix.org needs updating. Ironically, that's how I found eZ, three years ago. It was the only system that had all the features I needed.

Anne :)

PS: kracker - Thanks

Roland Benedetti

Monday 13 August 2007 9:08:42 am

Hi all,

Simply rebouding on Carlos post regarding SEO.
In eZ Publish 3.10 you will have the capacity to configure the word separator and to use a Dash. Dash might be used as default, though the Dash Vs. Underscore dilemma seems to evolve ... best will be that you can choose.

If interested, you can play with 3.10 alpha and comment on the sdk-public list.

Cheers,

--
Roland Benedetti
eZ Systems, Product Management

Carlos Revillo

Monday 13 August 2007 9:55:54 am

Thanks Roland.

I'd go further on this. I would try to make an "url alias extension". i have not used translations url from ez and i don't know if this works as well as drupal url alias.

Think about the posibility of migrating an static site to a php cms like the two we're talking about. If in the static version you had your about.html, you can create your new node in drupal an called about.html as before, so search engines would see new content at the same url...

Does url translator have this posibility?

Regarding on Anne post, you say...

"I think the most serious drawback of Drupal is the module management. "

That's right. not only upgrading issues. i have found conflicts between modules. last night i've installed a module and get an error. the reason if this module implemeted a function wich name was exactly the same of another module function... i've never had this problem with ez.

"Drupal took 18 downloads to get the same features as one eZ download. It
also took 16 hours instead of 2 with eZ."

I think, with respect, this is no a good indicator. you say you were working with ez for three years and only one month with drupal. maybe if you do the same test after a year...

i remember my first ez site and it took me two months to finish it. you know, client wanted that, and we didn't know much about ez. we have to learn the template system, we have to learn how to make an extension and months later we discovered that ez api could be our new best friend doing jobs...

Now i'm developing exactly the same project with drupal, only for testing, and i think i'll finish in two weeks...

i know, maybe if i didn't know anything about ez, drupal project maybe could take me six months... :)

i really like two systems and i don't see the reason why the people are trying to find wich is the best. actually i don't really know what could be my reply to that question...

Greetings.

Anne Onamouse

Monday 13 August 2007 12:41:16 pm

Carlos,

You are right about the 16 hours vs. 2 hours. I removed that text almost immediately - because it is unfair to compare the time with the two systems, since I had no experience with Drupal. Every application has a learning curve. I am still learning eZ!

I'm glad you posted that you like both systems. Drupal would not be popular if it wasn't good. This is probably a case where there are some applications that are better suited for eZ and some that are better suited for Drupal. Do you agree?

:)

Jérôme Renard

Monday 13 August 2007 12:54:08 pm

"Think about the posibility of migrating an static site to a php cms like the two we're talking about. If in the static version you had your about.html, you can create your new node in drupal an called about.html as before, so search engines would see new content at the same url."

You do not need to create any extension, this feature already exists in eZ Publish.

Log in your admin interface, and go to :
Setup -> URL Translator.

Add a "New system URL forwarding" for example:
about.html -> ezinfo/about.

And you are done, try the new URL ( http://www.yoursite.com/about.html) in your browser and you will see the expected page, which is in this case the result the info view from the ezinfo module.

Best Regards.

Carlos Revillo

Monday 13 August 2007 1:07:20 pm

ok. i'll try it again. i tried id some months ago, but i didn't spend enough time with this.
thank you.

Yudi Setiawan

Wednesday 12 September 2007 12:20:44 am

Dear Anne, Carlos and all,

Want to thank you for sharing the comparison between eZ Publish & Drupal.
I agree that each system has its own uniqueness.

I'm new to this CMS world, but would love to learn more about it.
At the moment, I'm considering using eZ Publish 3.9 or Drupal 5 to maintain my company website.

Want to discuss more about the database design.
I read this arcticle (http://www.lullabot.com/articles/an_introduction_to_the_content_construction_kit) explaining about the working of new content type creation.
In which the writer explain :
"The fact CCK creates these tables for you is significant. The Flexinode approach was to save all of the information needed to extend content types in a few central tables, no matter how many flexinode types were created, or how many fields were added. These central tables became a bottleneck due to excessive JOIN queries being made. The CCK approach of creating new tables for the purpose scales much better."
I think when we create new content with the customized content type in Drupal, the system will create new tables to hold the content.

Then I analyzed the eZ Publish database and found that all content created using the customized content class were store in one table, that is ezcontentobject_attribute table.
Which makes me wonder, will this make eZ Publish significantly slower after some time?
Especially with a lot of customized content object getting more & more each day?

This item is crucial for my project because we're gonna add content (a lot of them) on a daily basis.
And we're gonna using the customized content type (eZ Publish: content class) heavily.

Please help sharing your opinion regarding this.

Thank you.

Anne Onamouse

Saturday 17 November 2007 2:51:01 pm

<b>Thanks to everyone that posted.</b>

With all due respect to Drupal and its community, I prefer eZ as a CMS because a single download delivers a robust system that is supported as an integrated system. I also think eZ's community is an extremely valuable asset.

So, in response to Yudi's post - I would use eZ instead of Drupal for your company's website.

It is important to acknowledge that existing resources and experience are important factors in choosing platforms - my choice is very strongly influenced by my eZ experience.

Gaetano Giunta

Sunday 18 November 2007 7:59:45 am

@Yudi: <i>Which makes me wonder, will this make eZ Publish significantly slower after some time?
Especially with a lot of customized content object getting more & more each day?</i>

There are quite a few techniques that eZ uses to help mitigate this problem, including:

1 - using the fetch functions provided by the engine to access data usually leads to fairly optimized sql queries being generated

2 - the admin can change the number of versions stocked in the db per content-object. IIRC the default is 10, but you can set it to 3 and have one third of the data

3 - CACHING! There are many layers of caching in eZ, with the ultimate goal being to reduce db access as much as possible. This means that by default once an object changes, a cached version of its html rendering will be generated and stored on disk. When an user accesses the page where the object is displayed, the cached version is used.

Principal Consultant International Business
Member of the Community Project Board

Xavier Dutoit

Sunday 18 November 2007 11:43:13 pm

@Yudi,

The system won't get slower overtime, but it's, obviously much slower to have one record per attribute and version (at least) instead on all of them as attribute of one table read together as you describe it for drupal.

The difference is quite obvious when you're editing an object with a lot of attributes, but if the speed is ok for you, it won't get much slower than that once you get more objects.

X+

http://www.sydesy.com

Anne Onamouse

Monday 19 November 2007 1:31:41 pm

The content architecture and class definitions have an important impact on performance.

Every system has strengths and weaknesses - I still believe eZ is more powerful, more cost-effective to maintain, and better supported than Drupal. Drupal has some performance issues of its own.