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Prospective New User

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Brian Ross	Thursday 27 May 2010 9:09:56 pm Greetings, I have to ask if eZ Publish might be right for me, so please bear with me, and thank you for your time :) I'm starting a small business, very small just my wife and I, and we really need a fairly user friendly CMS that we can start simple and build from. I've done many rounds of searching for the best solution for us, and have been using Drupal on my personal site for a while to learn, which is very nice but I feel that I need to be a full time web developer (not my profession) to keep up with the 'who' 'what's' and 'how to's', not to mention I'm not a programmer - but I am tech savvy. I had a huge advantage with learning Drupal because of my lynda.com subscription (comprehensive video tutorials). I saw a video on this site detailing some of the new features, and some of those blew me away such as uploading a openoffice file and publishing (super efficient and quick) ... and mentioning that eZ Publish can resize images automatically, huge bonus for me as this is one of those details (auto image resizing) that has been a challenge for me to get working reliably in Drupal and Joomla!. This got me excited about using eZ Publish... so here I am asking some questions. What I think I like in eZ Publish so far is that my impression is it's solid and professional, web standards compliant, and not a toy box of incompatibility issues waiting to happen. Maybe you can tell me what you think of this? Some of the fundamental features we'd like to have either out of the box or via plugins are: - subscribe / unsubscribe to our newsletter - ability to edit <head> contents - product listings (using our own cart system already in place, would need to put in a html snippet) - contact / support forms - faq - about us - blog / news - product revision info - showcase category, via user form upload - tutorial section, written / photos / video What my question is for you is if you think eZ Publish might be right for us, or if you as an experienced user / developer feel that this platform may be overwhelming and we should spend our time elsewhere. I fully understand it may be difficult to say either way in this short post, but any insight would help immensely, and I'll surely answer anything you through at me. Thanks so much for your time, I'm looking forward to your answer(s). - BKRonline
Steven Stieng	Friday 28 May 2010 1:42:00 am Hi Brian. I've been developing websites for the last 5 years using mainly EPiServer CMS. For the last year and a half I've been using Wordpress as a CMS. I've just started developing a website for a customer using eZ Publish. I can say that eZ Publish, Drupal and Joomla are all very scalable and robust CMS. But I find them all a pain in the a** to learn how to develop custom websites. There is very rarely something called out of the box - all customers want their own look and feel, and custom content / functions. I mainly use Wordpress because it's extremely easy to learn and very flexible. (and there's a reason for why it one of the worlds most popular blogs). Yes it has it's limitations (out of the box), but there are so many plugins you can use. As long as you don't need user management / and you only want to publish company information, then I would suggest Wordpress. It's not point driving a Ferrari if you can do with a Volvo. eZ Publish, Joomla and Drupal are all Enterprise CMS. A downside of eZ, is that the CMS it self takes takes about 120MB filespace (over 10.000 files), whilst Drupal is about 3MB and Wordpress less than that. I also don't find the admin interface of eZ and Drupal very intuitive (from a usability perspective). But you have to weight the project up against the needs. I would never use Wordpress for an Enterprise website, but it works well for small and medium business for just presenting what the company does.
Robin Muilwijk	Friday 28 May 2010 2:24:52 am Hi Brian, As a response to Steven i'd like to add that making a choice between cms's to use should depend on the features you are looking for. To start with, I've used all of them (Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla and eZ), I've also been a core member at the Joomla! project so I ought to know what I'm talking about. Depending on how quickly you want the project done, and how much effort you want to put in (learning curve etc), I personally would suggest Joomla! as a quick option and eZ as a more enterprise solution. You really need to check features of both too. Now for your feature list: - subscribe / unsubscribe to our newsletter > there are newslletter extensions for both Joomla! and eZ - ability to edit <head> contents > easy to do in both Joomla! and eZ, fully supported - product listings (using our own cart system already in place, would need to put in a html snippet) > this requires some kind of wrapping in both of my suggested cms's - contact / support forms > possible with out of the box features in Joomla! and eZ - faq > possible with out of the box features in Joomla! and eZ (content objects) - about us > possible with out of the box features in Joomla! and eZ (content objects) - blog / news > possible with out of the box features in Joomla! and eZ (content objects) - product revision info > not sure what you mean by this but revisioning/versioning is only supported out of the box in eZ - showcase category, via user form upload > possible with out of the box features/extension in Joomla! and eZ - tutorial section, written / photos / video > > possible with out of the box features in Joomla! and eZ (content objects) Again, you need to look at all features your site requires. eZ has some advanced features like multisite, multilanguage, node based objects, full ACL which all of those are not available in Joomla! One other subject I'd like to mention are templates e.g. themes. Free templates are widely available for Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla! but less for eZ. Also, making a custom design/template for Joomla! will probably be done quicker compared to eZ. Both provide good documentation though, on making your own design/template. If I forgot to answer something, please let us know Regards Robin Board member, eZ Publish Community Project Board - Member of the share.ez.no team - Key values: Openness and Innovation. LinkedIn: http://nl.linkedin.com/in/robinmuilwijk // Twitter: http://twitter.com/i_robin // Skype: robin.muilwijk
Brian Ross	Friday 28 May 2010 10:09:03 am Thank you both so much for your well informed replies, your experience will no doubt be a pivoting point in what we decide to do. If I could tap in to your experience again, please look over the following: 1) Would you say that eZ Publish and Drupal equally high on the learning curve, where Joomla is a lower learning curve for someone like me that's not a pro web designer / programmer but has some experience with Drupal? 2) We really want to avoid having to build and rebuilt our site, as anyone would I'd assume. Between Joomla!, and Wordpress I've seen some pretty amateur looking sites built on those cms / blog platforms where eZ Publish and Drupal sites seem to be robust, feature rich and professional. The latter is probably due to the fact that a team of professionals are probably working on these platforms and develop their own functionality. Am I on the right track? I'm hopeful that your insight will help us narrow down the field. Thanks so much for your time. - BKRonline
Robin Muilwijk	Friday 28 May 2010 11:30:14 am Hi Brian, 1; I'd say Joomla! has the lowest learning curve, than Drupal and eZ with the highest learning curve. 2; You are correct about your analisys, however http://www.fina.org for example is also running on Joomla! Similar examples can be given for Drupal, Wordpress and eZ. It depends if a single web builder or experienced team is behind the site. It is inevitable that you spend some time learning the CMS and related design and extensions to build your own site. The best thing to do when you start building a site in a CMS which is new to you, is to make a test site and also install some extensions that you think you might need and simply play around with that. Discover all it's features and not to forget non-features. It would be even better if you for example install 2 CMS's at the same time so you can compare them and then make your decission which fits best. Regards Robin Board member, eZ Publish Community Project Board - Member of the share.ez.no team - Key values: Openness and Innovation. LinkedIn: http://nl.linkedin.com/in/robinmuilwijk // Twitter: http://twitter.com/i_robin // Skype: robin.muilwijk
Brian Ross	Friday 28 May 2010 1:09:08 pm I can't express enough how much I appreciate you sharing your time and knowledge. If you ever need any help with my area of expertise, pro audio, just let me know :-) Lots of good info here. I've decided to install eZ, Joomla!, and Wordpress, and bounce through all of them. For me, Drupal is out simply because I'm not afraid to say it's too much for me to learn and handle right now, though it's amazing and if I were a pro developer I know I could make it exactly what I need. Thanks again! - BKRonline
Steven Stieng	Wednesday 02 June 2010 5:24:54 am The quality of the website has nothing to do with the CMS - only the designer / coder :-) The following websites are using Wordpress as CMS: http://www.norwegianfashion.no and http://storelocator.no And a major website on eZ, is http://www.elle.fr/elle/ As to the learning cure, Wordpress is by far the easiest to learn. Then comes Joomla (I think), then eZ and Drupal. Something to keep in mind: The different CMS'es has different views on how to approach template / menu / attribute relations. I like EPi Server, Digimaker and Wordpress best because, in my mind, they have the most logical way of relating templates with the PHP / aspx files. I know both eZ and Drupal also relies heavily on ini files. I'm not sure how extensive Joomla uses ini files. Wordpress does not use that many ini files. Personally I find it annoying that I have to manually change a init file in order to display various menu items. Also, eZ uses it's own library / script. That means you can't write core PHP directly in ez templates (because they end with .tpl) Good luck :) PS. I spent two months trying to learn Drupal on my own. Couldn't do it :)