Drupal vs. eZ Publish: need for an emotionless and objective comparison

Author Message

Nicolas Pastorino

Friday 19 February 2010 1:23:14 am

Dear community,

I just stumbled upon this today : http://drupal.org/node/718314, someone in the process of making a choice between eZ and Drupal, and asking for objective pros & cons on these 2 solutions. He among others says he could not spot any site made with eZ Publish.... :). Quite funny.

So i wondered whether you guys would like to post a note there to help him make the right choice. I am sure a few online eZ Publish references will help him as well.

Cheers !

--
Nicolas Pastorino
Director Community - eZ
Member of the Community Project Board

eZ Publish Community on twitter: http://twitter.com/ezcommunity

t : http://twitter.com/jeanvoye
G+ : http://plus.tl/jeanvoye

Robin Muilwijk

Friday 19 February 2010 2:38:31 am

Just posted my opinion i.e. experience...

-- 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

Christian Rößler

Friday 19 February 2010 6:07:29 am

Seems to be a similar topic/discussion i started last year. See this link: http://share.ez.no/forums/general/smalltalk-what-is-cms-list-of-cms-my-2-cents
eZPublish is not listed in default-cms-shootouts and cannot be compared with joomla/drupal because you cannot compare apples with bananas.
Therefore its not listed/known by the-normal-cms-users out there.
eZPublish's primary sector is to be used in portals, organisations, companys, ...bigger installations and therefore offers much (is versatile, flexible, which inherits a bit of complexity ...).

With Drupal you gonna get results in a few minutes without having to edit templates or install too much extension and stuff like that. Also getting up and running with Drupal does not really needs a full blown Server - in fact its possible to install it on a shared host. eZPublish at least needs a virtual server to be used correctly/seriously. What i want to say is, that there a different types of customers for each of those CMS/WCMF.

eZPublish is more likely to be met in professional installations, print agencies, government stuff and so on. Drupal has a strong/large community and can be used for professional and huge sites too - but its more easy to set up a blog and therfore fits perfect for the normal-website-guy building a homepage and is more known by a wider audience... I think.
eZPublish needs more insight on how to geht things done. But when you know how things work, you can realize a lot more then you could do with drupal.

> He among others says he could not spot any site made with eZ Publish

Thats why eZPublish uses modern SEO thechnoligies and renders some ass-kicking urls. It also does not put its disclaimer in every template/footer which says "i am powered by ezpublish, click here to know more about me. please...".
I even have to smile about company-websites using joomla as their cms. I can say what website is using joomla as underlying cms just by looking at the generated urls. This is so unique and dumb...

But thats another topic.

the right tool for the right job

cheers,
chris

Hannover, Germany
eZ-Certified http://auth.ez.no/certification/verify/395613

Nicolas Pastorino

Friday 19 February 2010 7:16:46 am

Hi Christian,

This is the kind of good answer which may help the initial poster there : http://drupal.org/node/718314
How about sharing it there ?

Cheers !

--
Nicolas Pastorino
Director Community - eZ
Member of the Community Project Board

eZ Publish Community on twitter: http://twitter.com/ezcommunity

t : http://twitter.com/jeanvoye
G+ : http://plus.tl/jeanvoye

Christian Rößler

Friday 19 February 2010 9:06:48 am

Nicolas,

you are right. Posting it on the there should be more helpful. Did this right now :-)

Cheers + nice weekend,

Chris

Hannover, Germany
eZ-Certified http://auth.ez.no/certification/verify/395613

Nicolas Pastorino

Saturday 20 February 2010 7:12:45 am

"

Posting it on the there should be more helpful. Did this right now :-)

"

Excellent :)

Have a great week end too !

--
Nicolas Pastorino
Director Community - eZ
Member of the Community Project Board

eZ Publish Community on twitter: http://twitter.com/ezcommunity

t : http://twitter.com/jeanvoye
G+ : http://plus.tl/jeanvoye

Ajit Jain

Tuesday 23 February 2010 7:27:49 pm

Today I am going to convert my live Drupal site to eZ Publish.

Nihonsei http://www.nihonsei.jp/

http://drupal.org/node/718314#comment-2638724

Ajit Jain

Wednesday 24 February 2010 2:19:54 am

Difficult to ride an elephant (eZ Publish)
After some struggle I installed eZ Publish on a live server. It took more than 2 hours to upload and install.
No doubt eZ Publish is difficult to use, but it is faster than Drupal (may be template issue). Let us see the performance differences.

http://www.nihonsei.jp/ (Drupal site)

http://www.nihonsei.jp/ezpublish/ (eZ Publish)
(I will delete eZ Pbulish by this week.) Difficult to customize site with eZ Publish, as I could not find the way. Unable to find out, where to edit company logo and Slogan, etc.

Doug Brethower

Wednesday 24 February 2010 7:10:29 am

"Difficult to customize site with eZ Publish.."

Absolutely correct Ajit. Your frustration was my initial frustration and felt at exactly the same point.

The difficulty, for a newcomer, of figuring out how to do these simplest things, incredible. The practical information needed to complete basic tasks, if available, is cloaked within an insurmountable pile of documentation. Start spinning round and round, run out of time.

Since I had no choice, I learned to use the debug facilities to figure out what was going on.

My rough draft is at http://webportalmaster.com/index.php/eng/eZ/HowTo/Howto-Make-an-eZ-site-your-own Not an easy read, but it was the best I could muster with all my time already gone trying to figure this eZ thing out and deadlines slipping away.

Thanks for re-affirming the need. eZ is aware of the problem, trying to find the way there.

Good luck with your site. Check back!

Doug Brethower
Apple Certified Technical Consultant, Southwest, MO USA
http://share.ez.no/directory/companies/lakedata.net

Robin Muilwijk

Wednesday 24 February 2010 11:01:06 am

Hi Ajit,

There are some good articles on this community portal, along with some others that will guide you in setting up eZ and "making it your own".

Examples:

http://share.ez.no/articles/ez-publish/how-to-configure-an-ez-publish-site
http://share.ez.no/articles/ez-publish/how-to-skin-an-ez-publish-now-site
http://readtheweb.info/2009/11/29/get-start-a-new-ez-publish-project-part-i/
http://readtheweb.info/2009/12/01/get-start-a-new-ez-publish-project-part-ii/

I also read on the Drupal community forum that you had some trouble changing the company logo and slogan. This can be done by login in on the front end with the admin account, and check out the site settings (top menu). You can also change this in the back end: Edit > Look and Feel > Edit (English, or any other existing language).

As Doug mentioned, the community team is aware of the lack of beginner documentation and we have this on our agenda to improve this as soon as possible. Any feedback or problems you encounter are very welcome, they might point us to areas that need attention with regards to beginners documentation.

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

Ajit Jain

Wednesday 24 February 2010 11:46:45 pm

Hi Doug

Thanks for your comment. I hope one day I will successfully launch my site with eZ Publish. I have checked your website and suggestions. Today I wrote an installation manual (http://ezpublishinstallation.wordpress.com/). I am not a English native speaker. I am extremely sorry as there are many English grammatical errors in my manual.

Regards,

Ajit

Ajit Jain

Thursday 25 February 2010 12:12:28 am

Hi Robin,

Thank you very much for suggesting some good articles on eZ Publish. Today I installed eZ Publish two times for writing my own installation guide (http://ezpublishinstallation.wordpress.com/).

eZ Publish is a good software. It can beat many other CMS including my favorite Drupal. There are many changes required for eZ Publish (including a good marketing strategy) and updated documentation.

In Firefox http://ez.no/ Page Speed Score is 68/100, where Page Speed Score of http://drupal.org is 81/100). I found that http://ez.no/ is hosted on a dedicated server. But it is very slow in Japan to view this site. I have to wait for few seconds to view http://ez.no/

I am making a very simple site (a non-profit website) with very minimum resources and any CMS can fulfill my requirements. I hope one day I can build a big website with eZ Publish.

Thanks a lot.

Best regards,

Ajit

Doug Brethower

Thursday 25 February 2010 1:38:38 pm

I like in your write up, "not sure what I should do here".

I have seen eZ clarify many similar gaps in short time I have been using eZ. It is advancing rapidly, make no mistake.

The marketing strategy has been "of, for and by" developers, and it has worked too well. They are now faced with reality of their own great success sparking interest from not so highly skilled.

Yet they still commit resources down the line, to entertain newbies in these forums and further extend the community. Tells me they are not satisfied, still reaching higher.

eZ is not just for big websites. Perfect for ma and pa to put up web content, easy to admin many ma and pa sites. Just be sure you have at least a half day per site figured in when update time rolls around.

Doug Brethower
Apple Certified Technical Consultant, Southwest, MO USA
http://share.ez.no/directory/companies/lakedata.net

Ajit Jain

Saturday 06 March 2010 7:48:09 pm

I wrote a new comment in Post "Drupal vs eZ Publish".

http://drupal.org/node/718314#comment-2686114

Nicolas Pastorino

Monday 08 March 2010 4:55:50 am

"

I wrote a new comment in Post "Drupal vs eZ Publish".

http://drupal.org/node/718314#comment-2686114

"

Good piece of conclusion there. You make the very point that building complex websites anyways requires a more-than-one-person team, i agree with this (although not everyone does : http://drupal.org/node/718314#comment-2687098 :) ).

It takes some time to learn eZ Publish, but it appears you very quickly grasped it. We're here to help you continue in this direction !

Talk soon,
Cheers,

--
Nicolas Pastorino
Director Community - eZ
Member of the Community Project Board

eZ Publish Community on twitter: http://twitter.com/ezcommunity

t : http://twitter.com/jeanvoye
G+ : http://plus.tl/jeanvoye

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