Create your Experience

This year marks a year of continuous and major paradigm shifts in the relationships between IT, business and our greater society. Here at eZ it is the year where the forces and technologies that we have long forecasted as coming together to enable real and long term change has materialised. The result will lead to evolutionary and even revolutionary thinking and practices in digital experience management. 

The November 2012 release of eZ Publish 5 Platform – the Kilimanjaro version - is the culmination of several years of prediction, innovation and planning by eZ Systems AS and our global partner, customer and community ecosystem. Together we have built in the eZ Publish 5 Platform an Enterprise Open Source digital development platform that fulfils our vision:

To enable the full life cycle management of best-in-class, content-driven digital businesses

By design, the eZ Publish 5 Platform represents a combined set of complex and integrated digital technologies and orchestrated business models that enable strategic operations and processes to serve the needs of the individual end user. This is CXM – Customer Experience Management – for the digital economy. 

The platform is truly enterprise ready in terms of performance, availability, security and agility. It remains true to its core Open Source roots with an open architecture and environment that promote both visibility and scalability. It is a uniquely elastic platform with solutions fitting the needs of the smallest office up to the largest of multinational enterprises. It is sustainable allowing for predictable and measured growth including interoperability with today’s already existing and tomorrow’s still to be imagined digital services. 

In recognizing the diversity of organizational models and needs a uniquely hybrid delivery model is now offered. eZ Publish 5 Platform is shipped as a pre-configured, stack-optimized cloud service as well as an on-premise software solution.

Motivation of eZ Publish 5 Platform architecture

At eZ Systems our mission statement is: ”Empowering enterprises with the freedom to create sustainable digital content driven business”. It follows that our product and service development objective is to provide the most compelling Multichannel Web and Customer Experience Platform. With the eZ Publish 5 Platform architecture we present a thoroughly refactored and revamped platform which facilitates better user experiences, increases productivity, and enables your digital business model to grow sustainably. Underlying and enabling these ambitions is a completely new but thoroughly backward compatible product architecture, along with a host of user interface (UI) enhancements. 

eZ Publish 5 Platform is a feature complete digital experience solution. Orange components are part of the Software Platform. The green components are part of the Service Platform.

Deep dive into the new architecture

Since 2010, we have invested heavily in architectural improvements to eZ Publish. With the eZ Publish 5 Platform release, you will experience the full potential of the API Concept along with significant enhancements in product usability. Our dual objectives are to make eZ Publish much more agile and to raise the bar in the industry regarding performance, security and ease-of-use.

The “dual kernel” eZ Publish 5 Platform – multi-layered API Concept designed to manage legacy and future digital business.

The new API concept consists of multiple layers: Public API, REST API and Persistence API. Leveraging the innovative power of the eZ Community, the new, intensively tested API is currently available in preview mode within the eZ Community.

If you are worried about migrating existing projects to Kilimanjaro one primary advantage of the eZ Platform is its industry-leading flexibility and scalability. With Kilimanjaro, you will be able to update your implementation equally freely between the two architectures (4.x and 5), based upon which option best fits the situation.

To be very clear, you will be able to use your current projects based on your current database. This will allow you to leverage new functionality within the existing database model. Furthermore you will also be able to add multiple databases -- with new database models -- for improved performance.

In addition to the information here, there are valuable blog posts contributions written by eZ Crew members and which are also available on our community website (here, here and here).

New Public API – Streamlined PHP Interface to eZ Publish

Providing a consistent and compelling online as well as offline experience is key to success. Every business has unique requirements of how best to create powerful content experiences for digital channels. Agility and flexibility to accommodate your specific approach to optimizing the user experience is paramount.

Interoperability is the driving paradigm for eZ. With the clear and consistent PHP Interface of the new Public API you can quickly and easily create extensions and customize your enterprise web content management platform, while simultaneously enjoying full upgrade options and reduced infrastructural maintenance costs.

In addition to the more conspicuous benefits of the Public API, training times in the modules and extensions of eZ Publish 5 Platform have been greatly reduced, contributing significantly to speedier Web initiatives and time-to-market.

Enhanced REST API – eZ Publish as a Web Service

Within just a few years, smart mobile devices have gone from being niche products to the most common access point for digital information. The mobile device will soon be seen as the primary access point for most digital experiences, however true competitive advantage lies in providing a better experience across all devices in the long term. 

To provide a compelling content experience across all digital and mobile channels a platform that offers an open development environment and a user-centric product orientation is needed. With the REST API, you can create integrations, connectors and applications hosted on external servers or devices. This lets you act connected and deliver a content experience across your entire ecosystem.

Our open, standards-based, flexible platform provides a solid technical foundation that is already future-proofed. As a result extensive technical advantage is gained since you can create forward-compatible solutions in sync with industry standards. This holds true no matter which devices or technologies emerge as de facto standards.

New Persistence Layer – eZ is prepared for the era of Big Data

While it is great to have access to huge amounts of content sitting in multiple content sources, the flip side is that this may result in poor performance.

With the Persistence API you are able to improve performance with both a flexible integration layer and set of interfaces. The result is that instead of integrating multiple repositories manually, you create a high-performance single access point, thereby increasing productivity by getting the right information, in the right format, from multiple repositories.

This opens the door to create a flexible, high-performance database environment, which is scalable to your needs.

Built to create experiences on any device, for any app

With version 5, the eZ Publish Platform continues to improve its capabilities in mobile and multichannel experience management and delivery.

Our focus is on offering freedom – freedom to pick the right approach and with as much simplicity as possibly to implement:

• A brand new iOS and Android SDK, offering a ready to use, configurable native mobile application for iPhone or iPad to be used as a reference or as a starting point to build your own application
• An improved responsive design user interface framework
• An improved eZ App Factory application generator
• An optimized REST API  for mobile developers

New high-performance development framework

eZ joined forces with SensioLabs to leverage the new Symfony 2 based components. These offer all the flexibility of custom development and can be used to design an application that perfectly meets the expressed needs.

With the new framework, a set of prefabricated, quick to integrate software components will be made available. This means that developers will be able to write less code and with less risk of error. It also means greater productivity and the ability to devote more time to doing added value activities, such as managing guiding principles, side effects and more.

New modern template engine

The eZ Publish 5 Platform introduces a new template engine that is both more designer and developer friendly. The key-features are:

Fast: The new template engine compiles templates down to plain optimized PHP code. The overhead compared to regular PHP code was reduced to the very minimum.

Secure: The template engine has a sandbox mode to evaluate untrusted template code. This allows the engine to be used as a template language for applications where users ma