eZ Platform vs. Webflow

For a new site: 1. Are there any hosting requirements? eZ Publish works best on a traditional LAMP stack. 2. What is the expertise of the development and systems administrations individuals? There should be some PHP development experience and a solid level of Apache and MySQL hosting. 3. Who will be managing the content of the site? What is their bandwidth for training? For ongoing content changes?

Incentivized

The good outweighs the bad. I love how my webpage works, and it fulfills everything that I was trying to accomplish. The ability to tag and distribute content across the site saves a lot of time and energy. I just wish that custom elements were easier to reuse across pages and that it weren't so hard to figure out. This tool is better suited for someone who knows what they are doing, rather than a beginner.

Incentivized

• Content Taxonomy: Content is managed in a tree. Though taxonomy vs folksonomy is a near-religious debate among professionals, clients seeing the system for the first time just seem to "get it" more often.
• Content Flexibility: Common content types such as blog posts and articles are available out of the box. However, customizing these and creating new content types is very easy.
• Developer Friendly: Developers need only a little PHP experience to get started. Of course being an expert doesn't hurt and opens the door for the development of custom modules.

Incentivized

• Easy to use and customize CMS.
• Develop engaging CSS interactions and JavaScript animations visually.
• Several competitively priced hosting tiers are available and all use AWS servers and Fastly CDN.
• Code can be exported to be used with other CMS platforms such as WordPress, or E-Commerce platforms such as Shopify.

Incentivized

• The template language: Outputting content or doing something special with it requires use of the templating language. Myself along with other developers I have trained, found this to be one of the biggest hurdles.
• Layout of physical files: The system decides what settings files and templates to use based on a hierarchy of modules. The same file can exist in multiple modules and you can find yourself deep within very similar looking folder structures, causing confusion during debugging.
• Community: eZ has a solid set of community contributors but the gap between it and Drupal or Wordpress is pretty large.

Incentivized

• The Content Management System needs improvement. In my experience, it's very difficult to organise all our content at big volumes. We want to create a resources section where we can categorize our content but there isn't an easy or intuitive way to do it
• In my opinion, it's incredibly difficult to create tables in an article
• You have to do custom coding for anchor links within an article and it's time consuming and, in my opinion, super annoying
• Website designs are not responsive we need to keep designing a separate mobile version
• In my opinion, Formatting content in articles is annoying compared to other CMSs like Wordpress, Shopify, Wix, Blogger, etc. Worst experience I've had.
• Changes to the nav bar on the homepage do not reflect universally, we needed to do the same changes all over again for our blog and mobile
• Content editors need to keep logging in every time they add content

Incentivized

It's the perfect balance of GUI and code control

Incentivized

With a little education, I find Webflow incredibly easy to use. As previously mentioned, the Webflow University video library is amazing so anything you need help with is already available. That said, I do feel like it is a relatively steep learning curve and would be even steeper for someone who is completely new to Web Development, which is why I gave it the score I did.

Incentivized

In my experience, their customer service is an absolute joke, I tried reaching out to them they took forever. I had to keep following up with them as if they never received it in the first place. It’s a new platform, so guidance is needed. Tried the university they offer, in my opinion, it is completely useless, I would just completely move on from this website.

In my opinion, it is horrible, the rendering takes forever. I have the newest MacBook and the platform will still lag and slow down on me. I’m not a developer, I am a designer which makes it worst because I am using the features they are providing not extra coding features. In my opinion, it is a horrible platform really, stay away.

I haven't had to engage them from a support perspective; however, there is a considerable user community for tips/ideas/troubleshooting and the like. I believe the Pro plan supports additional resources but we didn't find that the cost justified the outcome. Overall the need for support has been relatively minor.

Incentivized

eZ Publish isn't as large in community size and number of installations as other content management systems. However, it's just as capable and met our needs:

• Developers, system administrators, and project manager can all speak the same language during the development and maintenance cycles of a site.
• End-user training is very straight-forward.
• Vendor support is available.
• Client IT departments can access if need (developers/designers/sysadmins).
• The community is there (forums) and there are solid contributions (extensions) from both the vendor and the community.

Incentivized

So, Webflow gave me the freedom that other platforms didn't in terms of not needing to code (in comparison to WordPress), and the site looks like a professional page rather than a generic average one, and then in terms of having more than just writing key findings (in comparison to medium) like a site that feels unique and sophisticated. Finally, all in all, Webflow is harder at start but the results are eye pleasing and its totally worth the time.

Incentivized

I feel it doesn’t perform the way it’s supposed to and it doesn’t have any beneficial factors to it. In my opinion, there is no reason to use a platform like this when Wix and Shopify, and WordPress exist. I believe Webflow is a platform that shouldn’t exist and it’s only popular because of the hype it received. I tried it and hate it completely.

• Common knowledge: By making eZ a core offering, developers, system administrators, and project managers were able to communicate with each other effectively.
• Training: Due to its content taxonomy, end-user training often went well.
• Support: In our case, we had Gold support from eZ Publish which saved time and helped with customizations.

Incentivized

• Work quality output has improved as Webflow helps bridge the gap between design and development.
• Lower overall development costs mean more client budget can be allocated to strategy and creative.
• Faster turnarounds result in shorter billing cycles, which improve agency cashflow.

Incentivized