eZ Platform vs. WordPress

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

In my opinion, smaller organizations with simpler layouts would be well suited to use WordPress, however, larger organizations with more advanced website feature needs may need another product. We found the website to be great at first, but as we grew, we needed more options that were not fitting for the product we had with WordPress and had to look at alternatives.

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 User Interface
• Coding / Plugin Implementation is awesome
• There's always a solution available for the platform
• Security is easy to use and robust
• Implementation with 3rd party platforms, such as Google's variety of tools
• Can download and host on your own server or use their hosted servers

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

• WordPress breaks often so you need to have someone who understands how to troubleshoot, which can take time and money.
• Some plugins are easier to customize than others, for example, some don't require any coding knowledge while others do. This can limit your project if you are not a coder.
• WordPress can be easily hacked, so you also need someone who can ensure your sites are secure.

Incentivized

As time goes on, websites will become less focused on paged content and more immersive. At the same time, the need for security will only go up. While WordPress has served the web community well for over 11 years, it's probably time to look for other better platforms.

WordPress has excellent UX/UI, mainly because it's familiar. The platform is still a bit dated on the back end, but it has improved from the past. I wouldn't give it a 10 in this area because it does require some coding and development knowledge. You can't just jump in and create a website with confidence, like you would with Jimdo, Squarespace or similar tools.

Incentivized

Anyone can visit WordPress.org and download a fully functional copy of WordPress free of charge. Additionally, WordPress is offered to users as open-source software, which means that anyone can customize the code to create new applications and make these available to other WordPress users.

Mostly, any performance issues have to do with using too many plugins and these can sometimes slow down the overall performance of your site. It is very tempting to start adding lots of plugins to your WordPress site, however, as there are thousands of great plugins to choose from and so many of them help you do amazing things on your site. If you begin to notice performance issues with your WordPress site (e.g. pages being slow to load), there are ways to optimize the performance of your site, but this requires learning the process. WordPress users can learn how to optimize their WordPress sites by downloading the WPTrainMe WordPress training plugin (WPTrainMe.com) and going through the detailed step-by-step WordPress optimization tutorials.

WordPress itself only has community service so your experience will depend on where you turn. Online, through forums and community boards, support is rudimentary but effective. You can easily turn to your local community and find exceptional individuals who know and use WordPress regularly for more advanced, inexpensive, support. I'm rating this less than 10 because of the lack of any formal support provided by a company.

Varies by the person providing training. High marks as it's incredibly easy to find experienced individuals in your community to provide training on any aspect of WordPress from content marketing, SEO, plugin development, theme design, etc. Less than 10 though as the training is community based and expectations for a session you find may fall short.

It is very easy to find online resources to learn how to do just about anything with WordPress.

WordPress is not a great solution if you have: 1) A larger site with performance / availability requirements. 2) Multiple types of content you want to share - each with its own underlying data structure. 3) Multiple sites you need to manage. For very small sites where these needs are not paramount, WordPress is a decent solution

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

There are no other site builders/platforms that stand up to the ease and versatility (heavy custom coding and customizations included) as Wordpress. Drupal is clunky and outdated, as is Joomla, and while Wix or Squarespace may be sufficient for someone with very low web needs, much like Shopify, it's incredibly limiting and either requires hitting it with a hammer and hacking code together to do what you want, or relying on often shoddily-built third party themes and liquid scripts.

Incentivized

WordPress is completely scalable. You can get started immediately with a very simple "out-of-the box" WordPress installation and then add whatever functionality you need as and when you need it, and continue expanding. Often we will create various WordPress sites on the same domain to handle different aspects of our strategy (e.g. one site for the sales pages, product information and/or a marketing blog, another for delivering products securely through a private membership site, and another for running an affiliate program or other application), and then ties all of these sites together using a common theme and links on each of the site's menus. Additionally, WordPress offers a multisite function that allows organizations and institutions to manage networks of sites managed by separate individual site owners, but centrally administered by the parent organization. You can also expand WordPress into a social networking or community site, forums, etc. The same scalability applies to web design. You can start with a simple design and then scale things up to display sites with amazing visual features, including animations and video effects, sliding images and animated product image galleries, elements that appear and fade from visitor browsers, etc. The scaling possibilities of WordPress are truly endless.

• 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

• Allowed us to being all websites under a single umbrella, saving costs on similar products.
• It's increased our website turn time and made us faster and more efficient at launching websites.
• Edits and tweaks happen much faster as we have a customized environment.

Incentivized