eZ Publish review based on experience with an Alexa Top 250 site
Pros
- 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.
Cons
- 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.
Return on Investment
- 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.
