Linux New Media chooses the eZ Publish CMS to achieve content-rich and community-oriented websites

2008-12-15 12:53:47 - Linux New Media is the world's biggest Linux and Open Source content provider, with offices in Brazil, Spain, Poland, the UK and the United States, and with headquarters in Munich, Germany.

Traditonally, it focused on print products but it has a number of websites that feature printed articles and online-exclusive content. After a careful evaluation of the Enterprise Content Management Systems available during its recent web presence renewal, Linux New Media now runs 4 content-rich sites on eZ Publish. Oliver Frommel, lead developer and editor-in-chief at Linux New Media, explains how the company extends eZ Publish to optimize development processes and to achieve its website needs.

eZ: Can you tell us a bit about how you use eZ Publish?

OF: The sites www.linux-magazin.de, www.linux-magazine.com, www.linuxnewmedia.de all run eZ Publish 3.9.2 on a Linux cluster of two machines. (For the more technically inclined: we are using DRBD and MySQL replication.) We have the same installation on a smaller machine for development.

Just recently we launched the new site www.linux-community.de, which is community-oriented and features comments, forums, mailing lists, ratings, blogs and so on. The implementation also included the migration of users, comments and so on from our former Zope site.


eZ: What made you choose the eZ Publish platform?

OF: Before we started re-implementing our old Zope-based sites, we did an evaluation of several CMS platforms including Zope/Plone and some Java-based products such as Magnolia and Alfresco. In the end, the professional level of the eZ Publish code and the future prospects of the projects convinced us. Another reason for choosing eZ Publish was that it is based on the widespread programming language PHP.


eZ: Have you customized and extended your eZ Publish installation?

OF: We have implemented several extensions, such as for the multi-page layout of articles that are internally stored in one piece. We use several community-contributed extensions, including payment gateways and Swark for some convenient template operators. We also make heavy use of our own templates and styles.


eZ: Are you planning further web phases?

OF: Our web development is an ongoing project, so we are always looking to extend our sites to enable optimal usability for readers and editors. The next step will be to migrate our eZ Publish 3 installation to eZ Publish 4. We also want to enable better ad targeting based on keywords, and introduce better usage tracking.


eZ: Is it important that eZ Publish is Open Source?

OF: Yes. Although we have not modified the eZ Publish kernel, it is sometimes invaluable to use the well-structured source code as a source of information.


eZ: Thank you for your time

About eZ Publish
eZ Publish is an award-winning, enterprise-grade Open Source Content Management System and development framework with functionality for web publishing, media portals, intranets, e-commerce and extranets. eZ Publish helps all kinds of organizations - including multinational corporations, humanitarian organizations and educational institutions - succeed at sharing their information.

About eZ Systems
Founded in 1999, eZ Systems is the world's largest Open Source Content Management software company with offices in Norway, Denmark, Germany, Belgium, France and North America. With customers such as the United States Navy, National Geographic France, Massachusetts Insitute of Technology, CNBC, Tele 2, Elle and Vogue, eZ Systems is the creator of eZ Publish, an award winning Open Source Content Management System with 2,5 million downloads, more than 200,000 installations and registered users in more than 160 countries. The eZ philosophy of openness and information sharing is still the basic guideline for the company and the eZ Ecosystem.