There are so many things that one can love eZ Publish for... My feeling is that the majority of the good things that we appreciate about the CMS today result from the fact that the software had been designed, coded and evolved the way it should have been done, in a very mature manner. Simple as that, yet so rare for so long and in so many open source projects. Stability, extensibility, robustness, security, flexibility, extensive use of best practices in terms of content management, content model as well as code organization and application architecture - all gracefully negotiated and combined together, at least since around legacy version 3.5.x which was the eZ Publish beginning for me about 10 years ago and now additionally amplified with Symfony2. It all makes eZ Publish a very solid, reliable code and project base. After all these years I am still enthusiastic to work with it.
To name few things I like about eZ Publish in particular:
- great, mostly very consistent PHP-level API and codebase (although I can’t deny awaiting the legacy code drop,
- it is great for prototyping and negotiating content and information architecture,
- with Symfony2 framework on board, it is even more robust,
- it is a Content Management Framework rather than just a CMS, there’s really little ground for confusion with most of popular open source products,
- it does help to shape and enforce high content culture within an organization and editorial team,
- it has great a community of enthusiast and experts,
- it is open source - you are able to discover all the awesomeness and adopt it to your own liking and needs and also contribute from time to time!
To successfully evolve complex web applications or content repositories based on eZ Publish you either need an expert implementation partner or an experienced internal team. Great as it is, the CMF is not immune to bad design or architectural decisions. To guarantee a future-proof solution you may need a team of people with deep understanding of eZ Publish content model abstraction, advanced caching, all sorts of low-level extensibility and all kinds of other details that take a lot of time and practice to master.
We have developed on top of eZ Publish since around 2006 and used it for all sizes of projects, from smallest websites to large scale editorial, content repository, social or e-commerce solutions for customers in various industries. It provided us with ability to easily deal with multi-site, multi-language and/or high-load architectures. It was effectively integrated with numerous IT systems including ERP, e-commerce, payment providers, content providers etc. It allowed developing entirely dedicated extension-based applications and solutions, either interconnected or disconnected from eZ Publish content model or other core features.