Image credit: Malinky on Flickr
Sandro Groganz just tweeted a link to Kristof Coomans’s proposal of a community fork of eZ Publish. Kristof is about to be a former employee of eZ Systems Belgium and seems to be quite frustrated with eZ’s lack of progress and openness with the platform.
To me, this is unfortunate news. eZ Systems has been making a lot of progress in the media and publishing industry and (to me at least) been improving the platform nicely. eZ Systems has also successfully established a beach-head in the United States. I think the one area that they have been lagging is their initiative to port eZ Publish onto the eZ Components framework. It would be a shame if the great energy behind this platform were to be fragmented into two competing projects – especially as eZ Systems is poised to do a major rewrite.
Still, I am not panicking yet. For now, I am just filing this as a frustrated employee rant. It takes much more than a rant to start a successful fork.
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While a fork may be a little far fetched the frustration from the lack of communication and apparent lack of progress that come out of eZ Publish is very real and has been ongoing for years.
While on the surface this does have the look of an ex-employee having a rant the feelings expressed do extend throughout the eZ publish community.
It also must be pointed out that Kristof is one of the creators of the original community fork to port eZ to PHP5, without which it is unlikely that eZ systems would have an offering for that platform.
Great post, and it makes me wonder how to measure ecosystems for given CMS frameworks. For example, can we look at the eZ ecosystem and apply some sort of assessment of activity, such as the speed of translation of extensions from 3x to 4x, or the frequency of new/updated contributions, or the volume of forum posts, or the speed of replies … I’m not sure of the answer, but it seems to be a healthy exercise for everyone involved.
I’m sure vendors want some sort of gauge to know the health of their ecosystem, and integrators do too because we want to be recommending platforms that are stable and growing as opposed to stable but declining. I think I’ll muse on this further in the days ahead. Thanks again for the update.
Interesting thread. I’m doing a CMS evaluation, and EZ Publish is remarked everywhere as one of the best open source ecosystems, specially if you wish to explote web 2.0 features. Are you of similar opinion?. As I understood from your comments, the eZ Publish community is not very active at the moment. Thanks a lot.
Hi Merry,
I wouldn’t say that the eZ Publish community is not active. It is just that, as a commercial open source application, it is not able to operate in as open a manner as a totally community-based project would. On the upside, you get the stability and accountability of a single vendor who cares about things like migration path, backwards compatibility, and security. If you are looking for a more grass-roots community feel, with lots of energy (but maybe less organized) and a big interest in web 2.0 features, you might look at Drupal.
Humm…eZpublish don’t have a community behind but a false community “pushed” by the editor.
I see this article on EzPublish with the failure of a project under eZpublish with a great media company :
http://www.media-business.biz/content/ezpublish-cms-drupal-cms-2-years-experience-big-media-website-edipresse-swiss-newspaper-edit
On my opinion, I think that eZPublish have a big architectural failure and can not handle major website right now…I saw in action eZpublish and it’s a very poor software solution.