As announced on the community site, the Christmas Special episode was with Roland Benedetti, Chief Product Officer of eZ System, as a guest. The main topic was the recent release of eZ Platform and eZ Studio, a long-awaited next generation of eZ Publish CMS.
This is a big milestone for eZ Systems, not that much in the terms of development - the work started 3 to 4 years ago and there is still a lot to be done - but in terms of signaling the market and the community that the new product is finally here, and without legacy. It is ready for production and it is supported. Maybe doing all kinds of projects is not as feasible to do as it was with the older versions, but that will be resolved with the new releases.
The Roadmap for 2016
For eZ Platform, the focus will be on the upgrade/migration tools, especially for the rich text field whose internal format is completely new and some other features that were standard before, such as search in the UI, content diff, etc. A kind of a new feature is also being planned: content deployment.
For eZ Studio, the focus will be on the workspaces and form builders (which will not be based on legacy information collectors).
Several other takeaways
- This release is the long-term support release. There will be a fast track with short-term support release every 2 months. Next LTS should be released by the end of 2016.
- The landing page management is replacing eZ Flow, but it will only be available in eZ Studio. This might present a problem for some people in the community as they are used to having this feature in the community version, but the eZ’s strategy is to separate more clearly what is for developers (generic content management framework under open source) and what is for marketers (specific commercial features).
- The separation between the open and the commercial is easier to understand and easier to switch in between.
- Therefore, innovation should be easier on eZ Platform.
- The newcomers should have a good starting point, and this has been restructured recently. Demo is separated in more bundles but can be installed easily via the meta repo: https://github.com/ezsystems/ezplatform-demo
- The community is welcome to join the eZ Community Board, soon to be restructured.
- The community is also invited to start innovating. The first steps could be to implement features that were valuable in legacy but are not in the roadmap (eZ Tags, Image Editor, etc.)
Watch the show on YouTube or listen to it on podcast to learn even more :)
Notice that his was the last eZ Publish Show since the name eZ Publish is becoming less relevant. Will something similar emerge, time will tell.
Have a merry new 2016!