UPDATED TO REFLECT DECEMBER 2016 1.7 RELEASE
Feature changes from eZ Publish to eZ Platform open source and enterprise editions:
| eZ Publish Feature | Description | Will it be included in eZ Platform Open Source or Enterprise Edition? | Time Frame |
|---|---|---|---|
| e-Commerce shopping cart and product datatypes | Ability to manage the sale of goods and other products in eZ and to give end users an online cart and a check-out process | The feature will not be ported to the first version of eZ Platform, which will serve as an infrastructure for e-commerce. eZ’s recommendation is to use silver.e-shop, a commercial solution from eZ Partner silver.solutions that is based on eZ Publish Platform, or to build a solution on top of eZ Platform (for instance, integrating Sylius or other e-commerce related components). | Use with silver.e-shop is available now as a side complementary solution, and in the community there is attempts at integrations with Sylius. An integrated solution for eZ Platform based on the next version of silver.e-shop is under development. |
| Online Editor | Ability to manage some rich text fields, apply formatting, and add assets such as images or existing content. Based on TinyMCE in eZ Publish. | The Rich Text Editor is being redesigned to provide a better user experience. It is available in eZ Platform. It is no longer based on TinyMCE, but is now built on Alloy Editor. | As of February 2016 supports basic text styling, alignment, image/content embedding, and migration tool from eZ Publish for the full format. Remaining features such as custom tags and tabular data is currently slated for early 2017. After that support for inline embed/custom tags will be looked into.
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| eZ Flow | Ability to manage landing pages, create custom blocks and manage flow of content in a block. | eZ Flow is being redesigned to provide a better user experience, a more visual interface and to simplify the business logic. The new feature, Landing Page Management, is part of Studio and therefore only available for eZ Platform Enterprise Edition users. | As of February 2016 feature parity with eZ Flow, and greatly improved editorial experience. |
| ODT Import and export | Ability to import Open Office (ODT) documents (and, with an extension, Word documents) as a content object (not as a file) | This feature will not be built into eZ Platform in the short term. Import services will be developed first. eZ is researching similar features for online word processors such as Google Docs, since desktop software - especially Open Office - is losing market share | No plans. It could come as a nice contribution to eZ Platform from the community as a Bundle. |
| Multi-upload | Ability to drop a selection of many files in one “drag and drop” into the content repository and have them imported as assets (File, Image, Video or others…) based on the MIME type of the file. Note: this is distinct from the ODT import in that with ODT import the files are just uploaded into a Field Type such as File, Image or other. | This feature will be ported to the Enterprise Edition as an editorial tool in Studio. It will be available in the Sub-item view of a Content item to allow the simple creation of image galleries, for example. It will also be available from the content edit view directly to minimize the number of clicks for the editor when creating collection of items. The feature is named File Import. | Target: First half of 2017. It will likely be introduced progressively. |
| WebDAV | Ability to navigate the content repository using a WebDAV client, and ability to read and write from there (ie. to create documents) | This is not a feature that we plan to implement for eZ Platform since the WebDAV protocol is used less and less and extremely unstable depending on the client software used. A potential replacement for this feature would be to use a CMIS client but it is equally unstable and not widely adopted. | No plans. It could come as a nice contribution to eZ Platform from the community as a Bundle. |
| Content Staging | An extension that enables users to set up content workflow across different eZ Publish installations (for example: create content on one installation and transfer into another one at some point, for staging or archiving reasons). | While this eZ Publish extension has been adopted by organizations for several use cases, it has not always fully answered the business needs. eZ plans on to bring similar capabilities to eZ Platform Enterprise Edition users, but in a different way. For that, eZ will not “port” content staging to the new platform but instead will redesign features and develop them progressively on the new products. Initially, eZ will develop Content Deployment services within eZ Platform and a “Workspace” feature in the Enterprise Edition that will enable users to create content in a workspace and then deploy it to a location local or remote from the installation the user is in. This will enable editors to deploy content to environments such as Test, Production or others. The feature is called Workspace. | Plan is to design the deployment services sometime in 2017 and implement after that. In the Enterprise Edition, our plan is to have content deployment capabilities in a workspace also in 2017. |
| Image Editor | A simple image editor which allows image manipulation such as resizing, cropping, flipping, rotating and simple image effects such as blurring elements in a photo and placing a watermark. | eZ plans to create an image editor in the Enterprise Edition. Image editor will be slightly redesigned to be more user-friendly. A key goal, allowing the creation of image variations such as size and compression, may be done in a second phase. | This is not prioritized for 2017. It could be accelerated by user contributions. |
| Import/Export eZPkg package system | eZPkg is a convenient way to import and export content, but also content types, styles and extensions, into a single package that can be used for deployment. | We are not planning to port this feature in a similar way to eZ Platform. We plan to implement the content import/export capability using a content deployment service, which will use API directly to replicate some or the full amount of content from one repository to another; preferred format: XML or JSON. For the deployment of styles, extensions and Content Types, we are still investigating but many requests suggest to use source control for that. Topic still to be refined. | No plan and no timing in the short term but some of the problems this feature solved will be covered by other features such as content deployment in workspaces. |
| Legacy Monitoring | eZ Publish Enterprise customers can benefit from a service of site monitoring that is used to better understand how their installation evolves (i.e., size of the content repository). | The legacy site monitoring service will not be ported to the new platform. New monitoring, which is being designed, will focus more on monitoring the installation from a software perspective (content repository, web server, database) to make sure it is healthy and conforms to the requirements of the platform. The new monitoring will focus less on the activity on the platform itself (ie. monitoring the object created etc.). | A new monitoring service is under consideration for eZ Platform Enterprise Edition. |
| eZ Find / Advance Search | An extension that upgrades search capabilities into a strong enterprise search engine, thanks to the use of the Solr Open Source search software. | In eZ Platform, access to powerful search capabilities is now built-in to the platform with the ability to use Solr (and, in the future, probably Elasticsearch) as a back end for the repository search and navigation. No standalone extensions or bundles required. Specifically:
There are so far no plans for other advanced features such as:
| Most features already in place. Coming in 2017:
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| Workflow | A workflow system that allows developers and editors to set up complex business processes such as editorial workflows, e-commerce check-out processes, and other multi-step processes. The feature includes an engine as well as a basic user interface, with support for limited collaboration during the editorial process. | A new feature, Flex Workflow, has been added to the Enterprise Edition. It helps streamline the editorial process by giving the user full control over the validation and approval process for the content they crafted. In eZ Platform, developers will have several new tools to help them build and automate digital processes, such as a signals/slots system (available now). In the future, we plan to develop the “object state” concept to port it to the “version level,” to allow more powerful processes around the content lifecycle. Finally, we also foresee the development of a more traditional advanced workflow system for editors and information architects. This is a feature that we will most likely implement in the Enterprise Edition. | Flex Workflow is part of 2015.12 (and later) release. More advanced editorial workflow system is planned for 2017 in Studio. The workflow related features in eZ Platform will be released progressively as needs come. |
| URL Alias | An administrative interface enabling developers and editors to manage URL aliases and URL wildcards. | A redesigned user interface will be offered in eZ Platform. | Specific timing to be defined. |
| Object states | An administrative interface enabling developers and editors to manage Object Sates, Object State Groups and Content assigments. | Specific timing to be defined. | |
| eZ Survey | An extension that enables content editors to create and publish surveys on their eZ Publish-powered by website. This survey feature is independent from the content repository. | A survey system is not planned for eZ Platform or in the short term. However, we introduced a Form Builder in Studio with the 1.7.0 release that may be used for simple survey needs, and that might evolve or be extended in a more complex survey solution. | The initial version of the Form Builder for Studio is part of the 1.7.0 release. Further development on Form Builder will be done on the 1st half of 2017. |
| eZ Tag | eZ Tag provides a sophisticated solution for tagging content with powerful capabilities to manage taxonomies. It is an extension initialized by eZ and Netgen, and then developed further by Netgen. It was ported to eZ Publish Platform and the Symfony stack later on. | We plan to develop/integrate similar features in eZ Platform. We think tagging should be a core part of the content repository. | Community has funded the support of eZ Platform UI for the eZ Tags bundle. When this is done, eZ will prioritize the integration with the eZ Platform core. |
| RSS feeds | RSS import and export capabilities are available with a UI in the administration interface. Users can import an RSS feed into eZ Publish objects. The export function exposes an eZ Publish feed (defined via the UI) into an RSS feed. | This function is not planned for eZ Platform. | No plans. It could come as a nice contribution to eZ Platform from the community as a Bundle. Note: Could use same underlying functionality as import/export. |
| eZ XML Export extension | An Export extension that enables users to export any content set to many different formats using XSLT. Exports can be automated / scheduled in different ways, and remote export targets (FTP servers) are supported. | This function is not planned for eZ Platform. | New export capabilities will progressively be built into the platform based on the new import/export system and installation packages with ability to pick a new format cable and use streaming or batch handling. It won’t be a high priority for 2016. |
| Commenting capabilities | eZ Comment is an extension for eZ Publish legacy. It gives the users of an eZ Publish-powered website a way to comment on content. This extension was never ported to eZ Publish Platform. | eZ has developed a bundle called “Comment Bundle” that allows developers to set up commenting capabilities in different ways. The comment bundle supports the use of third party commenting services such as Disqus or Facebook and also provides developers with the ability to manage their own commenting service. In the future, the comment bundle might be improved with the development of an internal commenting service. | The comment bundle is integrated into the eZ Platform and the Enterprise Edition demo bundles. No plan to prioritize further development, but contributions welcome. |
| Link Management | A feature that lists all links on a website, which helps users detect invalid links. | There is no plan to develop similar functions in the short term. | Specific timing to be defined. |
| LDAP connector | A feature that enables enterprises to plug their LDAP directories into eZ Publish and manage user roles and permissions from the directory. | eZ Platform already provides a much more powerful solution for user management that benefits from Symfony capabilities. There is, however, no built-in LDAP connector. eZ plans to provide a standard LDAP implementation. | Builtin LDAP implementation is planned for second half 2017, until then this is possible via Symfony bundles. |
| Front-end content editing and user generated content | eZ Publish and eZ Publish Platform can be used to give end users of the sites the ability to create and edit content objects in the content repository. We often refer to this as User Generated Content (UGC). | We implemented a system that enables developer to more simply implement similar UGC capabilities in the “content module” in eZ Platform, this does not imply out of the box front end editing ala web site toolbar in legacy. | Framework for User Generated Content has been introduced in the June 2016 release (1.4.0). This release came with the support of a limited set of field types. Solution for more field types planned for later releases. Community contribution could speed up the process here. |
| PDF Export | Automatically generate PDFs from content based on a template and make them available on the front-end of the site. | No plan to implement this function in eZ Platform “out of the box”. | No plan for an out-of-the-box feature but it is possible to do it on a project basis using templates and overrides. |
| Preview | Users of the administration interface can preview content in the different siteaccess points where it can be published. | Preview is implemented in eZ Platform as well as Studio landing page management tool. Preview will be improved, allowing to better emulate different devices. | From the first stable (Dec 2015), with additional features being developed progressively. |
| Information Collection | Collect user data in the content repository by using information collectors. | This feature will not be ported in the same way. eZ Platform users can use the Symfony Form component. Studio can use the Form Builder. | No plans. See eZ Survey. |