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Saturday, October 18, 2008

Naviatech chooses eZ Publish open source CMS

It was defenitely hardest decision ever where I have been involved in. Almost a year ago we ended a solution and let our own baby go. We gave up the development work of Navia content management system and chose Norwegian eZ Systems' partnership instead. I think we had a really good open source business plan, but I guess we couldn't create enough hype around it for Finnish venture capitalists. Finally, although we made the decision already, Tekes turned us down too.

I'm not happy at all how these financing things went and what were the arguments, but what has happened afterwards - that's another story. So we're not going to make millions and billions of euros with proprietary licences in the future (I'm not sure who eventually can, Bill Gates maybe?), we had to adjust our strategy and position for the future. Now we have eZ Publish, a free (GPL) open source CMS for customers, and to support our services.

eZ Publish is not a simple "web publishing" tool and it is not developed entirely by the community. It is a hard core content management system which development processes and security has been tested and sertified by the US department of defence. This also means that there's a commercial company behind where you can buy support and sotware maintenance/updating services. From analytics and optimization point of view, there's lots of good features in eZ Publish:
  • easy page template management for quick implementation of web analytics software and goal tagging
  • version management with "show differences" function - excellent for A/B or multivariate testing
  • automatic page/article/element titles (which you can customize too)
  • clean URLs and possibility to make URL aliases
  • comprehensive internal site search
  • out-of-the-box tag clouds and sitemaps
  • editing possibility for alternative image text
This is simply one of the best scalable software products I have seen in this field. You can easily - by couple of clicks - add blog, event calendar, photo gallery or poll, just to mention few. Hell, you can even start selling your products online with minimum technical work required. When you're planning next website or new CMS or face-lift, I think you should evaluate eZ Publish and calculate better ROI for your online presence.