YMC AG, Open Source Web 2.0 Content Management

YMC publishes the best of 7 years of eZ Publish development

Thomas Schieke, 07.05.2010 , 1 Kommentare

The Open Source CMS market is complex, with hundreds of projects readily available. Some are written in clean code, others turn out as horrible collections of dirty hacks. Some have sprung out of the anonymous dark, others are maintained by professional teams with release roadmaps, contribution reviews and certifications, and get supported by development guidelines, professional integration and maintenance services. Some of them have huge feature lists. Others keep their kernels small and establish an ecosystem for plugin manufacturers. The third group only accepts generic functionality in the core, so that the majority of practical needs can be met by editing data classes, templates and permissions, which renders plugins meaningless.

In 2003, YMC has chosen eZ Publish as our primary CMS. Over the years, we managed nearly a hundred projects of all sizes, and on the way, trained dozens of developers. With all the experience, we still deem eZ Publish as the most versatile Open Source Content Management Framework in existence. It has allowed for a smooth upgrade path, as it is strictly generalistic in design and both upwards and backwards compatible. Its thourough object orientation might be hard for the beginner, however, the advantages cannot be turned down when it comes to more complex multi-client installations that will be migrated to new versions of the CMS and even PHP. The professional vendor behind eZ Publish (eZ Systems), and the industry-grade services available directly from them (namely eZ Premium and developer certifications), are indespensable for a professional software investment.

In our work as consultants and programmers, we have specialized in two ways. First, we serve large media companies to meet their high-end demands, such as complex migration scenarios, flexible editorial workflows, quick release cycles, seamless scalability and uninterrupted business during migrations. Secondly, YMC has developed an appetite for the new and the fancy, especially in the media sector. We are strong advocats for user generated content, and we can help to create value from it, the more so as we have invested our expertise in several Web 2.0 startups.

Today, YMC initiates a third line of action. We intend to give back to the Open Source community. Therefore, we will publish selected modules under the GPL. All of them have been in stable use for years and undergone several evolutionary iterations. We hope that they will prove useful for other Open Source enthusiasts and help to further promote Open Source at the Enterprise level. Of course, we appreciate any feedback and any suggestions you might have.

We will use Google Code. Here is a list of recent and planned publications. Descriptions for the other numbers will be added shortly.

1) ymcExtensionLoader

Adds enterprise-grade multi-client capability to eZ Publish. Enables a more flexible handling of extensions and settings, sharing settings between clients, and nesting extensions.

• YMCExtensionLoader home on Google Code

2) ymcBootstrap

Introduces an alternative way to control patches to eZ Publish. Changes to the eZ kernel and the database are logged and can be automatically deployed onto a multi-server environment in a reliable manner. This will aid upwards compatibility to further versions of eZ Publish.

• YMCBootstrap home on Google Code

3) ymcLibrary

4) ymcClusterManagement

5) ymcDistributedCache

6) ymcMetaNavigation

7) ymcDistributedStorage

8) ymcCommunity