Latest eZ Publish Enterprise 4.6 reaches new heights 17/11/2011 5:33 pm -
Following the tradition of naming releases after famous mountains, the Annapurna takes eZ publish Enterpsie even higher. Let’s take a look.
App Readiness: Mobile Kit
The new Mobile Kit provides you with the foundation to create a mobile experience across different plattforms (e.g. iOS, Android, etc). This feature seems to be the result of the work being led by eZ Systems engineer Lukasz Serwatka and his team. After giving a solid presentation on Mobile Channels in eZ Publish during the eZ Conference 2011, we began to closely follow his work and are thrilled to see the results in the eZ core.
The turning point in the eZ publish Mobile Strategy occured with the development of a robust API (Application Programming Interface) which, accessed through a REST interface exposes the eZ publish content and functionality to other systems.
For the technically minded, Lukasz wrote two in-depth, informative articles focused on building native apps: Building native mobile applications with the eZ Publish REST API and Building mobile browser and hybrid applications with eZ Publish. Never mind the long names, these articles are surely worth digging in.
Improved Integration and API support
The architecture of eZ Publish Enterprise 4.6 has been revamped to better support integration through API’s while maintaining its leadership in site security. The new Public API feature allows you to customize integration with your content in a safe and solid manner. The eZ Publish REST API can offer an open environment so others can access your content remotely in an easy format. Finally, the Persistence API ensures that performance is not sacrificed as you integrate multiple repositories of content.
These enhancements are great news for companies wishing to make the most of their content through integration with other sites or offering a unique experience through the growing plethora of mobile devices. We’re excited about these enhancements and are looking forward to new iterations on the API to expose more functionality of the eZ publish core.
Enhanced Usability: Deployment options & Image Handling
As we’ve seen on numerous projects, as companies deploy one or more sites, there are different phases or stages to consider. The new deployment options automate a number of these processes and obtain the benefits of easier staging, site multiplication and upgrading.
Additionally, the enhanced image uploading features allow for better inline editing of images. These features will reduce deployment times and increase the productivity of those charged with this task.
User Experience: Search, Recommendation Engine & Integrated Analytics
Flickr photo by James Lumb
eZ Find is a search extension for eZ Publish which provides more functionality and better results than the default search in eZ Publish. The eZ Find extension ‒ initially released in 2007 ‒ became a critical component on all our high traffic sites by leveraging Apache Lucene, the heavyweight Java based search engine with eZ publish through the Solr interface.
eZ Find 2.6 continues to get better with support for version Solr 3.X and providing extremely fast search times, improved tunable relevancy ranking, sorting and keyword highlighting.
Odoscope - Internal Analytics Engine
Most sites use analytics engines like Google Analytics while larger customers prefer Omniture, recently acquired by Adobe. While these solutions are great for analyzing user behavior, they suffered from their separation with the CMS. In many cases we would code additional tracking inside eZ Publish to enable personalization or content ranking across the site. Now comes Odoscope, a powerful internal analytics engine that allows you to take advantage of user behavior to tailor the digital experience to their unique needs. With tightly integrated dashboards, click-paths, heat maps and more individual tracking, the Odoscope solution is an exciting step to improved tracking and decisions.
YooChoose Recommender Engine
The new recommendation engine is now powered by YooChoose, a company recently acquired by eZ Systems known for its exclusive technology for recommendations based on browsing patterns and advanced user profiling. YooChoose provides real-time recommendations based on advanced analytics that will improve monetization of your ecommerce and other websites. The Recommender Engine will rapidly become a favorite for marketers who need to proactively engage visitors based on their unique interests.
YooChoose will work with any kind of site, making the solution extremely attractive for recommendations on e-commerce sites, media or other high traffic. This makes eZ technology accessible to non-eZ publish powered sites like Magento E-Commerce or Gambio Shop among others.
If you value your brand and are interested in making the most of your digital presence with an enterprise content management solution, contact us to explore this further.
