Book Review: Learning eZPublish 3
I am using EzPublish 3.8 as a content management system for a website. It’s been quite awhile since I last looked at EzPublish and I bought a book to help me along. After limited research, I settled on Pakt Publishing’s Learning eZ Publish 3.
All in all, I am not very happy with the book. I wanted something that I could read and hit the ground running. Something that would run me through an install and setup for a basic website. Instead, it seems to be a rehash of the documentation found online, focusing on the structure of the system and not providing many useful examples for what I am trying to accomplish. In fact, I have used the documentation exclusively while customizing the website I am working on, letting the pdf gather virtual dust.
For example, chapter 2 gives a detailed overview of the system, covering the logical structure of the system, displaying content, workflows, and a whole slew of other things, which was too much info for me to take in. It also provides an example website at the end with brief specifications (photo galleries, personalization, discussion forms, etc), but leaves it up to you to figure out how to create it all and make it work together.
I guess I would have liked to see an example with a very basic website, and have a detailed walk through on creating a couple of sections, creating one object and assigning the sections, and applying templates to each section. Or something simple like that. While workflows and translations are important, I didn’t see the need for those in the second chapter. I tried to jump to chapter 8, where there was a case study. But the vast majority of the chapter was focused on requirements, specifications and pre-planning.
The other factor is 3.8 is obviously different than 3.0. I can’t blame the book for that, but it didn’t help. Take my review with a grain of salt, but if you are brand new to eZPublish and looking for examples on how to set up a basic website, stick to the documentation, which is quite well done in my opinion (and free).