The release of eZ Publish 4.2.0 included the stable release of the ezjscore extension. ezjscore enhances the eZ Publish ECMS by providing a framework for Ajax-based applications and facilitating development with powerful JavaScript libraries such as jQuery and YUI. My great colleague André Rømcke and I sat down together to write an article covering the details of ezjscore, with documentation and code examples.

I have noticed in the past few months an explosion of new media sites built using eZ Flow. What is eZ Flow you may ask? In short, it is an extension created for the eZ Publish Enterprise Open Source Content Management System. The eZ Flow extension enables editors to build complex page layouts and pre-plan the publication schedule to ensure a constant flow of rich content. eZ Flow brings modern portal management possibilities to eZ Publish.

Some very useful developer functionality has been added to eZ Publish in the past two major releases (4.1 and 4.2). I have compiled a list of improvements, mainly related to fetch functions and INI settings, that eZ Publish developers could benefit from on a day-to-day basis.

One of new features but a bit forgotten in eZ Publish 4.1 is the improved way to override translations and locale files. Previously, you had to override entire translation files, whereas with eZ Publish 4.1, you can selectively override specific strings. Let's take a look at a practical example, where we will override a default eng-GB translation (which is the default language in eZ Publish) by creating an extension to contain a translation file that has only a few strings that we want to override.

The PHP Development team has recently released PHP 5.3.0. Early reports indicate there is a performance boost simply from upgrading from a previous version.

From community feedback it appears that eZ Publish using Windows is about 30% quicker with PHP 5.3.0. I decided to validate these reports and confirm the performance of eZ Publish using PHP 5.3.0 with a linux environment.

A short summary of the tests performed can be found below.