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eZ Gento, an alternative CMS Module for Magento [Part 1]

16/09/2009 - 09:48 / Posted by Bartek Modzelewski
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Magento is a great software platform for web shops. It gives huge possibilities of products management, sales, promos, etc. Although some of customers demand also more advanced CMS feature. Plain pages structure is enough for sites with a few pages (like homepage, credits, legal mentions). But this might no be sufficient if you want to add more than 50 pages in different languages.
Of course it would be possible to develop additional modules, functions and blocks that will allow to group pages and store in tree structure, but that would be a very expensive part of the developement.
Therefore Baobaz has created a connection between Magento and eZ Publish Enterprise CMS. This solution allows to display eZ Publish pages directly in Magento front end

What is eZ Publish?
eZ Publish has many common points with Magento.

  • Like Magento is one of the best (if not the best) open source e-Commerce solution, eZ Publish is one of the best open source Enterprise CMS.
  • Like Magento, it is a great AMP platform for new extensions development.
  • Like Magento, it has a great community of contributors.
  • Like Magento, it has a lot of references
  • Like Magento with Varien, it was developed by eZ Systems, a strong for-profit company.
  • ...checkout http://ez.no/ for more details !

What we gain with eZ Publish?
A lot:

  • Content tree structure
  • Multilingual pages
  • Content versioning
  • Approval workflow
  • Multimedia direct insert
  • and much more...

Imagine that you can browse tree of content located next to products catalog, pages are in different languages depending on selected store view. It's also possible to define many little trees and put them in different product categories and don't have to take care about proper links placed in many templates. Everything is generated automatically each time new page has been published or exiting modified.

All above was possible thanks to merged Magento and eZ Publish called eZ-Gento. Both installations are placed side by side and contain little extensions responsible for direct communication. Each time user access any content page, Magento module passes part of url to eZ Publish and retrieves generated html content. Such html can be displayed directly on homepage, subpage or as a cms block next to product or as a product description.

So, first step done. If you want to read something more about eZ-Gento possibilities, stay tuned!