Webdev: November 2004 Archives

In my quest for a good CMS I have been looking at eZ Publish this week, and my first reaction is: "wow!"

It looks very slick, very complete, very customisable, well thought out, ... but also looks very daunting to implement.

The sky is the limit, since you can create your own content classes, but this involves also a lot of scripting templates to get the functionality to work. Previously I have been looking at Mambo Open Source, which is very easy to use, but has no fine-grained control --- I just want to decide what HTML elements are used in templates. eZ Publish does give me this low-level control, but at a price: template design is more complicated.

Still I guess that I am willing to invest the time to learn the template scripting language, since eZ Publish has many benefits. The biggest benefit is that it can handle everything I do with external scripts: searching, guest book, forum, ... Secondly, its multi-language implementation is great; the properties of each object can be entered in several languages, which will be shown to the visitor depending on the site access used.

I still have to play around a lot more to get to know its possibilities better, but I certainly have a very good feeling about this software.

The easiest way for a club, company or organisation to have a webshop is CafePress. You can upload your logo and select which products you want to offer, and they take care about taking orders, printing the products and shipment. Works like a charm, but they are USA-based. That means that European customers will ahve to pay extra shipment costs, which makes the items rather expensive. So I am looking for companies like CafePress with facilities in Europe to lower the costs.

So far I have found T-Shirt Zoo and spreadshirt, both of which look reasonable, but not as slick as CafePress. T-Shirt Zoo has a very small assortiment, and spreadshirt is only available in German. Are there any other companies like these available in Europe?