eZ publish: Making a systems flexable, but retain the ease of use

working title

Flexibility and usability are two important concepts, but in normal systems,
one tend to rule out the other. We want to show how a system can be made
flexible and extendable without loosing the focus on ease of use.

eZ publish 3 will be used as the reference where we show how the system is
designed to make it easy to customize the data that is managed and
presentated on the site, and possible to extend each part of the system to fit
specific needs. The use of abstraction for flexibility and plug-in support
will be detailed presented.

Topics that will be covered are:
-Presenting various kinds of data (the concept of content classes)
-Extending events for advanced workflows
-SOAP integration
-Database independence
-Presenting same data in different ways (HTML, Wap, syndication and so on)

The presentation will be technical. No actual code will be presented, but UML
diagrams along with real life examples will be heavily used. Everything
presented will be 100% GPL.

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My name is Jo Henrik Endrerud and I'm a system engineer for eZ systems
(http://www.ez.no) in Norway. We are developing the open source CMS called eZ
publish (http://developer.ez.no). When developing eZ publish 3 we used some
interesting techniques for making the system as flexible as possible. The
presentation will discuss the importance of good abstraction for making a CMS
extendable and flexible without loosing focus on usability.