Over the past few years, eZ Systems have made a name for themselves with eZ Publish, their open source content management software. They hit the 2.5 million download mark earlier this year, and show no signs of slowing down. As announced last week, eZ Publish is a finalist for Packt Publishing’s 2008 Open Source CMS Awards. It’s an honor to be nominated, goes the old saying, but it’s even better to win, and voting on Packt Publishing’s website is open until mid October.

In addition to the free open-source version of their content management software, eZ Systems offers a number of licensing options, some of which include a technical support subscription. That’s apparently where the bulk of their revenue comes from, and they announced this past week that they enjoyed 583% growth in new subscription sales with a renewal rate of over 90% for the first half of 2008. These are incredible numbers and have given eZ Systems two profitable quarters in a row, their first ever.

Finally, I wanted to mention the release of eZ Publish 4.0.1, 3.10.1, and 3.9.5, various versions of their flagship content management system. Although they include just a handful of enhancements, these releases focus mainly on addressing some security issues and bug fixes, reportedly over 300 for eZ Publish 4.0.1 alone.

eZ Publish is a solid, well-regarded platform with a substantial user community, and is certainly worth a look for organizations considering an open source content management system. And 2.5 million downloads is pretty convincing, too.

Included in these new releases is a dedicated extension to migrate custom URL aliases and URL history elements for existing 4.0.0 and 3.10.0 sites.

Please also note the security advisories which are resolved with these maintenance releases.
URL aliases

All of the fundamental problems with the multilingual URL alias system introduced in 3.10.0/4.0.0 have now been corrected. The ezurlaliasmigration extension in the distribution is provided to migrate custom URL aliases as well as the URL history elements (as long as the elements are not corrupted, possibly from earlier versions or bugs that were introduced in 3.10.0/4.0.0).

A feature pertaining to URL aliases has also been re-added. You can now specify whether a URL alias should be direct or redirect. Previously, all aliases were redirected (HTTP 301). Also, versions prior to 3.10 did not redirect URLs pointing to modules. With this new feature, this option is back.

Upgrading

When upgrading from 3.10.0 or 4.0.0, the process involves the bundled migration extension. Please refer to the upgrade documentation, which describes the steps in detail.
Future of 3.x community releases

The maintenance releases for 3.9 and 3.10 are likely the last ones for the eZ Publish 3.x series unless there are some serious issues that arise in the coming months. Current support contracts will remain valid. For new installations, eZ Publish 3.x is hereby deprecated and only 4.0.1 is recommended.
Future of 4.x community releases

A beta release of eZ Publish 4.1.0 should be announced soon.