eZ Systems Releases eZ Publish 4.2

eZ Systems has announced the release of eZ Publish 4.2, the latest version of its Open Source Content Management System. The new release brings improvements to the eZ Publish engine, as well as advances and new features for eZ Flow and eZ Find. A new extension, eZSI, makes its debut in the 4.2 package providing full support for the Edge Side Include standard to eZ Publish. The 4.2 release was developed by eZ Systems with contributions from eZ Publish partners and trusted community members, and is immediately available. eZ Publish 4.2 includes a new release of eZ Flow, an eZ Publish extension enabling the building and management of rich and vibrant Media portal pages through implementation of a constant content flow to visitors. The new release offers a choice of pre- made blocs for eZ Flow. The options, which include Media Carrousel, Google Map geolocation, Online users, Last Commented content or Search blocs,  provide eZ Flow users with a wide range of templates and functionalities for their sites. eZ Publish 4.2 also offers editors an integration between eZ Flow and the standard eZ Publish administration interface. Editors should now be able to control content flow in eZ Flow portal pages from the administration content management interface. The built-in content rating feature enhances Usability by enabling visitors to actively contribute and rate. Improvements to the eZ Toolbar front-end editing should ease the management of Web sites. Apart from various general enhancements and optimizations in the eZ Publish kernel and cache systems, eZ Publish 4.2 brings two new features in this area, the new DFS Cluster system and Edge Side Include (ESI) support. The new NFS Cluster system provides a native deployment of eZ Publish on several servers using a shared file system. The eZSI extension integrates ESI calls in eZ Publish pages. ESI is a simple markup language used for dynamic Web page assembly and delivery, making it possible to assemble pages from blocs requiring different refresh rates and update frequencies. eZ Find is an enterprise-grade search solution developed by eZ Systems, and based on the Apache SolR project. Full text search, external data source search, faceted search, automatic content relations, and other features have been at the heart of eZ Find.  The 4.2 release offers a number of possibilities for integrating eZ Find with eZ Publish. Predefined templates for eZ Publish and eZ Flow are now available, implementing faceted search. With the new elevate support feature, editors should be able to push "sponsored results" to the top of results provided by eZ Find. Finally, eZ Find includes a new level of granularity in the indexing and search processes, providing enhanced search relevancy, and enabling search of localised and translated content. The eZ Core library, which provides for efficient organization and layering of Ajax developments onto eZ Publish, is featured in the 4.2 release. eZ Publish is also unveiling a beta version of their CMIS library, thanks to a contribution from the NXC eZ Partner. http://ez.no/