As we had not implemented eZ publish before, we knew there was going to be a steep learning curve on the first implementation. Rather than face that learning curve on the gradlink site, we decided to invest our own time and resources in the implementation of our own site so that we could be sure that it was the right solution for GCCA. What we discovered in implementing eZ publish for our own site was that the actual implementation was the easy part! Defining the structure and how it was to work was the hard part. Basically, what we had to do was deconstruct our site into each element and then configure eZ publish to assemble these elements to produce the website.
These elements we defined as the following

a) content types - the structure of the actual content within the site, each with there own attributes

eg. one content type was an article which had a heading, author, date, body copy and image

b) templates - how the content was to be displayed, eg. the look and feel, basically html and graphics which provided the structure for the page and how the content would look.

c) rules - what content was to be displayed with which template into which sections of the site, eg. staff profiles only appeared in the "about" section of the site.

Which version?

At the time we did the test implementation, the latest version (3.0) was supposed to have been released but delays meant that only a beta version had been released. This changed our plans significantly as we had planned on the new features provided by the new version. We didn’t want to implement an old version and within a matter of months have to upgrade to a new version which would cost more in the long run.

We discussed this at length with GCCA and looked at time lines for implementation with the previous version and the latest version. In the end, in line with our recommendation, GCCA decided to delay the deadline 2 weeks to give us the extra time required to wait for the release of the latest version.

When the time came to start work on the real implementation, the final version was still not ready and we were forced to go forward with the latest release candidate. The final version was released during our real implementation but by then it was too late to migrate to the final version. This caused two minor yet annoying issues. Firstly, we had to implement some work-arounds for bugs that would not be fixed until the final release. Secondly, the wysiwig content editor would also not be available until the final release. This meant that GCCA would have to deal with some manual content formatting using tags eg. bold, bulleted lists, etc.