eZ Publish 4.0.0 stable? It's out there!

Just few months back it seemed like this moment was never going to come...

eZ Publish 4.0 is out there, stable. For those, who don't understand the excitement, little summary. eZ Publish 3.x is (I don't think it's appropriate to say was just quite yet...) doing fine, with hundreds of extensions and thousands of production installations all over the world, but has been getting old for some time. It still only works with PHP4, whose official development and maintenance will seize in just moments. That includes the willingness of hosting providers to keep it running on their platforms. But PHP4 leads to at least two other major problems. One - it offers a very simplified, less efficient object model, and eZ Publish happens to be essentially object oriented, plus more and more so seem PHP developers right now. PHP5 takes that problem away. Two - PHP4 makes it impossible to make use eZ Components and that hurts.

These are the major changes in new version eZ Publish, according to the eZ Systems release announcement:

• Complete PHP5 compatibility
• Full support for using eZ Components, eZ’s PHP enterprise components library
• Performance improvements
• Improved internal XML handling for increased performance and reduced memory usage
• Updated Website Interface with new graphical design and enhancements

Don't expect a revolution, though. You'll see the same administration interface, same old good content management model, same file structure, same setup wizard... As a matter of fact, eZ Publish 4.0 is a PHP5-refactored 3.10.x. Besides, revolution was neither needed, nor demanded.

You can download latest eZ Publish version from http://ez.no/download