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Are you responsible for the implementation and management of eZ publish projects, or are you building sites for medium to large clients? If your answer is yes, then this book will give you a better understanding of all the elements involved in eZ publish Content Management projects.

This is what we can read on the back cover of Managing eZ Publish Web Content Management Projects, and I think this is what we can actually get from this rather unusual book.

I say unusual because this is not a book to learn eZ publish, it’s a project management book for delivering eZ publish solutions. It’s also unusual because, while there are many project management books for software development projects, Content Management (CM) is still a young discipline, and no defined methodologies are currently available to cover the full scope of CM projects.

This book, published by Packt, is then an attempt to define a set of practices to help project managers deal with CM projects until suitable methodologies emerge. The author, Martin Bauer, is the Managing Director of designIT, an Australian based CM specialist practice, and has ten years experience in web development and web based content management.

You can find a general description of this book contents on the publisher’s site (Managing eZ Publish Web Content Management Projects), so I am not going to duplicate that information here. I prefer to report my own experience while going through the information packed chapters of this book.

I might group the thirteen chapters, according to their content, in:

a) Chapters mostly related to software development projects in general, containing sound advice for both “traditional” and CM projects: chapters 4, 7, 8, 9 and 12 fall in this category, covering Project Definition, Planning and Pricing, Risk Management, Open Project Management, and User Training;

b) A chapter mostly related to the eZ publish Content Management System (CMS), giving an overview of this powerful CMS: chapter 3 explains Content Classes, Nodes and Locations, Sections, Templates, Access Control, Workflow and Extensions;

c) Chapters mostly related to content management projects, containing specific practices tailored to this young discipline, like chapters 1, 2, 5, 6, 10, 11 and 13, covering Content Modeling, Implementation, Testing and Support of eZ publish sites.

I enjoyed reading the whole book, but the chapters in the last group are the ones I like the best, because they bring so many insights into the fascinating world of content management projects.