In my previous post, I was talking about main practice on designing content tree on eZPublish and some limitations due to the current architecture of this CMS.

It seems that this matter of concern was shared by a lot of people, in particular at eZSystems as Paul Borgermans has shown us during the eZDeveloper Meeting. See there.

The project V is the full reimplementation of eZPublish core to lighten it and make it more powerful and flexible. Looking back the evolution of eZPublish, a such great upgrade did not happened from the 3.x series, since 4.x was just a porting to PHP5. Thanks to new tools like a bug tracker or a testing suite, eZSystems has set a mature development system which can produce software of higher quality than before. So the difference between 3.x and 4.x is few bugs and PHP5.

What's next ? The Project V has the ambition to provide two things :

• a very modular and flexible Unix-like micro kernel. It will allow you to access more efficiently its API and will be based on ezComponents, specifically on the MVCTools component. This particular feature might let you use other components than the ezComponents : Smarty for another template engine or Doctrine / Propel for the persistence layer. It meets up with functionalities of another product we know well.
• a bundle of RAD tools to ease and quicken the development.

As it will be a complete different kernel, extensions will be different. To ease this migration, the engine of the Project V will appear as soon as 4.2 : the broker would bring the possibility to choose between old and new behaviour.

Quite exciting !