Community Portal
In the new Internet age, the winners in business are likely to be those who can build a vibrant community surrounding their brand. Being able to involve your customers and connect them with each other in a social network enables them to communicate, help each other and provide valuable feedback to your organization. Consequently, this increases the value of your brand.
Visitor interaction
Comments and forums are just some of the ways that you can build an online community. Comments allow visitors to contribute their thoughts and feedback.
Forums are a meeting place for people with similar interests and needs. Customers can ask a question and discuss the solution through threaded conversations. An eZ Publish website can have an unlimited number of forums, and forum replies can be moderated by your organization. In contrary to isolated systems the Content Management System (CMS) eZ Publish integrates user generated content with editorial content based on the same system. Expert-Communities are able to set up virtual rooms where they can share documents, images or project information. The big advantage comes from setting up relations between content.
Collect information with user-generated content
User-generated content increases the participation level on a site and adds more relevant content. The eZ Publish content engine supports wikis, where user accounts can be granted permission to edit and create any type of content.
Since eZ Publish has built-in version control, content notifications and content diff, you can keep track of the changes made by community members, and produce continuously evolving knowledge bases.
Visitors can also be given the opportunity to have their own blogs and blog posts can be written by multiple authors.
Ranking and rating
Let visitors decide which content is most valuable with ranking and rating of content. This element of interactivity provides visual and statistical information to your articles, products, and more.
RSS feeds
The open architecture in eZ Publish enables you to share content available via external feeds like RSS. This is the standard for content syndication, making sure that visitors can decide how to access your content in a way that suits them best.
Integrate with established social communities
To further drive traffic, you can enable features to automatically add your content to external social sites like Facebook or Digg. While a reader is on your page, they can bookmark or promote your content with one click. This makes your content available in more channels and encourages links to your website.
External web widgets
Let the world connect to you. You have the tools to do viral marketing by allowing other sites and blogs to embed your content such as videos, picture galleries or even stories.
Private messaging
Enable users to get in touch with each other privately, but directly on your website. Similar to e-mail and communication functions in external social networks, users can communicate with each other via private messaging within eZ Publish.