I first met Switzerland-based Alain Sahli when he e-mailed me to ask whether he could translate an English article from ez.no into French. (Answer: most definitely yes; you must simply state that eZ owns the copyright with a link back to the original article, and the article must be published under the same license as the original.) I had to find out more about this benevolent eZ Publish user. How did he find out about eZ Publish and what does he use it for? As it turns out, Alain is an active contributor to the Open Source community and a budding entrepreneur to boot!

eZ: How and when did you first hear about eZ Publish?

Alain: A year ago I decided, with a friend, to create my own website development company. After a few months we soon noticed that a CMS would be very useful. The first time I heard about eZ Publish was on the TV section of developpez.com in a video about eZ Systems presented by Roland Benedetti. After that I did some research on the web and read articles about this CMS on ez.no.

It has now been more than 6 months since I've been working daily with eZ Publish, and I learn new things all the time. eZ Publish is really powerful! The concept of working with objects and classes is absolutely brilliant! We save a lot of time in our projects because we do not have to repeat everything every time. In addition, this CMS is so extensible that it is very easy to adapt to the different projects that we have!

eZ: What are the main reasons why you chose eZ Publish?

Alain: - It's the only ECMS in PHP
- The principle of classes and objects really makes the system flexible
- It's Open Source

eZ: What are some of your favourite things about of eZ Publish?

Alain: - The settings and templates override system
- The classes, objects and nodes concept

eZ: How are you active in the Open Source community?

Alain: I am an editor for the French development portal developpez.com, which gets about 120,000 daily visits. It contains sections about each programming language, such as for PHP. For each section there are tutorials, source code samples, FAQs, videos, and more, plus there are 800 different forums on developpez.com. I also write articles and tutorials for the PHP section and manage the PHP source code sub-section.

You can check out my developpez.com profile, list of articles, and blog.

I began to translate articles from ez.no because I noticed that eZ Publish could be more popular among French speakers. The first article that I translated has been a great success with more than 3,000 hits in 3 months. I quickly noticed the impact of this article on the forum devoted to CMS, as the number of messages concerning eZ Publish has clearly increased. So I will try to continue to translate eZ Publish articles for developpez.com.

eZ: What is your background regarding web development?

Alain: I started for 5 years with PHP programming. I always did some little jobs for friends, and read a lot about web programming, web project management and marketing. In my school I had lessons about web programming with PHP. I worked on things such as:

- Image processing
- Database programming
- Web 2.0 with Ajax
- Community development
- Form generation
- Lot of OO programming to compare with C# or Java

I then decided to create my own company to work on bigger projects. I had developed a homemade CMS but I saw that this job is too big for only one person. So I turned to eZ Publish.

eZ: What is the name of your company and how can we find out more information about it?

Alain: The name of our company is Web Engineering Sahli & Stalder, and the website is at www.wess.ch. However, we've been quite busy with client projects, so our company website isn't finished yet! So far, we have worked on websites for a shooting association and for a company with about 70-80 pages in three languages.