Winner of the eZ Connector February Competition

We are excited to announce the winner of the first eZ Connector Competition: Sebastien Morel from Novactive with the Slack for eZ connector.

As the winner of the competition, Novactive will receive $2,500 and a contract for $5,000 to build an additional connector with eZ in the Build with eZ phase. The Slack connector provides a range of cool features that seamlessly integrate eZ Platform with Slack. A few notable features are:

• Slack Connect: Allows users to login in to eZ Platform via Slack. It can also recognize a Slack user in eZ (mapping with roles and permissions).
• Incoming Webhooks: Allows eZ users to push posts such as notifications on to different Slack channel(s).
• Interactive Components: Users can create an interactive experience by producing messages that contain an action. For example, a user can push a call to action button or menu in which the user can select from a list of options. This can be for example an editor an article to the article for review. Once the admin approves he can review and push to publish the article via slack.
• Slash Commands: Allows users to trigger actions from Slack on eZ Platform. For example, posting a gif, image, or a starting a conference call.
• Event Subscriptions: Users can install a bot that will be able to listen to a specific slack channel. The bot will be able to trigger certain actions according to the information that is being discussed. For example, the bot suggests an article to read about a certain topic that the people are discussing.

Click here to view a demo of the connector and to learn about its capabilities. In addition to the Slack for eZ connector, we had two other connectors great connectors that are great addition to eZ Platform.

Contextual Code created a Facebook Post Importer. The connector is based on Symfony and automates the process of importing Facebook posts to eZ Platform. It leverages the Facebook PHP SDK and allows you to read posts from your page. It works by giving the developer the capability to define the mapping of each post with the content type field definitions to use as a target for import .

To install the plugin, read this blog post.

Another connector in the running this month was xrow's Microsoft ActiveDirectory. The Connector lets organizations using eZ Platform to simply connect with their enterprise directory on Microsoft's ActiveDirectory for user authentication and management.

As a reminder, the eZ Connector Competition was launched last month when we announced the eZ Connector expansion program at the eZ's Barcelona partner meeting. The eZ Connector initiative consists of two programs: eZ Connector Competition and Build with eZ.

These programs are an opportunity for partners, developers, and third-party software vendors to build connectors that extend eZ Platform's capabilities. Our first eZ Connector competition kicked off on February 1. Participants had one month to build a connector of their choosing and were required to deliver the final product at the end of the month.

The next competition will kick off on April 1. Registration for next month's competition is already open.

Copyrights and intellectual property requirements: The connectors must be open source and follow the GPL license (version 2). For the eZ Connector Competition phase, participants are welcome to host the codebase of the connector anywhere, be it on their personal Github repository or their company Gitlab account. We however ask that they grant eZ Systems with the right to use the connector following the eZ Contribution License Agreement (CLA) , During the Build with eZ phase, the participant must agree on the same CLA, and, as it will be a collaboration with eZ Systems, we ask the codebase of the connector be hosted on eZ Systems GitHub organization (https://github.com/ezsystems/). eZ Systems will create a dedicated repository for it when launching the phase.