Ecosystem FAQ
Contents
The ecosystem
What is the Exponential Ecosystem? "The greater ecosystem extends beyond the community to cover all aspects of the Exponential world within the PHP stack: its users and creators" (What the ecosystem is).
How is it different from the community? The community is people who take part; the ecosystem also includes products, packages, the stack, organizations, and users who never take part (Partners, community and ecosystem).
Products
Which products are there? Exponential 6, Velocity, Layouts, Intelligence, AdminUI, Exponential Basic and the Platform line: Platform 3.2.9, Legacy, Nexus and DXP (Products).
Does the DXP include the Exponential 6 kernel or a layouts editor? No. It ships no layouts editor, approval workflow, scheduler or legacy kernel; Legacy and Nexus include the kernel (Exponential Platform DXP).
Is Velocity required?
composer.json requires it since 6.0.15, so it is installed; you may still serve the site with Apache, Nginx or
another server (Web servers and engines).
Packages
How many packages are there? On 18 October 2026 the kernel required 66 se7enxweb packages and the vendor had 219 packages on Packagist; recount before you quote a number (Composer and Packagist).
Can a published version change? No. "A published tag is never changed"; a fix comes as the next version (How packages are versioned).
Where do I find an extension? See Finding an extension.
Stack
Which PHP versions? PHP 8.0 to 8.5 (PHP 7.4 usable without support) for Exponential 6.0.15 (PHP versions).
Which databases? SQLite 3 (default), PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MariaDB, Oracle and MySQL, in that order of preference (Databases).
Which operating systems? Almost any that runs PHP 8.0 or later (PHP 7.4 usable without support), in four tiers (Operating systems).
Which PHP libraries does the kernel use?
Its own fork of the Zeta Components, the expcomponents (se7enxweb/expcomponents-*, Apache 2.0), since 6.0.15;
the upstream Zeta Components before, and eZ Components in the 4.x days
(Exponential Components).
Organizations and people
Who leads Exponential? 7x leads development; the Exponential Foundation operates the project (Organizations).
Is Exponential associated with the original vendor?
No: "This project is not associated with the original eZ Publish software or its original developer, eZ Systems or
Ibexa" (README.md).
How do I take part? Start with Community: start here; companies, with Partners: start here.
Related pages
- Ecosystem: start here
- Ecosystem glossary
- Community FAQ
- Project FAQ
- Free documentation: this page is free to copy, translate and improve under the GNU FDL 1.3.
Become an Exponential Partner
Partners share their information, provide funding, contribute back and develop the products with us, and that is how Exponential grows. A partner website and dashboard are planned for mid-2027: please become a partner today to speed up our growth rate and land new features faster.