cppkafka is a high level C++ wrapper for rdkafka, aiming at allowing to use rdkafka in a simple, less error prone way.
cppkafka provides an API to produce messages as well as consuming messages but the latter is only supported via the high level consumer API (introduced on kafka 0.9). Therefore, you need rdkakfa >= 0.9 in order to use it. Other wrapped functionalities are also provided, like fetching metadata, offsets, etc.
cppkafka adds smooth zookeeper support: you only need to add a "zookeeper" attribute to your configuration object and your producer/consumer will automatically load the initial broker list from it while also listening for broker list updates.

It's simple!

cppkafka's API is simple. For example, this code creates a producer writes a message into some partition:

#include <cppkafka/producer.h>
#include <string>
using namespace cppkafka;
using namespace std;
int main() {
    // Create the config
    Configuration config;
    config.set("zookeeper", "127.0.0.1:2181");
    // Create the producer
    Producer producer(config);
    // Get the topic we'll write into
    Topic topic = producer.get_topic("my_topic");
    string message = "hey there!";
    // Produce a message!
    producer.produce(topic, 0 /*partition*/, message);
}