I am in the process of building and maintaining a website that would be a combination of a news aggregation/digest (summary and links to articles) and product reviews focused on a very specific industry. Initially I will be doing all of the postings and content, but over time I may delegate some areas to other people. It might also contain a section where people would be able to add their commentary like a blog. I would also like the ability to send out and receive RSS feeds and have an opt-in mailing list. I envision the style to sort of be a cross between www.drudgereport.com, www.tomshardware.com, and a www.dpreview.com type of website.

The most important thing for me is that it be very easy to use and be a stable product (of course it would also be nice if it is scalable so I don’t have to redo things if my site becomes popular). My concern with some of the OSS products (like mambo) is that are just too hard to use without becoming a full time sys admin.

My feeling is that I am looking for a product that is a cross between a high end blog system and a content management system. Is this what EE is?

-Blake

I’ll address this feature by feature from your post, as that is easier for me to follow.

1) Members doing posting and content - absolutely.  But they have to be members at lest to do post.  Permissions are done by member group, so you just put the user intothe group that gives them the right access, and they can then post.

2) RSS feeds outgoing, yes.  And templated so you can do pretty much whatever you want with them.  Incoming you can parse with the Magpie plugin - there isn’t currently a way to parse them into entries in your own database, but I think someone may be working on a module for that.  But displaying others’ RSS feeds is no problem.

3) EE supports multiple mailing lists, as well as doing mailings by member group.

4) Stable, absolutely, and constantly under development with pages of new features added in every release.  EE is very, very scalable and you should have a look at pmachine.com featured sites, and recently updated sites (listed on the front page), to get an idea of the range and scalability inherent in EE. =)

EE has an excellent system of custom fields and custom category groups that let you deal with whatever kind of content you need to, articles and reviews are no problem. 

I hope that helps to answer your questions. =)

My feeling is that I am looking for a product that is a cross between a high end blog system and a content management system. Is this what EE is?

A rather fitting description, I think. Although many people use it as a pure CMS without any of the blogging functions, they are certainly there if you need them.

Thank you for your feedback. I think I will try out the hosted version first and see how easy it is to use and then purchase the regular package if I like it. Is the product easy to use for someone that does not have a programming background and wants to be insulated from most of the code? If I end up purchasing the package how easy is it to install and get up and running? Also what are the options relating to the management of advertisers (it would be nice to actually make money off the site at some point).

-Blake

I think using the hosted trial is a wise decision. As for being “insulated from most of the code”... Well. EE’s templateing system is very powerful, but at the same time relatively (realtively!) easy to master. Yet, there is a learning curve involved. To make the most of it, you should be also somewhat familiar with XHTML and CSS. If you are not, and cannot/don’t want to get involved a bit, you can still use some of the stock templates or hire sombeody to do the work for you.

It’s really not all that difficult. You take a template to see what it does, and how it achieves that desired result, and adjust it to your needs. Installing as such is quite straight forward, too. There is no built-in ad management, but you can of course use any third party script for that. Most people simply use Google adwords, and that works well.