WE are evaluating CMSs for a community site project.  We have some requirements that I’d like to know if PMachine will support.  It looks good on the surface!

1. User Group capabilities:
We’ll have about four different groups of users.  Registered, General Members, Affiliate Members,  and Administrators. Each will need different access privileges to the same set of pages and content. How does EEs access privileges work? can it get this granular?
2. Page layout flexibility:  On different pages, we’ll need to display different things in the side columns.  I believe I am seeing this, but a confirmation would be nice.

3.  Is there a way to put comments/forums at the bottom of articles?

4.  Is there a content rating system?

5. We will have vendor/product/event directories: we’ll need a way to search through these directories

6. Polling

Thanks in advance.

Chris will probably beat me to this but:

1. EE has all of this functionality basically built in.

2. All you need is to create the different templates.  Very doable.

3. That is basically what the more or comments pages are.  However, I believe at this time the comments can only be shown on the single entry pages.  So no comments on pages that show more than one entry.

4. No.  However, this functionality could be added as a module since it would require database queries. 

5. This would have to be separate from EE.  I’m not sure of any CMS that searches directories that are not a part of the CMS database.  Now if you went and entered all of that content into a separate weblog it would be possible.
6. No.  But something like this could be added as a plugin or module.  I myself am waiting for a polling module.

Jamie

I’ll say (perhaps somewhat contentiously) that at this point, using EE for a general CMS is a bit difficult. It’s mostly doable, but all the docs, and the app’s initial focus seems pretty firmly in the weblog way at this point.

That said, it provides one of the better bases to build on, which is why I went with it after reviewing way too many of these apps. You’ll just have to get a bit creative when veering away from more traditional blog-ish features, and do some coding yourself.

And chances are, as it develops things will get easier and more features applicable to more general CMS usage will be “out of box”. So unless you’ve got the resources to build custom from scratch, or maybe big bucks for a big enterprise-ish CMS, it’s a good system to go with.

I have a related question.

I see the beauty of having totally dynamic pages and all that, but how about if I want to “build” an HTML page for all my entries? Is this at least possible as an option in EE?

Thanks

You’re going to have to explain what you mean by “build”.

Generate static HTML pages.

No.  However, you can take advantage of the caching features of EE to get most of the speed benefits of static files.  That’s about as close to the “best of both worlds” as you’ll get.

Thanks Chris, will check it out.

Second question, can I now have cruft-free, intuitive URLs with EE? I mean really meaningful URLs instead of URLs that end with “?id=18422_0_19_0_C” etc..

Thanks!

Um, that’s a pMachine Free/Pro URL, not an ExpressionEngine URL.  You’re posting in an EE forum, which is what we’re discussing; are you sure you’re in the right place?