I am testing out EE, in hopes to implement into a college website, which will be redesigned from scratch. With that, I’ll say I am a new web developer for a small college that has a completely static website.

I want to implement a CMS to help divide the time it takes to keep the website up to date, otherwise my job would consist of updating it and not moving forward w/ new technologies, anyway….

Originally I was thinking of implementing Drupal, which is a nice CMS, but not as flexible as I would want it to be, well, I am sure it is flexible, but it seemed to be a pain to bend it, that is when I thought “ok, I’ll code my own”, since each department within the college will want their own kind of things, outside of the basic news items, and calendar of events. Then I stumbled upon EE and I signed up for the $10 for a month trial, as of yesterday and began testing it.

What I want to know, is what benefits will EE bring to developing a dynamic college website, in which each department will want something different from the other.

For example, admissions might want a student application form, so students can apply online, and then the alumni dept. may want an alumni update form, to keep an eye on what their alum is up to these days, and possibly a recruitment form for a coach in the athletics department.

I viewed the video tutorial of making a Songs form, to display the song title, artist, and lyrics, which was extremely helpful.

But I want you to think of yourself in a situation that you are a web developer who is redesigning an entire college website, dynamical driven, customizing it to each department’s needs, and is it more beneficial to do it that way than just code the entire CMS yourself?

I ask you, because I know a lot of you have a lot of experience w/ EE and I am looking forward to your feedback.

Thank you for taking the time to read this!

-Brad

I think that one of the main benefits I would see here would be leveraging the Multiple Sites Manager.  In this way, you could make each department its own Site, and let them have full control over the data, look, and feel of the site; yet at the same time, member registrations would work installation-wide, which would be a great boon for students, teachers, and other employees.

your comment brought up a good point, when it comes to user management.

i will assign user accounts for certain people in each dept. to manage their content.

i imagine you can restrict the access so only content in their dept. is the content they can update.

but w/ that, if they were to log in w/ their user account, would it be possible that the user only sees their appropriate “weblogs” to select from to browse thru to update/add/delete items?

Absolutely; and since a department itself may have many weblogs, the MSM would be great to keep complete “sub-sites” together.  Read and watch about it here.

thank you for that tutorial link.

subsites, such as subdomains, that would work great.

would i be able to get away with (not using MSM and) being able to only display the appropriate weblogs that associates to that user, based on their access, such as Johnny from Admissions, once he logs in, he’ll only see Admissions weblogs, and not anyone elses, without having to use the MSM.

Because it won’t be anything like….

admissions.collegesite.edu

it’ll be collegesite.edu/admissions/

and

collegesite.edu/financialaid/

collegesite.edu/housing/

so on and so forth…

so Johnny in admissions would only be able to see the admissions weblogs within the cp when he logs in.

Yes, you can set permissions per weblog per member group.

And you don’t have to use sub-domains with the MSM; it can be a very useful way to simply group together your departments.  It really depends how complicated each site will need to be.

Using Member Groups you can easily assign which weblog they can or cannot write to. So, you can create a group named Admissions and allow them to only add/edit/delete content from the admissions weblog.

While I was hunting down the link for Member Groups, Lisa beat me to it.