Thats fantastic, the community is certainly the best feature so far on here!

Cosmik Carrot - 12 October 2010 11:41 AM

Thanks Digitaal Dier, for a quick response.

So with what you say, as my client is looking to replicate this site but in new HTML5 - http://www.theweddingdirectory.co.uk/classified/Browse.asp?cid=146

I should go for EE, is that right?

Is it alot more complicted than wordpress?

First, to Martin Luff, you posted some great information!

Cosmik, your about where I am on using a 3rd party cms. However, I’ve been programming for about 21 years, and the last 12 years of which developing sites with perl, php, css, xhtml, jquery, etc. So, I’m use to building front and custom back-end systems using php/mysql etc.

I looked into Drupal, Joomla, and Wordpress over the past few weeks. Personally, the learning curve from difficult to easy fall in that same order.  I opted a week or so back to jump into Wordpress. From a developer/designer point of view wordpress is a mess. You really need a good understanding of hmtl, css, php, a wordpress framework, and the wordpress codex to develop a child template, or even more difficult building a master template. When it comes to building templates, etc, wordpress reminds me of a patchwork quilt, wrapped around my head at the asylum.

Based on Martin’s comparison (above), if your NOT skilled in PHP, EE might be the best route to take. Unlike WP, Joomla, etc, you build/design out the pages like you would normally do for any site, then replace the static content with EE tags in order to display the dynamic/database content.

You may opt to do what I did buy (or visit books a millions) a couple of books, say one on WP and the other on EE. Skim through the books and see just how complex, or easy, or which one just “feels right.” (worse case scenerio you can toss the book that you don’t need back on Amazon and get some cash back).

The only downside that I see to EE is that once you start adding up the license, add-ons, your time, etc., you may have to turn down small non-profits and focus toward commercial clientele that can afford the work.

From a cost perspective, having a solid background in php, I may have to use modx (or build something in codeignitor) for the non-profits and go with EE for commercial clients.

It’s been mentioned before, but SMS made simple might fit a lot of requirement for relatively brochure-like hierarchal sites such as the Dick Cheney one mentioned above.

I used it once - and I am neither a programmer nor developer, yet with a little help from a few members of CMSMS community, was able to scratch together a low cost site which ended up making the client very happy.

Here is the sample site:
http://atrafireplaces.com/

This type of CMS does a lot of the work for you in terms of menus, links, etc…..or, you can remove that stuff and do it yourself. It’s free - and members of the community (international) did some outside work for me for very reasonable prices.

I would not use it for my own site since my needs are much more custom. But it seems like a nice mid-level tool.

We are now a couple of years on from this post and I was wondering if everyone still agreed with what they wrote?

I maintain 6 websites. Most are really blogs, but now the demand is for them to be more. All bar one are non-profit. I know HTML/CSS. I’m also looking for a CMS to do this. I’m more of a designer.

I recently came across setseed (http://setseed.com/), which uses Smarty Templates. I would have happily opted for EE, but as most of my sites are non-profit, the cost is quite considerable.

What would you recommend?

Hi [rev],

Welcome to the EE community.

We specifically choose to use EE for nonprofits because of its total cost of ownership, and we’ve been doing it long enough to feel confident speaking on the subject.

I also know what its like to manage the budget of a nonprofit. Any well-managed non-profit should be able to afford the start up costs associated with using EE. What they can’t afford is the cost (down the road) of living with a website built on software that you (and none of your peers) want to maintain. There are lots of “free” products, that are dirt-cheep to install, but think about the cost of that product every six months to a year when its time to update the software. How much (minutes vs. hours) time will it take you to update and maintain the software for the nonprofit?

We maintain close to 200 websites all built on EE. We update nearly all of them every year at least once and most of those software updates take us about 20 min. or less. That means we can’t even bill a full hour for it, and that means its very cost effective for our clients to maintain it. The version updates from EE 1.x to the newer 2.x are the exception as some of those take us a half a day. But during that half a day we also rebuild parts of the site templates and prepare the website for the next 4 or more years, so again, it’s time well spent for our clients.

The single most expensive thing for a nonprofit is time. Software is not expensive, time is, so don’t waist the time of the teams of staff an volunteers at the nonprofits you’re working with by putting their website into anything that difficult to maintain over time. If the software is no fun to maintain, it won’t be taken care of and the organization will suffer losses in time and revenue because of it.

My 2-cents.. Use EE, and use it with as few add-ons as possible. If you work with a lot of tiny nonprofits, then build yourself a little framework of reusable code to speed your own development times in EE.

EE is not the service you are selling/providing to the nonprofit, you are. If you like working with EE, and would prefer to be using it, and are more likely to want to help maintain the sites you build if they are built in EE, then use EE for the nonprofit. If you prefer maintaining some other software, then that should be your tool. You won’t be doing anyone a favor if you put a group into some software that’s no fun to maintain.

Hm… time to get off my soapbox and get back to work.

Many thanks Kurt,

I think my real problem is that the non-profit sites I manage are essentially just running for a web hosting fee that has a one-click wordpress install. As wordpress is open source the cost is extremely low.

I’m now in a position where I lead a non-profit and don’t have the time to maintain 6 separate sites. I don’t want to ditch the non-profits, but need everything in one place. I also need a framework that does not have a steep learning curve. The non profits need blogs, podcasts, events/calendars, and newsletters. However, some are now suggesting, vidcasts, wiki’s, forum, and specific login user content. My problem is not the content as the non-profits are responsible for that, my difficulty is in creating a system that needs as little administrating as possible. This means having a CMS that I administer, but each non-profit can login and add their content that is then automatically updated on their site.

Would EE give me the shortest time input to create these things simply? I reiterate that I am no programmer, although I understand markup and know HTML/CSS.

thanks for your wisdom.

If you are interested in Smarty Templates and want something similar to EE take a look at HeroFramework, it is a Open Source Framework, is developed in CodeIgniter as EE and it uses Smarty Templates…

It’s got a comercial E-Commerce Module as well which manages Memberships and selling of goods.

You can download it or try it as SaaS… I’m testing it right now and, is really easy to set up and the support is very good.