Hey all, 

I’m looking into switching to EE after a disastrous attempt to build a client site using Drupal… So far, I’m really impressed with EE’s capabilities, but was wondering if I could get some input on your usability experiences.  I’m more of a designer than a developer, but am comfortable with some basic coding as well.

However, my clients (the ultimate end-users for maintaining the site) are not particularly tech savvy.  Should I even bother with EE?  I mean, for such things as controlling which items show up in the side panels for specific pages or categories of the site… I can see how I could hard-code this in a template, but couldn’t possibly expect a client to dig into the code to add/remove/re-arrange sidepanels.

Are there any modules or plugins that make this more user-friendly? Some sort of ‘widget-drag-and-drop-thingy’ ? (sorry to get all technical)

Tx in advance,

Ira

Download it and give it a try, Ira, I think you will find it more than capable.  Make sure you read the quick start in the User Guide and watch the video tutorials to get you started.  You generally will not need to give clients access to your templates to provide them with the means of controlling which content is displayed where.  For me, this is an area where custom statuses plays a good role, others will choose categories, but either way, your tags on the templates will define what types of entries will be output in what locations, and the content authors simply “flag” entries for those areas by using the custom statuses / categories / weblogs that you have setup for them.

Thanks for the quick reply, Derek.

I’ve seen the videos, and read quite a bit of the docs, but didn’t really see anything about that.  I’ll check out the custom status stuff for starters.  I was hoping that this was a fairly common task and that there may have been something more inuitive. I guess I’ll have to install and play around with it for a while.

Cheers,

Ira

One other little thing before I get in too deep…  There are currently no solutions for editing directly in the front-end are there?  This is something I would need to implement myself?

Ira

Yepp, no direct editing in the front-end. But you can add a link to each entry automatically that will only show for logged in users of some user group (superadmins, authors, ... whatever you need) that will lead directly to the cp editing form prefilled with the current entry. The link would be invisible for other users or if not logged in.

-Markus

that will lead directly to the cp editing form prefilled with the current entry

Wow - I did not know this but just tracked it down in the wiki:
http://expressionengine.com/wiki/Edit_Link_With_Entries/

You might also find this interesting - I haven’t tried it but it’s awfully appealing:
http://expressionengine.com/wiki/Edit_in_Place/

Wow, glad I asked!

As a workaround, I was thinking about implementing a jQuery ‘popup’ window (lightbox effect, but for a php page with the admin / editor interface),  but this is definitely worth looking into as well.

Ira