Hello,
We’re in the process of scoping a brief.  Although I would love to use Expression Engine on this project there are a number of criteria requested by the client that i’m not sure about.  I would like to ask the EE community for any suggestions on the following end-user points.

WYSIWYG Editing
Templates - Users can choose from a number of different templates to “customise” how pages are displayed.
Content History - Allowing users the facility to ‘roll back’ to previous versions of a page.
Audit history - A comprehensive means of seeing who made what changes and when.

Also, is there such thing as an Expression Engine ‘service level’ agreement where EllisLab would provide direct technical support?

Thanks in advance.

gdpfunding - 25 July 2008 02:35 AM

WYSIWYG Editing

There is currently no default WYSIWYG editor in EE, although there are a few 3rd party addons that can be installed to do the trick.

gdpfunding - 25 July 2008 02:35 AM

Templates - Users can choose from a number of different templates to “customise” how pages are displayed.

Wow - I’ve never seen this requirement and it would concern me a bit as a developer - usually a site look and feel and content structure are arrived at by some pretty drawn out thoughtful processes, and costs for design typically preclude having multiple options.

At any rate - this could be worked into EE I think, either through using some options in the publish page hooked to some conditionals in the template, or through the Pages module and how it allows a user to choose an output template.

But this assumes the content is relatively simple. The more complex the content structure the more involved building this feature will be. So doable, yes, but if it were me I’d push back to see if the client is really willing to pay the costs for getting this feature or if this is just a blue-sky idea.

gdpfunding - 25 July 2008 02:35 AM

Content History - Allowing users the facility to ‘roll back’ to previous versions of a page.

Yes, there is content versioning available.

gdpfunding - 25 July 2008 02:35 AM

Audit history - A comprehensive means of seeing who made what changes and when.

There is a control panel log which starts to provide a basic audit trail but it won’t show, for example, what users made what exact change to what exact post - only that they logged in.  The log activity is more geared towards control panel/system events than content events.  I’m attaching a screenshot of a log from my own site as an example.

gdpfunding - 25 July 2008 02:35 AM

Also, is there such thing as an Expression Engine ‘service level’ agreement where EllisLab would provide direct technical support?

Not through EllisLab, but I think you’ll find the standard tech support better than what most companies will provide through a service level agreement.  You also might be able to contract with one of the members of the Professional Network for more in-depth consulting and support needs.

Thanks Michael for a great and comprehensive reply.  It seems the templates idea was a misunderstanding and i’m not visibly shaking anymore   It also seems that EE is ticking all the right boxes so far.

Could I please ask your thoughts on setup? I’m currently trying to figure out the EE structure for this particular project and i’m having the categories vs weblogs problem.

Here is the brief I have:

One website for a group of 10 companies
Each company has it’s own departments (approx 5). So clicking on say ‘The London Company’ would take you to that ‘companys’ homepage where users could then browse that particular ‘companys’ departments.
Each company can edit content for it’s own set of departments BUT can NOT have access to any other companys content (to avoid users posting info to the wrong part of the site).

I initially thought of using weblogs for the departments (allowing for custom fields) and then each office being a category.  Unfortunately it seems I can’t restrict individual user access to to it’s own category(office).

Your thoughts on this would be much appreciated.

Thanks again

Does company == office?

Will each company use the same design?

If I understand things right I’d have one weblog for everything, each company would be a category, and each department a post in the weblog assigned to a category.

Then I’d setup user accounts, and configure them such that they can only edit their own posts.  Once setup I’d go back and assign them as authors on the department posts - so EE would see those posts as belonging to them.

I’d lock them out of editing categories.

That should keep the content all in one EE weblog while allowing multiple people to edit only certain posts.

Thanks Michael,
I may be wrong but.. Would that only work if every page (post) were identical in layout and content?  Unfortunately there will be a need to employ custom fields for the variation in content between departments.

One possible solution we’re looking at is:

Each Office has it’s own SET of weblogs for the various departments.  A member group is then assigned to it’s own set of office weblogs.  This opens up for flexibility with custom fields, it allows drilling down so that department individuals can only post/edit within thier own departments.  It also allows for sub-categories and new page (post) generation.

Unfortunately this approach requires rather a lot of Weblogs (100+) but the individual users would only see 9 or 10.

Does this look like a reasonable set-up to you?

Another point raised is that the website currently gets 150,000+ unique visitors a month.  We’re hoping to expand this to 200,000+ before the end of the year.  Would these numbers pose any problems for EE?

Thanks

gdpfunding - can you clarify if the companies are separate entities, please?  There are license considerations here with hosting sites for third-parties, and it would be best to ensure that you’re clear of that before proceeding. =)

Hi Lisa, One company, One website, several offices.

This project is for a large organisation so any potential license issues would certainly be addressed.

Thanks

That’s fine then; just wanted to make sure.  Thanks for clarifying!

It really sounds like each office site is relatively independant - with it’s own design, content, and content administrators.

If that’s indeed the case I’d be looking at the Multiple Site Manager and run each office as it’s own site within that.

Thanks for some great feedback.  I have just a couple more questions.

Head office would like to ‘moderate’ any entries or editing done by individual offices.  I can’t find any way of assigning this kind of privilege.  Basically, any office can make changes to their own ‘site’ but Head office want to check it before making it ‘live’.

Multiple Site Manager - This looks like a very interesting option. How would this work with many ‘sites’ under a single domain? It’s important that the URI is the same for all offices (it is just one site). Would we be able to have URIs like… www.ourwebsite.com/manchester/index.php/, www.ourwebsite.com/liverpool/index.php/, www.ourwebsite.com/london/index.php/?

That really should be an end to the questions

Thanks

gdpfunding - 26 July 2008 02:50 AM

Thanks for some great feedback.  I have just a couple more questions.

Head office would like to ‘moderate’ any entries or editing done by individual offices.  I can’t find any way of assigning this kind of privilege.  Basically, any office can make changes to their own ‘site’ but Head office want to check it before making it ‘live’.

If you are talking content changes you can handle this requirement for new content with entry statuses and notications.  Essentially the workflow is:

- Individual office posts new entry

- New entry goes to a Pending status

- EE generates an email to notify the head office of a new post.

- The head office logs in, makes any necessary changes and sets the post to an Open status.

- New content appears on the site.

You’ll note I said new content.

What EE doesn’t have is a built-in way of having V1.1 of an existing post set to an Open status and live on the site, while V1.2 of the same post is in a Pending status being reviewed before overwriting V1.1 on the live site.

If this is what the client is requesting - honestly I’d push back and see if that situation can’t be handled outside the system - even in email.  Every time I’ve seen this sort of workflow implemented it’s added so much procedural overhead that it guarantees the site content will never change.

It often boils down to an issue of trust in an organization - will the head office trust the individual offices to generally have the best interest of the company in mind when maintaining the site content. 

If you essentially tell the individual offices that they can’t be trusted (by implementing the approval process) they may just decide that maybe the head office can just do it all themselves, thank you very much. 

gdpfunding - 26 July 2008 02:50 AM

Multiple Site Manager - This looks like a very interesting option. How would this work with many ‘sites’ under a single domain? It’s important that the URI is the same for all offices (it is just one site). Would we be able to have URIs like… www.ourwebsite.com/manchester/index.php/, www.ourwebsite.com/liverpool/index.php/, www.ourwebsite.com/london/index.php/?

That really should be an end to the questions

Thanks

I haven’t set up that exact configuration, but can’t see why it wouldn’t work.  I run MSM on http://www.train-ee.com with subdomains on the other sites (ex: http://church.train-ee.com) and your approach seems to be the same just without the htaccess work for the subdomain and a different URL for the site in the EE CP.

Thanks for your time on this Michael, it’s really appreciated.