I just stumbled across EE today and have spent the last several hours pouring over the plethora of information, but I still have questions. First, a little bit of background. I started using Joomla a couple of years ago because it was easy to install and fairly simple to get content up and running. I know XHTML and CSS quite well. However, I have no experience using PHP and MySQL so I am very limited to what is available in terms of plugins and extensions for Joomla. Time and time again I have hit a brick wall and could not find an extension that would help. As of now, I am completely frustrated with Joomla, and may never go back.

I would like to build a dynamic shopping site comparable to http://www.dealnews.com. If you look at this site, you can see that the content is overwhelming. Is this a possibility with EE assuming no knowledge of PHP and MySQL? Does EE handle datafeeds?

Hi, utchief - welcome to the forums!  Can you let us know what specific features of dealnews you are interested in?  It is much easier to give you exact answers when we know exactly what you want.

As for data feeds - do you mean RSS feeds?  ExpressionEngine can parse incoming feeds and you can use templates to create outgoing feeds.

Have you given the trial a go?

Datafeeds store product information in a delimited file (usually .txt or .csv). It allows you to take products (image, description, sku, price, etc.) from a merchant’s datafeed and upload them to your site.

As for dealnews, there are many features that I wish to duplicate. One feature is displaying merchant information dynamically. For instance, if you scroll down the home page until you reach the section titled ‘Store Events’, you will see that the merchant’s logo is included with each post. This is done on the backend by storing the merchant’s logo in a database, and then attaching the proper merchant to the article. A linked image is applied dynamically to each article pertaining to that merchant. If this is a possibility without having to hand code the function, then I am pretty sure I can do just about anything I need to.

There is a CSVGrab plugin which you could use to parse the data feeds.

Yes, you can include the merchant’s information; there are several ways to approach this depending on how you want to structure your data.  You can also relate images to weblog entries, or simply upload an image with an entry.

So for what you described, ExpressionEngine does sound like a good fit.