Thread

Please excuse my ignorance, I am hoping you can help with this issue.

My friend and I are building a website within a vertical, connecting very specific product suppliers and producers with businesses sourcing these materials:

Customers-
Will purchase a recurring subscription to one or more data sets (a data set is a grouping of suppliers, for example fabricators vs designers vs sample makers)
Will retrieve/search supplier data and use website to initiate contact with suppliers (send initial contact email, monitor emails sent)

Suppliers
Will be able to create or “claim” a profile
We will create/utilize a range of data fields
We also want to have a set of tags for easier searching
We want some look ups of external data (probably through API, for example social media metrics like facebook page URL/Likes)

We want-
Payment via paypal or amazon (possibly stripe)
Automatic account creation/suspension

Is expression engine the right “tool” for this project?

Thanks!

A couple years ago, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend ExpressionEngine. Sadly, the once flexible, powerful and truly awesome product is one that I can no longer recommend, and I’ll be moving my client’s sites away from EE as much as possible. You used to be able to get support from community members as well as staff, but since EE moved to the paid support system, I think it’s dying off. I might be wrong, and they might be raking in revenue, but the advantages of using EE have disappeared. Free products like Wordpress and Drupal have not only caught up to EE in terms of flexibility, but have surpassed it in ease of implementation and user experience for non-technical folk to add content to their sites. Frankly, I’d use Wordpress for your project-there are tons of excellent e-commerce plugins out there.

Yes, you can do this with Expression Engine but you will probably need a couple of modules as well and with EE all of them are mostly paid. That is not necessarily a bad thing as they are supported and updated as opposed to open source modules which stop working eventually or are not updated.

What I’m saying is that you can’t do that probably out of the box and you will have to spend more money on it.

I also have to partially agree with Mooo. If you are starting new I would probably advise you to use something like Drupal. My choice was Drupal or EE and when I went with EE I did based on 3 reasons:

Drupal and other open source where not that advanced yet
EE had commercial support and was backed by a commercial company
Everyone recommended it and it had a great community (which was important for me)

Today this is not true anymore. EE has hardly evolved in the past years. Just look how simple their Wiki or Forum modules are compared to everything else you can get today. The software has hardly evolved in features and the community is mostly dead. You will not get help anywhere and you can see most users asking help don’t get it. Most of the community has moved to something else and the reason is because your PAID license does not get you anything. Support costs extra now. You are buying a software which comes with no support which is rather strange.

Go with Drupal, not only its free, but the community is huge and you will get a reply in minutes all without spending one dime. What is ironic is that Ellis Lab gave Code Igniter to another party so they can focus on developing EE and yet the development is mainly only bug fixes. I don’t think there is anything new in terms of features for years now. And I do check the changelog on each new release.

Besides this, the software is really great if you know how to code your way around. In my case I don’t know how to code, so I actually need community help and since I can’t get it, I don’t even bother to try to learn it anymore. But if you actually have invested in EE in terms of time, money and know your way around I think you can build great stuff with it.

Holy Zombie thread Batman!

I do want to say something positive as well. The things I really do like about EE:

1. How clean everything is. No messing around with complex codes/file structures. Everything fits into piece the way you want it.

2. It adapts to you, you don’t need to adapt your website to it, but you can adapt it to your website. Great for existing websites.

3. You are not restricted in anyway by the CMS structure. This is one the things I love. This means you can use any page or software on which you code HTML and put them right inside the EE engine. You don’t need to adapt your code or pages to make it work inside EE, with templates, you use the same code you have right now. And you can still edit them externally with what ever software or editor you use without problems. This is very powerful. Instead of having to re-code everything to make it work with the software, you don’t need to change anything. The same pages and the same code can work out of the box, then with time you can make it more dynamic using EE features.

4. Simple but yet powerful. If you can master it, you can build great stuff, but it has a learning curve.

5. Modules and plugins are of higher quality. The reason is since most plugins are paid, they work and are constantly updated, as opposed to having to rely on plugins which are not support or outdated in other software. In Devot EE you can find great modules. Also the developers of modules for EE seem to be of higher quality in terms of performance and security.