Thread

Hello,

I’m wondering if there are any known web apps based on expressionengine? Does anyone have any experience with doing this?

I’ve been using EE for a while now and I’m going to start developing a new web app and I have considerations if EE might be suitable for that kind of solutions (since I dont want from scratch and would need many EE features).

I have come around information that http://www.campaignmonitor.com has been built with EE. Is that right?

What I’m concerned about in this situation is: is EE flexible enough for that kind of projects/solutions?

Thanks a lot for help!

I think the best way to make your decision is to look through the developer docs to get a feel for developing for EE.  IMO this forum is a great example how EE can be extended.

Your biggest issue might be the need to change core functionality of EE but with no hooks (for extensions) available for that change (ETA: Think about what you might have to change or add to the core functionality and look through the available hooks to see if those changes are possible.)

EE 2.0 will likely be much nicer for development but I wouldn’t wait around for it to be released.

Campaign Monitor certainly is EE… and you could probably learn a lot from the builders articles on the subject:
http://newism.com.au/blog/post/76/building-campaign-monitor-part-i-expressionengine-weblogs/
http://newism.com.au/blog/post/77/building-campaign-monitor-part-2-expressionengine-template-groups/
http://newism.com.au/blog/post/90/building-campaign-monitor-part-3-design-process/

In my opinion EE is certainly flexible - The question is are you able to get your hands dirty enough making modules, etc! Many here only dabble, i am only learning, others just buy! Either way you can, and perhaps consider learning more about CI as this will be the EE 2.0 core.

I believe that with Campaign Monitor it is the site that was built in EE, not the app.

Echoing John, I’d look at the dev docs and also the third party addons that are out there in the wild. I’d also think about how separate you want your app to be from EE - you could build it completely separate but just using the members database tables for instance, or it could be so tightly integrated that you were reliant on using the weblog publish and edit forms too. There’s lots of levels of integration and reliance.

Re. your is EE flexible enough question - difficult to know without knowing what it is you want to build, and I can understand why you may want to keep that private. Can you elaborate at all?

Most of the EE sites I have seen so far are just represeting the information. I’m interested in EE web app development research - which wouldnt be just making a particular module/plugin for EE.

What I’m thinking of is a php framework that would allow you call EE functions inside the code - instead of EE templates you would have just pure php code instead of template files (this would affect the preformance).

For instance (I’m not totally sure yet how this would be implemented - maybe some kind of web app developer EE module):

instead of web page template you could create php file that could do some processing (manipulation) with the external applications (such as mail senders - campaignmonitor, sound/wavetable processors - soundcloud.com, etc..) and could be called inside templates or with a cron jobs, etc..

That would extend the use of EE because I find just templates and modules very limiting for web app development - module is an addon imo that can be ‘widely’ used on many platforms, but here we are speaking for website specific actions that could be easily implemented/changed/manipulated inside EE backend.

Or do you guys think its just better to start from scratch (which really sucks) or write a module and lose/spend a lot of time that development takes to make it?

Campaign Monitor is probably very complicated example of a web app, so maybe we could start with simpler examples to illustrate how certain problems could be solved on the optimal way with EE? Has anyone already tried doing anything similar?

If you want to code everything yourself, as it were, take a look at CodeIgniter.