Thread

Morning

I’ve got a project that’s been in planning for a few months now. It has enough “standard” CMS requirement to warrant using Expression Engine. It’s also got a fair bit of systems integration with a back-office environment, so there will be API calls and extension hooks in use all over the place.

My initial thought was to just use CodeIgniter all the way, but I don’t want to have to re-invent the wheel with the rest of the content management. So I’m left with a choice between EE 1.6 and EE 2.0.

The add-on situation (or rather lack of) is not an issue. EE2 covers everything we need out-of-the-box, except the bespoke app we’re going to have to build anyway.

I’m wondering if anyone has jumped in and done some serious application development in EE2 yet? Am I likely to find life significantly easier building my app underneath v2 rather than v1.6 - or is it a case of “different” rather than “easier”?

Interested to hear other people’s views.

Save yourself a lot of trouble and start with EE2, rather than 1.6 and update later.

You can split CI and EE2 apart somewhat and make EE2 play nicely with other CI applications that you develop.

we’re a few weeks into this project now and EE2 was definitely the way to go.

It’s nice to have the familiar CodeIgniter tools to draw on, but the best thing by far is being able to use Views for custom module output on the front end (ok - I could have done that anyway but it’s nice that it’s native now).

The Third Party folder layout also makes much more sense than the mish-mash we had before. I like that the control panel recognises ‘packages’ and allows you to manage related extensions and modules together.

The colour scheme on the control panel skin I’m getting used to. It would be nice to have a v1.6 skin though - lots of clients are re-assured by something they are familiar with.

All in all , good job Ellis Labs.