Thread

Hello,

I am just starting to learn EE and at the moment I’m a bit overwhelmed but slowly learning. I have been tasked with building a small business site for an upstart company and have some questions. I have been looking through Devot:ee and am interested in the wygwam and structure modules but want to know how much easier they will make my task before paying for them.

The site currently is not that complicated but it needs to be flexible for future needs. I intend to set up the standard home and about pages but also have a company blog/news section and then a product area with multiple categories and products which does double duty for e-commerce with foxycart.

Also what are your opinions on foxycart and it’s integration with EE, or would you have other suggestions?

Thank you,

JCloutier -

Structure has become pretty standard for most of our sites now; however, it really all depends on the use case. For simple sites, the standard template_group/template setup that EE provides might work very well. We’re in the middle of re-designing our own greeneggmedia.com site, and we’re sticking with the out-of-the-box functionality. Not that we don’t love Structure (we do!), but Structure just doesn’t make sense for this particular redesign. In short, Structure is well worth the license fee if you need to dynamically generate URLs, dynamically generate navigation, change templates for an entry easily, and move content around in the site tree easily. For sites that are going to be pretty static or just run a blog, Structure is probably overkill.

Wygwam is an outstanding WYSIWIG editor for EE. It is far superior to the built-in TextArea fieldtype. There are other options, though, if you don’t want to shell out the money. For example, you could use NSM TinyMCE, which is free. We’ve never used that, to be honest, but it might be worth a look.

Hope this helps, at least a little.

Lance
Green Egg Media

Thank you very much, I think I’m going to go with wygwam instead of NSM TinyMCE for greater functionality. And thank you for your input on structure. At the moment the default functionality I think will do perfectly and in the future if it’s needed that we can look at it then.

In your opinion what is the easiest method to set up e-commerce? I would like to create an environment where the customer never has to leave our site but I am not very versed in php which is making me hesitant about foxycart since FoxEE isn’t compatible with EE2.

Have a look at this (download the slides), it’s a good overview of the current e-commerce options for EE.
http://eeinsider.com/blog/eeci-2010-e-commerce-on-ee/

Thank you e-man, that was a great help. I’m starting to think that I should have gone with EE 1.6 rather than EE2.

JCloutier -

ecommerce on EE2 is not really mature yet. There are things in the works, but it isn’t there yet. Depending on how much you really need to do with ecommerce, EE’s built-in SimpleCommerce might have something for you.

Lance
Green Egg Media

E-commerce isn’t really essential right away so I have time to let things iron out. I have never really cared for paypal which I’m trying to stay away from. Simple as it may be it just seems a bit “tacky”. Thank you for you your advice. 😊

Thank you e-man, that was a great help. I’m starting to think that I should have gone with EE 1.6 rather than EE2.

i thought i read somewhere that if you buy EE2, you are still able to download 1.6x, no?