Thread

Hi all,
We’ve got a Code Ingiter site, very complex (managing the relationship between a buyer and seller for a digital deliverable, bidding, estimates, milestones, payments, etc) with APIs for external sites to make niche markets, membership levels (from free, subscription, advanced stuff), S3 cloud integration, merchant account integration (and Paypal IPN) - the owner of the site wants to convert the content areas to Expression Engine (and add the forum too) - single sign on for all services.
Our schema is massively complex (we inherited the site and transferred a few hundred million records).

Here are my concerns:
1. We have different types of members (buyers, sellers), different levels of membership (paid, 3 subscription levels, group membership - like an agent with all of their people and administration) which afford different permissions and abilities - as well as API members.  Does Expression Engine mold to an existing schema, through some translation table or models - or would we need to change the database or change the core of EE to make this happen?

2. Search - the current site has a detailed search function based upon several parameters (language, area(s) of specialty, age, gender and membership) and is limited to certain areas (like the store is only the store items while the site search excludes the store items) - can this be done?

3. Certain content pages link to processes in CI we don’t want to export, they would like the pages (for example, the login) to function, and resolve to the CI side of the code (like the member’s account landing page which includes things like jobs, messages, escrow, etc which are all custom coding) - can this level of control work in EE?

4. The redirection of the page, we would need to maintain the google links (all hail Google) so we would need to direct each part of the site to the correct content delivery system, will this mess up how Expression Engine works?

What pitfalls await us?
Anyone have experience mixing these two on a large scale site?
Thanks

This sounds like a huge undertaking. I’m sure integrating with EE from a CodeIgniter standpoint should be do-able. Your biggest issues might be with search, and making sure template efficiency stays high.

I haven’t built a site to that level of scale yet, but there are limitations on ExpressionEngine’s caching for sites over 1000 URIs, thus keeping page loads efficient would be a priority.

You should never try to modify ExpressionEngine’s core code, so that upgrading is not a hassle. Luckily they have coded it to be very extensible, and easy to write add-ons for (like CI). Installing and/or writing a couple add-ons could get everything you need done, I think.