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Admins: I believe this is a pre-sales-ish question, but feel free to move it should there be a more appropriate forum elsewhere.

I was wondering if expressionengine would be appropriate for use in developing an ecard site (similar to a simpler someecards.com).

I envision visitors to a site being be able to click on an image, filling out the mailing info and message (without logging in or creating a membership), and sending out an automatically generated url to the unique card.  Recipients of the ecard would click on the emailed link, visit the site, and see their message.

My concern is with the generation of unique urls.  I know that ee shouldn’t be used for a hosted blogging service, and I’ve read that this is because of limitations of the software in handling multiple public users (I may be wrong though).  Will this limitation also extend to being able to run an ecard site?

Also, are there any other potential obstacles that anyone can see?

Thanks!

Hi pacific_water, and welcome to the forums!

You are correct in regards to using EE as a hosted blogging service, but what you are shooting for is different and certainly allowed by the license.

You’re definitely going to need a custom module to achieve the e-card functionality (to handle the unique URLs and serve the appropriate content from your tables) but this would be the case with any CMS. ExpressionEngine modules can take full advantage of CodeIgniter which should speed up your development time tremendously. See our Module Development documentation for more.

We also have a 30 day money-back guarantee if EE doesn’t fit your needs. Let me know if you have any other questions!

In searching more, I believe Solspace’s SAEF Redirect extension may serve as a suitable solution for an ecard site: http://www.solspace.com/software/detail/saef_redirect/.

So does this mean that ee is appropriate for what I envision?  Or may I be missing something?

Thanks!

Oops!  Sorry Brandon, didn’t see your response before posting my follow-up.  Thanks for replying so quickly!

I appreciate your input, and it’s definitely great knowing that ee can do what I hoped for.  Thanks!

Hi pacific_water,

The SAEF Redirect is great, but for your purposes you’ll probably want URLs that are difficult to guess (hashed) otherwise someone could easily browse others’ e-cards. That’s where your module comes in.

Don’t hesitate with any further questions!

Thanks!  I’ll start playing around with creating something, and I’ll post follow-ups on the other (non-“pre-sales” forums).

Sounds good! Don’t hesitate to post again as needed.