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Redesigned my business site with EE2, it's good to be back to EE!

October 21, 2011 12:24pm

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  • #1 / Oct 21, 2011 12:24pm

    OwanH

    87 posts

    Hi everyone,

    I wasn’t really going to announce this but I decided to because of the great experience I had moving my business site, http://ispheretechnologies.com, from Drupal back to EE. Hope you guys enjoy the story.

    When I first launched this website back in 2008 I had built it with EE 1.6. It was a very small site then, no more than about 4 or 5 pages, with no kind of interactivity or social networking integration but with a very clean and modern design. It was super easy to theme and publish with EE1. A year later I started building sites almost entirely with Drupal 5/6, a decision made by my then employer (I was doing my business on the side then). As a result I ended up doing a redesign of my biz site in Drupal 6. I was accustomed to Drupal by then so it seemed like I was able to get the site up quickly.

    This year, however, I decided it was time to redesign again, the site now had inaccurate information as I made some changes to my business’ services and processes and decided to get more serious about it on a whole. I still was using Drupal 6 this year and actually started using Drupal 7. But then I decided to take a look back at EE, this time EE2 (I had briefly skimmed the features when it was still in beta).

    I was going to do the redesign of the site in D7 based on the fact that, IMO, D7 has made some great leaps and bounds with it’s administrative user interface and module support. Then a little voice in my head convinced me to take EE2 for a spin and so I bought a Freelancer license. To make the rest of this story short, I am now more than happy I made that decision. EE2 has really been a breath of development fresh air for me and I thank God that I am using it again. I had forgotten how easy soooooooo many things are to theme and build with this great CMS.

    Is it better than D7? I won’t get into that (perhaps volatile) argument lol but I will say that it makes some things easier where theming and module integration are concerned and I think it gives you more control over your site than Drupal does (with drupal you have to often customize too much to have the control you might want). Please note that I still do use D7 (not D6 or below) for a few sites because as I said it has really improved it’s admin user interface and experience over previous versions. However, Ellislab, I want you guys and gals to know that it’s good to be back and this CMS that you (and the EE community) have spent all these years molding into what it is today, it freakin’ ROCKS!!! I also look forward to seeing how much further it grows as time goes by! 😊

  • #2 / Oct 22, 2011 12:54pm

    Euan

    214 posts

    I particularly like the navigation menu you have created.

  • #3 / Oct 22, 2011 4:13pm

    Roi Agneta

    352 posts

    Thanks for this story, Owan.  As a long time user of EE, and a former user of Joomla, I really appreciate this kind of feedback from knowledgable people who are coming over to EE from elsewhere.

  • #4 / Oct 24, 2011 11:11am

    OwanH

    87 posts

    Hi guys, thanks for the feedback.

    @Euan - The HTML structure and CSS for the navigation is based on a CSS3 Mega Drop-Down Menu tutorial I read up on at http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/html-css-techniques/how-to-build-a-kick-butt-css3-mega-drop-down-menu/. It was a bit tricky to set up the content of the navigation, I set up a custom channel and appropriate channel fields and had to write a blend of EE tags and php.

    @Roi - Thanks, was glad to share the story.

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