Thread

I’ve been a long time Wordpress user and I was thinking of possibly moving up the CMS ladder as handling relationships between custom content in Wordpress is rather limiting- at least for my usage. I was actually looking at Drupal when EE came as a suggestion so I thought I’d pop over and ask some questions

1) CCK in Drupal is quite powerful. Does something like that exist for EE? To give you an example, I want to create “Company” as a type of content with certain fields. Then create “Product” as a type of content with certain specs. Product require being associated to a company. When that is done, lets say I want to create a News article that is talking about certain company/companies and product(s). Can I do that with ease?

2) Moving a step up from the example above, if I want to review a product, can I add a review score or whats good/bad (custom fields etc.) as well as within the body of the article, create a table that compares the specs of the product to a couple of other ones already present in the database? To make things fun, when defining product specs, can I make certain specs as “quick specs” as a subset and then compare either quick specs or full specs within ar article or comparison page (think how gsmarena.com lets you compare products)

3) If the above is not complicated enough, can I add set of benchmark results to products and then compare these results with auto-generated graphs from within an article

4) Can users registration be handled by allowing one to log-in through Facebook/Twitter/Google etc. and then an account gets created on EE

5) The forums look a bit bare. Does EE work with other forum apps as far as sharing user data and possibly commenting on articles is concerned? I’m currently using IPB but like XenForo.

6) Why aren’t there any incredibly gorgeous themes available for EE? There are quite a few from drupal and Wordpress readily available. Speaking of themes, can forums and the main site share the same theme or does the theme need to be recreated specifically for forums?

And I’ll save the best for last. I am not a coder/developer or graphics designer. I’m a content creator. How easy would it be for someone who is not necessarily code savvy but can put two and two together in terms of structuring the blocks for building EE. I understand that for certain complex parts, I will need to hire a coder and then a designer for the UI but, for example, drupal makes it fairly easy to set up content types and conditional fields etc.

Hi and welcome to the EE forums!

1) CCK in Drupal is quite powerful. Does something like that exist for EE? To give you an example, I want to create “Company” as a type of content with certain fields. Then create “Product” as a type of content with certain specs. Product require being associated to a company. When that is done, lets say I want to create a News article that is talking about certain company/companies and product(s). Can I do that with ease?

In EE you create “Channels” for different content types. Each Channel can then have it’s own set of Custom fields according to your data structure, you can also share a Custom field group between two or more Channels.

There are several default custom field types including:
- Text input
- Textarea
- Checkboxes/Radio buttons (from a predefined list)
- WYSIWYG
- File (for images, files)
- Relationship (relate one entry to another and vice versa)

There are also many 3rd party Fieldtypes for all sorts of uses - check out http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/filter?t=ft for a big list.

2) Moving a step up from the example above, if I want to review a product, can I add a review score or whats good/bad (custom fields etc.) as well as within the body of the article, create a table that compares the specs of the product to a couple of other ones already present in the database? To make things fun, when defining product specs, can I make certain specs as “quick specs” as a subset and then compare either quick specs or full specs within ar article or comparison page (think how gsmarena.com lets you compare products)

Yes, there are several ways to do this. EE doesn’t assume your data structure, instead you can build your custom fields to accommodate whatever data you want to throw at it. For something like ratings/specs you could create several custom fields (one for each spec) and call them into a review page or amalgamate all reviews data into a table, list or however you wanted to output the data.

Again checkout http://devot-ee.com as there are a few “ratings” addons that can help with things like averaging total scores etc.

3) If the above is not complicated enough, can I add set of benchmark results to products and then compare these results with auto-generated graphs from within an article

Yes you could do that, again a number of different ways you could approach it. One way would be to have a “default” review entry with your benchmark data in it, or your could use something like http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/low-variables to hold default data.

4) Can users registration be handled by allowing one to log-in through Facebook/Twitter/Google etc. and then an account gets created on EE

Yes there are some 3rd party addons that allow logging in via social network accounts, again checkout http://devot-ee.com

5) The forums look a bit bare. Does EE work with other forum apps as far as sharing user data and possibly commenting on articles is concerned? I’m currently using IPB but like XenForo.

I know of a vBulletin bridge adon - http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/vbee - suggest contacting the addon author as he may be able to help.

6) Why aren’t there any incredibly gorgeous themes available for EE? There are quite a few from drupal and Wordpress readily available. Speaking of themes, can forums and the main site share the same theme or does the theme need to be recreated specifically for forums?

EE is typically used for bespoke and custom designed sites, though you can use any 3rd party theme and integrate the design elements into any EE site. You don’t find many EE themes because every site is different in terms of content and structure so generic themes often won’t work.

And I’ll save the best for last. I am not a coder/developer or graphics designer. I’m a content creator. How easy would it be for someone who is not necessarily code savvy but can put two and two together in terms of structuring the blocks for building EE. I understand that for certain complex parts, I will need to hire a coder and then a designer for the UI but, for example, drupal makes it fairly easy to set up content types and conditional fields etc.

To develop an EE site you’d need to know HTML and CSS and learn EE’s template tagging system. When an EE site has been built correctly it should then make the publishers job easy and offer everything required to publish content without the need for anything complex.

Hope that helps.

Thanks so much for taking the time out and answering my questions Rob. With regards to your statement:

To develop an EE site you’d need to know HTML and CSS and learn EE’s template tagging system. When an EE site has been built correctly it should then make the publishers job easy and offer everything required to publish content without the need for anything complex.

Hope that helps.

Does even building basic Channels with fields require HTML skills? Or is that a fairly GUI driven task.

Hey Abbas Jaffar Ali,

Welcome to the forums!

I am glad to see that Rob was able to answer your questions!

Creating the channels is all GUI. The content you will be serving up is whatever you want, usually HTML/CSS.

Please let me know if there is anything else I can do to help!

Cheers,

Thanks Shane- Good to know that creating channel is GUI. Is an “Article” also a channel? And does EE support conditional fields? So for example, if an article is of type “Reviews” then fields like Editor’s score and What’s good and bad etc. appear. Otherwise, if it’s just news, then these fields don’t show up? Or would I need to create separate channels for News and Reviews?

One thing you said was a bit ambiguous:

Hey Abbas Jaffar Ali,

Creating the channels is all GUI. The content you will be serving up is whatever you want, usually HTML/CSS.

Does that mean that all the content that my editors will be adding will need to be in HTML? Sorry- a bit unclear of what you mean by content I’ll be serving up.

Finally, is there an eval version for EE that I can mess around with?

Hey Abbas Jaffar Ali,

No worries! No such thing as a bad question here.

ExpressionEngine is a blank canvas, so you will need the build out the templates with HTML/CSS using your designs.

Once that is in place, your editors just add content to the channel entry fields that you set up. A Text Area for example, where one would put the pages main content, has the ability to present you with formatting buttons to make text bold, or add links etc. So the answer, sorry it took so long to get to, is that your editors can be editors and know nothing about HTML or CSS. Life is grand!

I am going to take your thread here into Sales and we can see about an Evaluation License.

Cheers!