Thread

Background of myself, I’ve got around 8 years of PHP experience and have been using CI to write apps for close to two years.  I’m in the planning portion of a new app, but I’m interested in leveraging some of the items that EE might be able to offer me.  At this point, I’m trying to figure out if EE might be overkill for what I’m trying to accomplish since at this very moment the only features that I can see really wanting are the forum module/memberships page(more on that)/user management.  Without getting my hands on it, it’s hard for me to ask the right questions, but I’ll try…

- Which codeigniter version is supported in the current version of EE?
- Are all elements of CI available and can I easily leverage the two together?  Are there any tutorials/documentation on this?  Are there considerations that may need to be made when developing with the two?  (for instance, there’s a DB class in EE as well as CI… is this simply an abstraction?)
- Does EE work with PgSQL?  If so, any currently known issues?
- Can the add-ons (listed here: http://expressionengine.com/overview/pricing) be extended?  For instance, as someone else in a thread from July mentioned, I might need a more complicated Membership model for my application.  Or I may want to offer the user MORE options that they can edit about themselves.  If so, is there any documentation?

I’m certain as these are answered more questions will pop into my head.

Thanks for your time!

Hi kreeves,

Excellent questions! Thanks for asking and thank you for your interest in ExpressionEngine

- Which codeigniter version is supported in the current version of EE?

ExpressionEngine ships with a custom branch of CodeIgniter 2.0.1

- Are all elements of CI available and can I easily leverage the two together?  Are there any tutorials/documentation on this?  Are there considerations that may need to be made when developing with the two?  (for instance, there’s a DB class in EE as well as CI… is this simply an abstraction?)

Absolutely. You have everything in CI in EE plus ExpressionEngine’s own API

- Does EE work with PgSQL?  If so, any currently known issues?

At this time, ExpressionEngine only supports MySQL

- Can the add-ons (listed here: http://expressionengine.com/overview/pricing) be extended?  For instance, as someone else in a thread from July mentioned, I might need a more complicated Membership model for my application.  Or I may want to offer the user MORE options that they can edit about themselves.  If so, is there any documentation?

Many of them have already been extended. For example Zoo’s Visitor and Solspace’s User extend the Membership System to have more features and Visitor extends membership management in to ExpressionEngine channels for incredible flexibility.

Extending ExpressionEngine is very, very similar to writing a CodeIgniter application, again, referencing the CI User Guide and EE’s Developer’s Guide is an excellent place to start.

Please let me know if you have any other questions!

I appreciate the quick reply.  I’ve got a few more for you!

1)  The forums module that we can purchase with EE, does it operate similar to this forum?
2)  Can it (the forums module) be extended in a way that I might be able to call additional controllers, if deemed necessary?  I believe I found the answer to this in the “PHP In templates” section… but I’ll leave the question here in the event maybe I’ve missed something.

Hi, kreeves!

1) This is the Forum Module.  Our proprietary design, but the technical operation is the same.

2) You can enable PHP to run in the forum templates.  You’d also use the same API Dan referenced to extend the Forum.  Depending what you need to do, you might need to run the forum through the main template parser, though.  So do be aware of that.

Please let us know if you have any more questions!