Thread

I’ve used EE for one job (development outsourced) and was relatively happy with EE.  I now have a need for a community website for a county. It should include multiple blogs by locals, a forum, a gallery, reviews, informational pages (wiki?), classifieds (not just forum posts), and other things I’m probably not thinking of.  Can I get some examples of EE sites that are like this to get an idea of what can be done and how well it can be done?

Thanks!

No community sites with EE, or wrong forum?

Hi, slobizman.  It ultimately depends what you mean by community and your question didn’t really outline that well.  EE is not a social networking software so items like “blogs by locals” might even reach into a license problem as outlined here: kb entry.

Perhaps if you clarify a bit of what you are after, then more examples will be forthcoming. And, of course, you are invited to peruse our Showcase and the site intros forum. =)

Thanks for the reply Lisa.

As for the “blogs by locals”, I’m not intending on making it so that hundreds of people can sign up and get a free blog, like Blogger for example, or the multi-blogger version of Wordpress they now have.  What I mean is I would have hand-selected people from the community I would allow to post blog entries that would be categorized as from their blog. I’d set each one up by hand.  I’d think there would not be more than a couple dozen. I’d combine them in chronological order on the front page, but I’d also what the user to be able to display just the entries by that blog author.  I don’t know if it crosses the line or not. If so, that’s a really restrictive limitation, as many community sites are doing more and more of this.

Maybe vbulletin’s new blogging system debuting in a few weeks will work out better.  That would be unfortunate though, as I’d be limited in some of my other things I want to do. I guess there is always Joomla or some other CMS.

I don’t think keeping the “social” aspect out of EE is a wise move as that’s what the web is all about now (although I understand it not becoming a source for someone to give out thousands of blogs). But, maybe I don’t understand the restriction as I should.

As for the other aspects of the site, I think the initial rough description is enough to give anyone an idea of what type of site I’m talking about.  I didn’t see anything like this in the showcase.

Thanks.

Hi, slobizman.  It ultimately depends what you mean by community and your question didn’t really outline that well.  EE is not a social networking software so items like “blogs by locals” might even reach into a license problem as outlined here: kb entry.

Perhaps if you clarify a bit of what you are after, then more examples will be forthcoming. And, of course, you are invited to peruse our Showcase and the site intros forum. =)

That sounds fine, the way you describe it, and is the essence of how ExpressionEngine works. It’s quite easy to achieve this - you can limit entries showing using the username parameter with a segment to make it dynamic, too.

I would recommend going through our Showcase and Site Intros as mentioned, but hopefully now that people have more an idea of your goal, more links will be forthcoming.

slobizman, I’m pretty new to the forums and ExpressionEngine and as such haven’t had a lot of exposure to the EE sites that may be out there. I did a quick search and found TheDailySheep in the Site Introductions forum (which is the forum that Lisa was referring to). Although it doesn’t offer all of the things that you intend to offer, I think that it’s a pretty good example of what can be done for a community website, especially in regards to classified.

Even though you’ve given a really good description of what you’re after, it’d probably be best that you browse the Site Introductions forum or even search the forums to see if you can find something, at least until people start offering up some other ideas.