Thread

Howdy folks,
We are considering moving our entire small university web site over to Expression Engine. I have just been thrilled with the progress of the app and the support. While I was initially put off by the lack of LDAP support, I have just about decided that not having to learn a new CMS is worth the hassle.

So, I have a few questions about best practices in moving from a blogging stance to a full-blown CMS stance. Any insight would be appreciated.

Event/Calendar
It seems to me that native event/calendar management would be immensely helpful. I haven’t seen any modules or other products that handle this. So what are you doing? Building a date app within EE? Integrating another product?

Menuing - Global and Local
I’m curious as to menuing best practices. On our web sites we have three menus:
The first is the “audience-based” global menu. These are links to pages which are tailored to specific audiences. This is the simplest menu.
A simple custom variable/embed will take care of this.

The second menu type is “content-based” global menu which is navigation based on what we believe our users are looking for.
Once again, I’m guessing that a simple template/variable-based solution would work best.

Third, we have the local menu sub-sites. These sub-sites have their own “local” navigation and these would need to be managed by separate contributors.
For this function, I have been thinking about using categories. Using categories would allow contributors to manage navigation from within the CP, and not have to mess with code or create new entries in a separate blog.

Taxonomy/Site Architecture
Finally, I’m concerned about cookie crumbs and overall site architecture. If I have a structure like this:
http://www.oc.edu/academics/arts_sciences/art_design/ How would I accomplish this? I realize that I may need to completely rethink my taxonomy, and that’s OK. But I’m thinking even in the best-case scenario, I can’t limit my depth to two levels. So I guess this is my greatest concern.
Right now, I’m in the dark on how to do this.

Can anyone shed any light on how you do these things, or if I’m way off in my thinking?

Hi Dan-  Expression Engine does have a calendaring system that works well for most uses. If you need a full-fledge calendar with alarms and alerts, than you might want to look at something else, but otherwise, all you really need is a weblog for events (you can create whatever custom fields you like), and the calendar tag, well and some design experience. I’d also recommend the Repeet plugin, in combination with this.

Menuing is almost always a developer’s issue. What you’ve currently mention can be done, and if care is taken with the site architecture, it can also be automated to a degree. I know for our clients, we often go for a minimal navigation structure—meaning that once your in a section (say admissions) then typically there are only three or four template options, everything else we handle using if statements.  It combines menuing with site architecture, so for example the registrars office would be part of the admissions sections. But instead of creating one or even five templates related to the registrars there, we would modify the display of the index, article, or list page based on the url. So the url http://www.my-unnie.edu/admissions/registrars/ would use the index template of the admissions template group, and pull an embedded file based on the {segment_2} text being “registrars”.

It typically takes more upfront planning to make sure segments line up across different scenarios, but works very well. But that’s just our approach, and one developed after spending a year or so with EE. Before that, we had templates, templates, and more templates for each template_group. That really made adding a new feature kind of harsh though. Now our basic template structure is easy as pie to go through, but we use a lot of embeds which we store in three auxiliary template groups (includes, search, and forms).  For really large sites, there’s been a mini-debate on breaking the includes down into additional template groups such as browse, list, articles since that’s how we normally distinguish file (i.e.  browse_pubs_alpha, browse_pubs_date, articles_pubs, articles_news, list_proj_states, etc., etc.) 

For really large sites we might end up with over 20 includes related to browse (which is typically what we consider viewing 25 items at a time, with summaries, pagination, and date information) or 15 different article formats—book vs video, vs generic publication, vs news item or press release, etc. So you can see the “include” area can get large so the recommendation for further breakage with _browse/templates _article/templates, etc. could be useful.

That’s all very helpful - thanks so much. I need to give it some serious thought.

So, your example with the registrar. Can the registrar’s office then manage that site in the control panel? I really want to make it as easy as possible for the end users, enabling them to produce content, but separating content from presentation.

I wasn’t clear about our needs re event management. I am aware that EE has a calendar built-in but it’s not really equipped to handle the things we need without extensive customization. We really need event management,  preferably with some sort of facilities management. I’m sure that it can be done, but it’s not really built in the way it is in other products.

Thanks,
dhl

So, your example with the registrar. Can the registrar’s office then manage that site in the control panel? I really want to make it as easy as possible for the end users, enabling them to produce content, but separating content from presentation.

Yes, all content is handled per normal. So going back to my prior example, their would either be a single weblog/section for admissions with a category called registrars; or my preference a weblog/section called registrar with possible additional related weblogs, their own categories and field groups.  Lot’s of universities registrars differ, but lets say, the registrars office handles academic calendar (things that effect all students), course catalogs, and transcripts.  Then I might set up the following weblogs/sections:  Registrar: General; Registrar: News; Registrar: Academic Calendar, Registrar: Course Catalog, etc. 

I’d set up a member group for registrar staff that would only allow them to post in related registrar weblogs/sections. Each section would have it’s own field set-up (perhaps general and news could share fields), and create related categories as needed.  If I was actually doing a course catalog, I’d probably have some related fields, like allowing any individual course to related to any other course or viewing courses by instructor, etc.

But at that stage its all about weblogs/sections, member groups, and permissions (including posting privileges). Can instructors add and update their own courses, or do all updates go through a single individual, department or group?

Yeah, we’ve adapted EE Calendar with a related weblog to handle event registration; but facilities management would be a lot of work to get the level of responsiveness I imagine.