Thread

Hi All, I’ve got some quick and not so quick questions in multi-parts.
Our firm just got invited to turn in an RFP, so we did.
The in-house programmer works in ASP or asp.net 1.1 currently.
We just recently got the go ahead to run PHP stuff, it’s now on the server.
The RFP got turned in with the price tag including the ticket price for ektron cms400, wow we’ve got some lead way now!
  Can EE have multiple user groups. They are suggesting they need a way to have secure areas for various groups to show various documents and information.

Wordpress refers to many add-ons as plugins, can a newbie to PHP handle extending the EE in much the same way with plugin code (copy-paste and tweak)?

If anybody will humor me, next week when I have the RFP in front of me, I can throw out some supposed required features just to get some general thoughts on what EE could do.
Sorry for being so vague right now, just wanted to open a discussion.
I doubt anyone around here knows too much about the ektron product, if we obtained the bid, I’m not sure I see the company springing for that product it’s a huge chunk of the budget.
The boss is giving us a snowballs chance of winning the bid, maybe he’ll be surprised though. It’s high time we leveraged open source, the way I see it.

Can EE have multiple user groups. They are suggesting they need a way to have secure areas for various groups to show various documents and information.

Yes, you can have as many member groups as you want and can set permissions for each separately. You can also restrict access to content via conditionals in your tempaltes as well as restrict a template itself to certain member groups. Be aware that an individual can only be the member of one group though.

Wordpress refers to many add-ons as plugins, can a newbie to PHP handle extending the EE in much the same way with plugin code (copy-paste and tweak)?

Wordpress is somewhat different than EE in that it needs a lot of add-ons. EE has most major things built in. That said, there are many plugins avaiable for EE but if you need something a little different you could start with an existing plugin and tweak. There are special forums for EE developers and plenty of advice/help.
You can also develop Extensions and Modules.

With an Ektron budget, you could probably afford to hire the entire freelance EE development community 😉

Last time I checked Ektron sold for nearly 10k…. Sounds like you definitely have some room to play.

M.

That’s about it from what I gather the cms400 price tag was about 10k. They offered to make us some kind of recommended services provider if we “buy in”, the joke was maybe they should pay us $15k then!
Could one email have more than once account? Creating a unique id for a given event possibly?
Checking your portfolio PXlated, curious which ones may have been built on EE, or which ones you think EE would have been perfect for?
There are not that many entries in the Forum thread for new site showcasing, I’m sure there are just a ton more out there, any other galleries anyplace?

Checking your portfolio PXlated, curious which ones may have been built on EE, or which ones you think EE would have been perfect for?

Well, I haven’t really updated my site for a year or two :-( Do plan a complete overhaul here at some point but most of my business comes via personal referrals so it hasn’t been a pressing need.

The last three versions of my site have been EE and I think all but the BestBuy site and the US Bank Intranet (not sure I even have that one on my site) could have been EE. BestBuy is one of the largest eCommerce sites (top ten last I checked/heard) and there are so many people involved in content that it has a lot of custom functions, staging/production/live servers, etc. The US Bank needed massive cross-pollination of memberGroups, ties into their customer/employee databases etc. It was as much a data depository as a CMS. So neither of those were a possibility.

Other than those types of sites, EE is structured in a way that covers a lot of territory.

thanks px, of course the US Bank and Best Buy sites were the ones I wondered about, thanks for the insights…
Some of the more elaborate functions the project is calling for are:
  1. Calendar/Event reg
  2. Secure area with assigned users and passwords for custom meetings.
    I’m thinking they just want to share separate groups of custom documents.
  3. Subscription lists for podcasts, newsletters, etc. various items.

The site is maybe 150 pages in size, a small enterprise I guess you would say.
I guess the rest seems doable. Any suggestions for these then would be appreciated.
thanks again.

Sounds like EE would work for what you need. I don’t really have any general advice as I’ve found the devil is in the details. Once those are fleshed out, there’s plenty of help here in the forums and of course through the Pro network.

Good news I’ve got EEcore 1.6 running, almost had to cry for help (didn’t know my php Admin details, they hadn’t been set and are now).
Later this week or next I may meet the “devil in the details” face to face lol…
More when I know more then thanks.