Thread

Hi! We are new to EE and have purchased it and are going to be using it on a couple of projects, however, we also have the need for a CMS (with wysiwyg), that is Free or at a much lower price point. We sell a mortgage website solution (here: http://www.ipagio.com/blue1/index.html) and we need to implement it into a CMS so that end users can edit content at will. I’m in talks to provide websites to a mortgage company that has 500 plus branches, this means that each one of the branches would need a website and is why we would immediately need scale up to a more efficient build process and user enabled control of content….We currently build each website by hand and it takes approximately 2 hours of build time per site, thus it makes sense for us to integrate the website build process into a website builder where users can choose between different color themes, home pages styles, etc. There are so many providers and platforms that the learning curve / research needed to find the right solution is extremely high. If anybody has any experience or input, it is greatly appreciated.

I’m looking at wordpress and other options, but there are so many options. It gets really tough when looking at website builders….

Talk to me! 😊

[Moderator Edit: Moved to the Lounge]

Around here, you are going to get a lot of advocates for EE.  Is $199 per website too much to build into the cost?

There are plenty of folks that have integrated wysiwyg word processing tools (forget the name at the moment) into EE.  There have been a few debates about getting wysiwyg tools integrated into EE, but most users, including me are not in favor of it.  Mainly because it opens the door for a boatload of complexity and ugly, uncontrollable markup.

IMHO, after using EE, I couldn’t imagine going back to WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc…  There is one CMS that I keep an eye on from time to time.  Check out http://www.modxcms.com/

Yeah, unfortunately for our purposes that is absolutely too high… as I mentioned we will be possibly rolling this out to hundreds of websites and given the end usage needs, EE is way more tool than we need for the job so it would be overkill…. I’m not sure EE is user friendly enough either… I know I’m struggling to get acquainted after watching the videos and reading the tutorials over and over… there is a significant learning curve and my personal experience with that alone would prevent EE for qualifying for inclusion based on the particular needs of these end users….which are basically folks that don’t know and don’t care to know about anything accept how to change a sentence here or there or add pages…. I feel like I need to have a background in PHP sometimes when I’m reading the tutorials… but I’m not giving up!

Yes, don’t give up!  Although I hear everything you are saying and can sympathize with the learning curve, I encourage you to stick with it because it’s simply worth it.

Having said that and understanding the cost of EE is just out of your budget, I don’t agree that EE is too hard for the end user.  The reason?  Custom fields.  By setting up weblogs with custom fields, all an end user would need to do to publish/edit content is fill out a form and hit submit.  It couldn’t get any easier than that.

Anyway, I realize your thread is about finding a cheaper solution, so I’ll cut this short…

Good luck Trace1025.

Just as a note, it’s $199 for the commercial MSM (which puts you at 3 sites), then a much smaller amount per Site.  Read here:

Additional sites can be purchased on a per-instance basis for $49.95 (commercial license) and $24.95 (personal license).

So if you’re talking about hundreds of sites, then you’re really talking about a very, very small cost per Site.

Furthermore, the developer does, yes, have to learn about EE - however, the editors need never really worry about any of that.  Simply give them an “edit this” link and they can edit in either the publish screen or a Stand alone Edit Form, or using Ajax, even edit *in place on the public site* - there’s a wiki article called Inline Editing for that.  You can not get more end-user friendly, in my opinion.

Just a few things to think about - the development of the site in EE is far different than the experience the end-user will have in managing the content: it is up to the developer to make that part easy.

Another item you have to watch out for is maintenance.  ExpressionEngine is built very well for handling multiple sites because you can control everything from one installation.  I am not aware of any other system that can handle multiple sites so well with one install though that is probably because I have not messed around much with the other available systems.

If you have to duplicate the same code across each site then maintenance could become a real pain.  With EE you just need two files copied to each domain and everything else is controlled by the master code base.  If you choose a system which requires all domains to have a separate copy of the code base (even if you can control each of these copies with the same control panel) then you have to also update each of these instances when a security update is released.

Think of needing to do this for 500 sites.  Also, Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress release a lot of security updates so you need to be ready for that.  The hidden cost of such a scheme might be time required for maintenance.  If you don’t choose EE, you should choose a system that handles multiple sites in much the same way.

Thanks,I will definitely have to look into all of the suggestions… because I’m not up to speed to yet with EE, I’m not aware of the possibilities….....l I will have to dig into this commercial license and take it from there…...

I really need to get Ipagio.com onto EE as well, I have 5 color themes and most themes have around 10 home page options and 10 back ground colors… this means I have a CSS for each background color (need to have different corners and BG colors in each CSS) or around 30 or 40 Style Sheets, I know that this could be simplified by adding everything into EE….

I need to start from scratch and try to figure out what is involved in importing one page into EE such as http://www.ipagio.com/blue1/index.html . That will really help me understand what the entire job would entail… Then take it to the next step and figure out what would be involved with creating custom fields so that End users could simple edit these fields to edit text…

After looking at the sites attached to your signature, it wouldn’t take much.  If you are responsible for creating those, I’m certain your competency level is there to put it all together.

Remember, the nicest thing about EE is it works so nicely with the standards (HTML, CSS, etc…) that you are already using.  With EE, you are “configuring” a location to store and manage the data that populates your site.  In other words, create your custom fields, place the custom field tags into your templates which will pull the data from those custom fields into your HTML.

Editors of your sites will enjoy the simplicity of logging in, seeing the Publish and Edit tabs and choosing which content to edit.  Streamlined, as non-confusing as it gets, and most importantly an effective way to publish content and have it presented on the site as you intended it.

You could do something like create 40 different template groups (one for each style) and then simply make a copy of whichever template group you want for the site in question.  You would then go in and change the generic settings/info and you have your site. 

Depending on how generic the templates are you might be able to do some tricky optimization by using variables to set the characteristics of the site.  For instance, you might be able to get away with one master copy that you would copy for each site but then have another template group with 40 different style sheets.  Change one variable throughout the templates and that would select your style.  You could probably come up with other methods could even further scale things down.

You could use the free core version of EE to start playing around with some of the possibilities but of course there are some limitations to that version.  Depending on your budget you might want to create a post in the jobs board to see if you can get a consultant to help you answer some of the harder questions.  If you need to shop around you should probably post in the forums of the other systems mentioned here to see what kind of answers you come up with. 

Good Luck!

Have you had a chance to read this article by Derek?

I think, once you understand the basics (video tutorials and docs), you should read that article (and all of the BTC articles).  It will probably shed a lot of light on a streamlined solution.

And no one’s mentioned it so I will now - if the sites are dead simple and you’re just looking to churn them out, and price is as much of a consideration as anything, you could also consider CodeIgniter, our open source PHP framework.  Yes, you would either need to learn some PHP or hire a PHP developer, but the long term benefit of either might be well worth it.  I’d definitely lean towards EE with what little I know about your project, but thought that CI was worth a mention.

I see you can manage multiple sites through EE, but I haven’t found anything that references whether users can log in and manage their own site and only their particular site or domain…. the video and page I read seem geared toward 1 user or party managing multiple sites that THEY own and need to control. I’m needing a solution where many different parties that are not related to each other can logon and manage their personal website….. thanks for any clarification….

Although probably possible from a purely technical POV, I think that that would violate the license of EE and/or the MSM. I let the EL folks clarify, though.

I don’t see the parameter in the docs, so I’m not sure this is possible, but it seems like you could set up Stand Alone Entry form(s) for each site.  This would allow site owners to access a form to edit/publish their content.

You’d need the parameter site=“some_site” for the SAEF.