Thread

Hey everyone,

I took over administration of the following website back in April: http://www.windyhop.org/
This is not-for-profit site serving the needs of the Chicago swing dance community. We have around 500 active, regular users.

The codebase was written by two guys doing their own thing, years ago. It’s hard to use, full of bugs, and impossible to modify. I plan to rebuild the site from scratch and import my old data. EE seems great, but I’d like to tell you all about my needs before I jump into learning a new CMS.

* Here’s the number one deal-breaker: I rather dislike PHP. I’m a Ruby and Python guy. If using EE will require me to do a lot of PHP hacking to get things working, I’d rather use a worse CMS written in a better language. If most, if not all, of the PHP is abstracted away where I don’t have to deal with it, we’re golden.

* News articles and calendar. These are separate, but will function similarly. Any logged-in user can submit, news/calendar admins can approve/edit/decline. News/calendar admins notified when articles are waiting in an approval queue, submitters notified when article is approved. News articles are displayed until a specified expiration date. Support for recurring (weekly/monthly) calendar events.

* Optional - news articles also need to be approved by any associated band and venue users before they’re posted. Band and venue users can delete events associated to them.

* Photo gallery. Any user can upload a gallery, and retains full control of that gallery. We will need to import our old images.

* Optional - Some galleries are open for uploading by all users, those photos must be approved by a photo admin.

* Forum. Standard forum, nothing fancy. However, it’s imperative that we can import our old posts. The SQL database is…funky, to be generous. Is a paid service available that can do this data import for us?

* Users. We should be able to import all our users. Doing this from a CSV is fine if that’s the only option.

* Nice-to-haves: RSS feeds, ability to add AJAX-y goodness (especially to the calendar, eg. hiding all events of one type).

I think that’s it! Let me know how feasible this is with ExpressionEngine.

Thanks for your help,
Aris

EE is written almost entirely in PHP; however, I have found I do not have to do much hacking to get it to work since for the most part it is extremely versatile and straight-forward.

RSS feeds: there is an RSS module included that generates RSS feeds automatically (granted, you’d have to tweak a code to get entries from a specific weblog).

For your gallery concerns:

1. this might be fishy with EE’s licence (no weblogging service) so ask an EE sales team member.
2. EE has a very flexible member group module, if you go into the Admin you’ll see you can restrict exactly WHAT weblogs/galleries/etc. they can post in/view.

EE has most of the features you’re looking for as far as restricting content by member group, etc.

I’m not sure about the forums and member import, so I’ll let a more experienced user answer. 😊

EDIT THE FIRST: Post on importing members/posts to the forums

To paraphrase, he said that a forum import is a custom job, and that transferring members is easier than transferring members AND posts, though it can be done. In the EE Wiki, here is a post on how to import posts if your former forum-ware is PHPBB.

EDIT TWO:
Here is the Wiki category on Importing to EE.

Bobby got a lot of it, but here goes anyway =)

* Here’s the number one deal-breaker: I rather dislike PHP. I’m a Ruby and Python guy. If using EE will require me to do a lot of PHP hacking to get things working, I’d rather use a worse CMS written in a better language. If most, if not all, of the PHP is abstracted away where I don’t have to deal with it, we’re golden.

EE does, indeed, use PHP; however you may never need to use PHP at all.  We do have an extensive framework for modules, plugins, and extensions, though, which you may wish to one day build and would require PHP.

* News articles and calendar. These are separate, but will function similarly. Any logged-in user can submit, news/calendar admins can approve/edit/decline. News/calendar admins notified when articles are waiting in an approval queue, submitters notified when article is approved. News articles are displayed until a specified expiration date. Support for recurring (weekly/monthly) calendar events.

The calendar is just a tag that formats the weblog entries into a calendar, so yes, quite possible and out of the box.  Also see entry status workflow for how to set that up.

There is no current first-party support for recurrence, but there is a popular third-party plugin called RepEEt which you can use for this.

* Optional - news articles also need to be approved by any associated band and venue users before they’re posted. Band and venue users can delete events associated to them.

All done via membership permissions.

* Photo gallery. Any user can upload a gallery, and retains full control of that gallery. We will need to import our old images.

You are going to need to review our license as it sounds like you’re building mini-sites for others.  You can also review this kb article.

* Optional - Some galleries are open for uploading by all users, those photos must be approved by a photo admin.

You may want to use a weblog for the gallery if you need members to upload to it, as the gallery itself is an all or nothing as far as access.

* Forum. Standard forum, nothing fancy. However, it’s imperative that we can import our old posts. The SQL database is…funky, to be generous. Is a paid service available that can do this data import for us?

Sure, check out the pro network to get quotes on importing services.

* Users. We should be able to import all our users. Doing this from a CSV is fine if that’s the only option.

You could probably work that into the import service above, or use the built in member import utility.

* Nice-to-haves: RSS feeds, ability to add AJAX-y goodness (especially to the calendar, eg. hiding all events of one type).

Of course on all.

You should also email sales with a detailed project proposal to ensure you’re within the license.