Thread

Hello to all

I’ve just discovered you blog/cms solution and I like it or so I think but :

I actually have a joomla website with a lot of dynamic content like a frontpage slide show and slideshowpro and other mootools stuff made by a template club !

here is the url : http://www.wugong.fr

it is still a very simple website all in all juste a few content webpage but the dynamic content is the stuff i like.

I also use SMF forum

so here are my questions :

Can I use EEcms with SSP http://slideshowpro.net/
and with it’s director witch use a Database as well ?? (embed swf flash movies ?)

Can I convert my SMF forum to EE forum ?

Is there any possibilities to get slimbox or lightbox(it’s a mootools driven photo display) or the same kind of stuff in EE ?

How easy is it to design your own css template ?

I would love to have a menu with the mootools effect witch I didn’t learn yet cause had the template club do it for me 😊

a lot of question I know but i often end up buying stuff that don’t really do what I want in the end.

so basically can EE do the same as joomla+my template with all of it’s dynamic stuff the menu the slideshows etc…

and the SMF forum problems ...

Thanks a lot for your help

best regards

Hi there,

To answer your questions in order :

Can EE integrate with Slideshow Pro?
Yes definitely. It depends how much you want it to integrate. You can definitely use SSP within a page spat out by EE and just use the standard XML file to provide the image data that you need but you could also use EE to create the XML for you so that your slideshow(s) can be truly dynamic. Would take a little more work but once set up would give you a lot more options.

Can EE be integrated with SSP Director?
I’m not entirely sure in which way you would want to integrate it because as far as I know SSP Director is just a place to upload all the images and then create the XML code for you? If that is the case then EE can certainly be used in this way as you would just have to embed the flash .swf file and then point to the correct XML database driven variables.

Can I convert my SMF forum to an EE forum?
This is a bit more tricky. I am not totally up on all the different forum software’s out there so not too sure if SMF has any extra functions that EE’s forums doesn’t have and so on and so forth. If you are just wanting to move the users from the SMF forums across then this would take a little bit of knowledge of MySQL and queries but shouldn’t be too hard. If you need to take posts that are already in the SMF forum and move them across to EE’s forum structure then that might be a bit more work as the two probably work in different ways as to which database table holds what information but it would still be doable. I know that a few people on the forums here were working on a phpBB2 - > EE forums converter tool and they might be able to help more with this as they may have knowledge of the SMF forums too. If not then the best place to start would probably be the EE Professionals network as there may be someone on there that could create an export / import tool for you.

Can I use Slimbox / Lightbox in EE?
Absolutely. These can even be made dynamically so that images automatically utilise these javascript functions if you need to.

EE is a fantastic tool to work with and for new sites it is fantastic. When taking an existing site then sometimes it can be harder if you have the likes of forums and such but then other times it can actually become a lot easier as you already have the site design and CSS all down and so would just need to copy and paste that into EE and then create the content.

Hope this has helped out a little. Really everything you want to do is possible the only slightly more fiddly part would be the SMF -> EE forums conversion but this can be done though with some help.

Best wishes,

Mark

Well that was a really fast reply !!! thanks

Actually if i can convert from Phpbb to EEforum that is doable cause i could just do it like this SMF - PHPBB -EEFORUM ! a lot of work but ...

I like my design but i didn’t do it myself just changed some stuff I’d like to do this one myself intirelly so kind of afraid of CMS for templating !! cause joomla even if some think it’s really easy is for me a beginner a nightmare !

What i mean with SSP director is just have it on the same server so it can generate my XML for me and uplaod the pictures and so on but i guess they’re not related in any way so ... If I can put my swf movies everthing should work.

Now all you answers are great but just a question thought you’re saying i can get EE to do many stuff but I’m a newbie noob beginner if you see what I mean just know a bit of CSS and i’m able to follow a good tutorial ..😉

Tahnks a lot
regards

Excellent explanation Mark you hit it on the nail.

Why thank you!! You didn’t even ask the question either!!! :-D

Mark

thanks a lot for your replies.

I still have one or two questions.

after playing with EEcore a little I realised if I’m right that the design can be made with anything :

Xhtml, CSS and add some Jquery or mootools or moofx without to much difficulties right ??

and I can have a different design for almost every pages if I wanted to ??

keeping on playing with EEcore ...

PS I also saw that in the personnal version of EEcore there is a Gallerie module ?  where could I see a demo of that running ?

thanks again for your help much appreciated.

regards
zhangfei

It is quite easy to use the gallery module in conjunction with slideshow pro the gallery module outputs an XML file, which SLP reads. Just remember to use absolute paths when setting the XML source in SSP

You do not need SSPDirector as you are duplicating back end functionality. You can integrate Lightbox, Spry or any other JS library easily, it is just a call from an EE header template.

EE works on templates, these can be created with any text editor and pasted into the relevant EE blank template. It is then just a matter of inserting dynamic placeholders (the EE tags) for the static content used to get the design right.

I have never used an off the shelf front end template, first jpb with each install of EE is to delete all but one RSS template, empty the default index template and go from there.

That really was a sweet rundown, Mark!  Yep- playing with EE Core is definitely the best way to get a feel for things.  And yep- using Jquery or mootools- all of that should be cake.  The biggest issue folks usually have is just getting their paths correct.  Different designs on different pages/templates should be no problem- though how exactly you’d set this up would depend on your requirements and personal preferences.

The gallery isn’t included with Core (which you already know) but if you want to skim some nice implementations, here are the showcase sites under ‘gallery’.  That would be a good start.  You could try the hosted trial if you really want to play with the gallery before you commit.  However, you might have trouble uploading the js libraries, so I won’t swear it will allow you to test everything you want to test.  And of course, some folks run their galleries via a weblog due to personal preferences.

That really was a sweet rundown, Mark!

Why thank-you!! :-D :-D

Really though it was a nice feeling to be able to (hopefully) help someone else out now that I have taken a lot from the EE community. I have been helped out many times now and due to the amount of sites and varied use of them I have now used most of the modules, extensions, plug-ins and javascript tools out there on a site at some point or another and if I can offer something back to help someone else out then I feel very proud to be able to do that.

I can only do that due to the excellent help that I have received on these forums so really it is all down to the other people on the forums really.

Hope it all goes well for you zhangfei.

Best wishes,

Mark

Thank you for all your replies !

just the atmosphere on the forum makes me want to go for it.

Thanks again
regards

zhangfei

Hiya,

No problem at all. Glad to have been of some assistance hopefully.
I can safely say that if I had the knowledge of EE that I have now but a few years back (even though EE wasn’t out yet!!) I would have been using it as soon as it came out. As it is I have come in a couple of years or so after its launch but I can safely say hand on heart that it is the easiest and most powerful system I have ever laid my hands on. I have yet to find something that EE can’t do which is definitely saying something!!!

Anyway I wish you all the best with your venture and I am sure that if you need any more help that you will find the people on here more than welcome to help out when you may need it.

Good luck with everything.

Best wishes,

Mark

Hi there,

To answer your questions in order :

Can I use Slimbox / Lightbox in EE?
Absolutely. These can even be made dynamically so that images automatically utilise these javascript functions if you need to.

Hi Mark,

Could you point me in the direction of where I could find more information on doing this?

Thanks

You might check this thread- lot of talk about slideshow options and tutorials.  The logic would be the same.  I’ve done it via xml with videos- basically, you just set a template to ‘xml’ and use a weblog tag to pump out whatever you want.

So for a simple one- I have a ‘video_feed’ template that’s set to xml:

<playlist version="1" xmlns="http://xspf.org/ns/0/">
<trackList>
{exp:weblog:entries weblog="video" limit="1" rdf="off"}
<track>
<title>{title}</title>
<creator>rob1</creator>
<location>http://www.mysite.com/images/video/{file_name}.flv</location>
</track>
{/exp:weblog:entries}
</trackList>
</playlist>

Then a grid with all of the videos, pass the proper vid id in the link so it’s acting like a single entry page:

exp:weblog:entries weblog="video" rdf="off" disable="categories|member_data|trackbacks" limit="8"}
  <div class="Grid">
             <h5>{title}</h5>
<p>            <a href="http://{video_path}{file_name" rel="vidbox" title="{caption}">{video_path}{file_name }_tn.jpg</a><br />
      </div><br />
{paginate}<br />
          <div class="PaginationWrapper FloatLeft"><br />
            <div class="Pagination"><br />
               {pagination_links}<br />
            </div><br />
          </div><br />
{/paginate}<br />
{/exp:weblog:entries}

That’s a really simple example, but you get the gist.  Feeds aren’t limited to a single vid- can do playlists, multiple players, etc.  But as long as you can figure out what you want outside of EE?  Getting EE to give you the properly formated output is generally cake.

Someone at this site wrote an SMF forum importer.

You might check this thread- lot of talk about slideshow options and tutorials.  The logic would be the same.  I’ve done it via xml with videos- basically, you just set a template to ‘xml’ and use a weblog tag to pump out whatever you want.

Great thanks for that example and info.  However, do you have any suggestions or links for dynamically updating the Lightbox utility as Mark mentioned?

OKAY that’s it I’m a member !! just great

will probably need some help in the future so will stick around in the forum a lot 😉

thanks for your replies and help

regards
zhangfei