Thread

At the end of the day, here’s what we’ll need:

General CMS - for content, articles and such

Blog (for multiple bloggers)

Robust Ecommerce (selling books, cds and such)- needs to receive more than just paypal payment…

Forums

Calendar

Online Registration for Events (Seminars and such) with the ability to receive payment (both cc and check)

Online Donation system taking various payment methods with immediate receipt generated.

Would you comment on how or if expression engine might help us with our project?  My main concerns are the ecommerce, donation and event registration needs as it seems that yours and many other cms platforms handle the other needs pretty well.

Also, tell me about the EE’s seo.

All the best,

Blayne Chastain

Hello, Ashley, and welcome to our community!

Blogs, Forums, Calendar are all out of the box.  You can see the forums in use right here, and view our Showcase to see the variety of sites that use EE, including the Event Calendar category.

With the calendar, each event is an entry in a weblog, so you can use comments as an event registration medium.  This would take some thinking through but is definitely possible.

Currently, we only support the Simple Commerce Module.  EE supports the building of modules, plugins, and extensinos, so you could possibly build your own e-commerce system or integrate with another, see our development documentation. You might also look into aMember as I believe some have used that to integrate with other eCommerce packages.

You could do the online donation system with the Simple Commerce Module if you were ok using Paypal for that; just set up entries with varying amounts of donations and have people “buy” those.  Easy!

As far as SEO, the public site is all in templates you build. EE’s URLs are very friendly, and content is the important SEO factor, so SEO is no problem.

I’d suggest having a look at our trial options and giving EE a shot.