Thread

Hi folks,
After much searching and home work I have decided…ya at least I made a decision… 😊 that there are 2 CMSs in the running for my wife and I and our new web site. EE and Silverstripe. Don’t know which one yet.

I have contacted EE and Lisa Wess was kind enough to answer some of my questions. She also suggested I post here in order to get in contact w/ community members that have worked on Real Estate sites involved w/ MLS/IDX. So please any community members who have worked or are capable of working w/ php, mysql, to get data and photos from MLS and parse data into a mysql db, and write queries to display data on the web site, please feel free to contact me.

Current roadmap= Cron job to get ftp downloads of my MLS/IDX data provider, parse to mysql db. Initial data download approx. 1600mb then data updated once every 24 hours.

Thought it best to have 2 dbs. One for the MLS data and one for the general web site data in case for example if the MLS db has problems the rest of the site would work.

Your thoughts…?

Can anyone tell me what the minimum ram requirements might be?

Silverstripe.com vs. EE

-EE seems to be alot quicker.
-EE seems more mature.

Is there a development roadmap for EE?

-Silverstripe has a powerful latest and greatest technology team behind it (Google folks).
-Silverstripe is free although from my perspective that is not an issue.
-We like Silverstripe’s text editor better.
-Silverstipe the admin interface seems to be quite a bit more intuitive. Image, file, page management and so on.

We are looking to hire someone for the look/feel design of the templates and for the programming of the MLS IDX solution. This can be a 2 part project web site design, custom MLS/IDX solution or all in one.

I have a rfq form filled out that I will be happy to send to anyone that might be interested. It has what some of our ideas are and what we are looking for w/ regard to this project. We would appreciate a referral or if you guys could recommend a reliable person(s) for this project.

I don’t want to discuss budget here…but we know this will cost some money. :coolsmile:

Thank you for your time and consideration and please let us know your thoughts.

I can speak to some of these questions, so if you don’t mind… =)

Here is our policy on roadmaps.

You did mention that you prefer Silverstripe’s text editor, so I wanted to speak to that.  In ExpressionEngine, you can save templates as text files and use any any text editor you want.  The docs on that are here.

As for hiring someone, we do ask that you post on the Job Board or contact some of the Pro Network Members for quotes. =)

Looking forward to other’s thoughts on the MLS aspect of this.

A couple of points…

1. The “Google folks” are funding Silverstripe, not developing it. Google sponsored Silverstripe as part of its Summer of Code program. While the Silverstripe team certainly deserves congratulations for that achievement, that is not same thing as Google developing Silverstripe. They aren’t.

2. Silverstripe has the “latest and greatest tech”... There is nothing tech wise in Silverstripe that couldn’t be implemented in EE. You like Silverstripe’s Text Editor? Its just TinyMCE which you can also implement in EE along with a host of other editors. You can certainly use AJAX with EE’s template system.

And therein lies the big difference between Silverstripe and EE and most other CMS tools. Tools like Silverstripe locks you into their solutions. EE gives you and your developer choice. Use whatever Texteditor you like. Use whatever AJAX solution you like. Don’t have php5, which Silverstripe requires, that’s fine, use php4, which is still by far the dominant version in the real world.

Silverstripe is a promising open source CMS with some interesting ideas, don’t get me wrong. And kudos to their team for accomplishing what they have. But to say that EE and Silverstripe are on the same level in terms of maturity, power, and flexibility is simply not true. Saying that they are both valid options for your project is certainly true. Silverstripe’s built-in solutions may appeal to you more than implementing your own solutions into EE.

As to your server requirements such as ram, that is going to vary based on your actual implementation. Our recommendation is always to work with a server admin familiar with MySQL and database applications or be absolutely ready to learn such things on the job. Server support and configuration is beyond what we offer with our tech support.

My recommendation is to try both and see which one works for your needs better.

Thanks Leslie but I dont think I wrote “But to say that EE and Silverstripe are on the same level in terms of maturity, power, and flexibility is simply not true.” :roll:

I actually wrote that EE was MORE mature. 😉
Kind regards, Cap’n Mike

Can’t a guy be a bit defensive about his baby? 😊

I don’t know much about Silverstripe, but since you’ve admitted that EE is faster and more mature, I will tell you that the EE team is very responsive and (I’m biased here, I bet) better programmers than Google’s funded team.  Google’s getting too big to focus on one product and get it done tight.  EE has done an excellent job, and I know they are very responsive.  I’ve personally had Ellislab add features in some of their code (in CodeIgniter) at my request, so I know they are very responsive. 

I agree on the text editor—EE can use any text editor for the templates, as Lisa pointed out.  And I think you can add TinyMCE like features to the posting screen…. or post directly from some of the great offline, local editors via the moblog interface.  Which is better than TinyMCE any day, I think (plus, it allows your posts to not be crufted up with that auto-generated HTML as much. 

I think you’ll be better pleased with EE in the long run, myself.  😊  And I wish I was paid by Ellislab, but I’m not, alas.  :D

As far as your project, I’m a php/mysql guy by trade, so you could send me your rfq and I’ll take a look.  It doesn’t sound like it’s impossible, by any means.  It does sound like a lot of work, though. 

Vanceone

The post from Akash was removed because he is not a member of the EE community. He’s some developer trolling our forums for work, which is not allowed.

Vanceone, Leslie was correct…Silverstripe… the google folks are helping w/ the funding of Silverstripe and the google summer of code contributions, but apart from that the developers of Silverstripe are independent from google.

Thank you for your comments and my tree is really starting to lean toward EE. 😊

If I could just get a handle on the minimum ram issue. Our current site gets about 1000-1500 uniques a month and about a 1GB of bandwidth so its not high traffic. Akash wrote that I need 1GB of ram which to me seems way excessive to start with. I was thinking more along the lines of 256mb (Media Temple DV). The folks at MT thought I would be just fine with their grid solution so after they said that I thought I go up one level to the DV.

I know Silverstripe requires a minimum of 32mb. I havent been able to get hooked up with anyone who is actually hosting a MLS/IDX mysql db but I never imagined that I need 1 GB of ram for a REALTORS(R) web site. :-(

Anyways…thank you for your comments…

The ram issue? 

Honestly, you shouldn’t need that.  And I would look at engine hosting instead of media temple…. it’s run by an affiliate of Ellislab, so they tune their servers to run EE well.  Plus it has distributed mysql databases, excellent response and hosting….  for a business class website, they are good. 

You won’t need 1 GB of ram.  Are you looking at a dedicated server setup?  You shouldn’t need one, not at all.  Not at those levels of hits and bandwidth requirements… (only 1 GB a month?  That’s nothing!).  You have lots of mysql space requirements, but it’s not accessed much.  256 mb would be fine, I think. 

Neville could chime in here (he’s EE’s hosting guru) but I’m sure I’m pretty well on the right lines here.  The MLS/DX db issue really doesn’t matter—it’s just a mysql db, albeit a big one.  Not too bad at all, really. 

And glad you are looking at EE!

Mike, please be very careful when receiving phone calls or comments from people like Akash. He’s not a known member of this community. Based on his response he has no idea what he’s talking about in terms of php/mysql applications.

There really isn’t a way to give you RAM requirements until your site is built. Some EE sites run just fine very little RAM and others will require a lot. Its really dependent on your specific design, EE implementation, active queries, concurrent users, and a host of other factors that can’t be known until something concrete is built. Measuring server requirements by number of unique visitors is a very poor way to measure what a site will require server wise. This is true of any php/mysql solution. My recommendation is to use a hosted solution with a server admin who really knows their way around MySQL and scaling sites as required.

We provide this at EngineHosting of course but there are certainly a wide variety of hosting providers to choose from. Server administration is a science and an art. There is a reason trained professionals handle this at the higher levels. Its not something we recommend people who aren’t familiar with a php/mysql solution dabble in, especially on business critical items. You’ll save yourself a lot of hassle and headache by optimizing EE (or whatever solution you choose) as best as possible and let the server admin worry about the specifics.