Thread

First, I am sorry about the length of the post.

I have been considering switching our site over to a CMS platform, I have looked at a few projects and from recommendation of a friend who does CMS sites as a business, he recommended Typo3, but I came accross EE and initially was very interested because it looks very powerful and exactly what we are looking for.  Then I logged into the demo and purchased the 30 day hosted trial option, and now I am left with mixed feelings.  Not that what I see is bad, but more so confusing and leaves me with lots of questions. 

I now understand the value of “weblogs” at first I really felt I was stuck looking at a blog engine trying to go CMS.  But I still feel confused as a lot of what I am expecting to see, I don’t see.  What little experience I have with CMS systems, I am expecting to see some sort of auto navigation menu generation as you add pages, WYSIWYG editors for “content areas”, as well as a few other things.  Anyway, here are the questions I came up with that may help steer me into the right direction.  But first, a little bit about how we maintain our site right now.

We have two sites, they both work off a index.html file, and a subpage template in dream weaver, I edit the shared elements within index.html and the template file, which then goes out the rest of the pages, then I use Dreamweaver with the site up load feature to modify whatever content in each of the pages.  This works fairly well, I really don’t have any major issues.  The real reason I am looking at a CMS is that I am looking at combining the two sites together, going from two 8 page websites, to one site with initially 15-20 pages, and expand it out to 100+ pages.  We are a technology value added reseller with a flagship product we developed in house.  We are planning on creating a lot of landing pages and eventually white papers and articles to generate content and interest, as well as lots of pages on our flag ship product discussing the benefits of our system.

I have gone through the video tutorials and quick start, but I am still left with lots of questions.  Typically I will have a designer build the shell of the website or design, and I will maintain it and make on going changes as well as integrate web 2.0 features and analytic type of features.

1)  When creating things such as a footer, header, shared navigation section, how do you do this with EE.  Do you create a separate template group to handle the shared “web parts” or do you create these template files within the main template group, and just embed them into your files?  I am used to use Dream Weaver templates and PHP Includes.

2)  I am surprised by the lack of WYSIWYG for the template editor, even if just to touch up, I am very comfortable editing HTML, but I love using dream weaver as it saves a lot of time when doing touch up work and quick edits to content.  I am concerned that building pages in dream weaver and cut/paste the html into EE templates is going to add a lot of manual process and one of the big things I am confused about as I am concerned I am going to be doing more work with EE than Dream weaver, one thing I really love about dream weaver is the ability to create a “Site” and be able to manage the updating of the public site easily when making changes to the local files.  This is further a concern of mine when it comes to images, dream weaver makes it easy to manage these with uploading dependencies, which saves lots of clicks and needless pecking around.

3)  How do you handle images, is there any easy to manage images used in templates and weblogs, is it typically done by creating an images folder on the root of the domain and just ftp up the images required?

4)  I started building some content with the demo account for a example to reproduce our partners page, one element of that page is a logo, I didn’t see an image field type, so I assume you just create a field that holds the url of the logo after ftping the image up, is this the best way of doing this?

5)  How would you handle the concept of a sub page template for designing new pages, one of the biggest things I am looking to a CMS to solve, is creating a shell page that has the navigation, header/footer, analytics and web 2.0 code already in the page, and I can just click create new page based on template, and I just need to work in the “content area” of the page.  If you use another template to create a new template, what if you decide to change the navigation or something like that, how do you assure all pages are updated properly.

6)  We currently use word press, which I like a lot, but I think using the build in system to replace it would be easier to maintain in the long run, and give us the biggest value, but I don’t really see a “blog” interface, what it seems like is you create a weblog data set to hold your posts, then you create the front page, article page, and archive page from scratch.  Am I accurate in this view?  I don’t see this as a down side, as it allows you to build the interface from scratch and perhaps have more freedom, and even possibly easier to manage as you can use blog posts in other areas of the site easier.  But I want to make sure I am looking at it the right way.

7)  How is the performance of a fully dynamic site compared to a typical static site, should we expect any problems as we grow?  I did skim the cache sections and aware of the general idea of what is available.

I guess in a nutshell, I am mainly looking to see how can EE save me time and work over using DreamWeaver with templates and its site manager?

1)  When creating things such as a footer, header, shared navigation section, how do you do this with EE.  Do you create a separate template group to handle the shared “web parts” or do you create these template files within the main template group, and just embed them into your files?  I am used to use Dream Weaver templates and PHP Includes.

There are a few “standard” approaches, the most common is to use ExpressionEngine’s ability to “embed” templates. Embedding is very similar in concept to php includes.

2)  I am surprised by the lack of WYSIWYG for the template editor, even if just to touch up, I am very comfortable editing HTML, but I love using dream weaver as it saves a lot of time when doing touch up work and quick edits to content.  I am concerned that building pages in dream weaver and cut/paste the html into EE templates is going to add a lot of manual process and one of the big things I am confused about as I am concerned I am going to be doing more work with EE than Dream weaver, one thing I really love about dream weaver is the ability to create a “Site” and be able to manage the updating of the public site easily when making changes to the local files.  This is further a concern of mine when it comes to images, dream weaver makes it easy to manage these with uploading dependencies, which saves lots of clicks and needless pecking around.

Again, the focus of EE is giving developers flexibility and choice. There are a variety of WYSIWYG editors that work just fine with EE. Each editor has significant strengths and weaknesses which is why we don’t include a default one with EE. While one editor is perfect for a certain audience it causes headaches for another.

EE works just fine with Dreamweaver. You can save templates as “flat files” that can then be managed with Dreamweaver or your HTML editor of choice. I’ve personally built a number of sites using EE + Dreamweaver and once you make a few small adjustments to your work flow its really quite nice. Here are the things to keep in mind with this approach:

- The Template needs to be created in EE first, then saved as a flat file. At that point you can work with it via Dreamweaver’s built-in FTP.
- Use absolute URLs. There {site_url} is very handy for this. 

3)  How do you handle images, is there any easy to manage images used in templates and weblogs, is it typically done by creating an images folder on the root of the domain and just ftp up the images required?

For Images that belong in templates, FTP is how most people usually work. For images meant for weblog entries, creating an images upload folder is typically the way to go.

4)  I started building some content with the demo account for a example to reproduce our partners page, one element of that page is a logo, I didn’t see an image field type, so I assume you just create a field that holds the url of the logo after ftping the image up, is this the best way of doing this?

Its one way to do it. Really, there usually isn’t a “best way” in EE so much as “the way that works for this project.”

5)  How would you handle the concept of a sub page template for designing new pages, one of the biggest things I am looking to a CMS to solve, is creating a shell page that has the navigation, header/footer, analytics and web 2.0 code already in the page, and I can just click create new page based on template, and I just need to work in the “content area” of the page.  If you use another template to create a new template, what if you decide to change the navigation or something like that, how do you assure all pages are updated properly.

Again, Embeds are probably what you’re looking for. Michael Boyink, a long time EE user, has written an excellent series of blog articles called Building an ExpressionEngine Site that addresses some of your questions more specifically.

6)  We currently use word press, which I like a lot, but I think using the build in system to replace it would be easier to maintain in the long run, and give us the biggest value, but I don’t really see a “blog” interface, what it seems like is you create a weblog data set to hold your posts, then you create the front page, article page, and archive page from scratch.  Am I accurate in this view?  I don’t see this as a down side, as it allows you to build the interface from scratch and perhaps have more freedom, and even possibly easier to manage as you can use blog posts in other areas of the site easier.  But I want to make sure I am looking at it the right way.

That is a good start to getting a handle on how EE works. Basically your weblogs represent the structure of your data and the templates determine how you want things displayed. The biggest mental transition from most other systems to EE is this. EE makes almost zero assumptions about how weblogs and templates related to each other. This is the magic trick that gives EE its flexibility (and its learning curve).

Again, I think Boyink’s articles will really help you out in this respect.

7)  How is the performance of a fully dynamic site compared to a typical static site, should we expect any problems as we grow?  I did skim the cache sections and aware of the general idea of what is available.

Optimize EE and use a web host geared toward a dynamic environment and you’ll be fine.