Thread

I’m a teacher, and thinking of moving a school website from e107 to EE. I love what I’ve seen so far; it looks like a really solid application. But I have many questions which I could not find answers to:

1/
The school is non-profit making. ie. The parents association own the school and the board of governors (also parents) run it. I get paid a little each month for developing the website and adding content, but apart from that there is no budget for it. So the license and updates would have to come out of the money I earn from the development. Can I buy the 99$ licence on behalf of the school? The commercial license is the same amount as I get for two months of development (at least a couple of hours a night and much more on the weekend - as you can work out, I do it as a favour and because I’m interested in the technology, not for the money! lol).

2/
e107 is great. I’ve done several small sites with it for myself and acquaintances. However, it is struggling to accomodate a school community - it is difficult for teachers/students to add content (especially images and attachments) and it is difficult for me to manage their content.

So, can EE do the things e107 is providing for us:

a. easy-to-create, dhtml (eg. drop-downs and expanding sublinks) menu system
b. easy themeing with html and css templates
c. static pages of information about the school
d. categorised download section (mostly for pdf files)
e. multi-language content
f. categorised image galleries
g. ‘daily news’ section (with ‘extended news’ option)
h. categorised ‘articles’, with publishing permissions and moderation control
  (Eg. each yeargroup or subject is a category, so teachers can post course info)
i. email contact form, categorised by department
j. a blog for each teacher which allows students to comment (or even a blog for every member?)
k. subscribable newsletters (note the plural - we have more than one)

And can it do some of these things which e107 is finding tough to do:

l. use tags and keywords (or just generally - can it cross-reference content?)
m. make uploading/management of attachments and images very easy
n. have a good wysiwyg editor for adding content
o. have any community features, like creating ‘groups’ (shared blogs)
p. have a finely-layered permission system to separate admin, teachers, students, parents, tec
q. have a good links repository/directory
r. a profile page that lists the users blogs/comments/posts/attachments/discussions and allows management of them
s. a wiki plugin, for collaborative work?

3/
Assuming the answer to most of that is ‘yes’, are all these extra plugins free? Is there an OS community making plugins for EE? Or do 3rd parties tend to sell their developments?
Would this actually end up costing me 200-500$ to get all the necessary plugins?

4/
Regarding the licensing, does the software ‘phone home’? If so, will this be an issue if we decide to move hosting to our own school server at somepoint in the future (at the moment we are fine using a cheap shared-host)?

Thanks so much for answering all these questions. I’ve downloaded the free core, and will be trying it out over the next week or so, but only someone with experience can guide me through the above queries. I’m also trying Drupal. It’s pretty good, but no-where near as polished or bugfree as EE.

By the way, the orange is just a test of question M.
I want to see where it goes, and if I can manage it from my profile.

Cheers!

My oh my, that is a lot of questions.  Well, welcome to the forums, and with a bang, for sure!  Let’s dig in, shall we?

Before I do begin, I would like to ask you to review the license and this kb entry.  Now, since these are all teachers for the one organization, your usage should be fine; but there are technical reasons as well that I wish for you to review those links.

a. easy-to-create, dhtml (eg. drop-downs and expanding sublinks) menu system
b. easy themeing with html and css templates
c. static pages of information about the school
d. categorised download section (mostly for pdf files)
e. multi-language content
f. categorised image galleries
g. ‘daily news’ section (with ‘extended news’ option)
h. categorised ‘articles’, with publishing permissions and moderation control
(Eg. each yeargroup or subject is a category, so teachers can post course info)
i. email contact form, categorised by department
j. a blog for each teacher which allows students to comment (or even a blog for every member?)
k. subscribable newsletters (note the plural - we have more than one)

a and b are both covered by the template system; it is extremely powerful and flexible and entirely in your control.

For c, have a look at the Pages Module.

For e, have a look at the Languages category of the wiki.

f-i are all included, and j is why I included that first information.

For k, the Mailing List module is part of the full version.

l. use tags and keywords (or just generally - can it cross-reference content?)
m. make uploading/management of attachments and images very easy
n. have a good wysiwyg editor for adding content
o. have any community features, like creating ‘groups’ (shared blogs)
p. have a finely-layered permission system to separate admin, teachers, students, parents, tec
q. have a good links repository/directory
r. a profile page that lists the users blogs/comments/posts/attachments/discussions and allows management of them
s. a wiki plugin, for collaborative work?

For l, check out the newly certified Tag Module.  There are also relationships, and reverse relationships built into ExpressionEngine.

For m, there is a file upload wizard included, and there are several extensions to make this easier depending on context.

For o, you can have community blogs where many people contribute, and that is one of ExpressionEngine’s many strengths.

For q, you would use a weblog as a “data container”, with custom fields created to handle that data, and output into the template in the fashion of a link directory.  This is no problem.

For r, there is a profile page (see the top of these forums, “View Profile”, and you can expand on it by passing the username in the segment and pulling data out that way.  You might also choose “My Account” to see the front-end, account management area.  For what you are after, it would require some customization; and again, reviewing the license here is important.

For s, we have a Wiki Module which is included in the full version of ExpressionEngine.

You’re already playing with EECore, but you might consider the hosted demo for the Mailing List, Pages, and Wiki modules.

Thanks you very much for your time replying.
OK, I’ll experiment for a while with the free core, and consider my options.

One of the reasons I am considering Drupal is that it has a Moodle bridge now
(ie. sharing/sycronising their user databases, so only one login is necessary).
I don’t suppose EE will have any bridges with other OS software?

Cheers!

Moodle is an excellent, fairly specialized package; they were using it my last year at Smith.

It would be possible to build an extension / module to bridge the two memberships, probably.  You can read about developing extensins in our development documentation