Thread

I am on the fence if EE is a good fit for our needs.

We currently run two commercial sites, each about 8 pages each.  We have decided it is best to roll our second site under our main site when we redo the site.  It is our flagship product, but more importantly we plan on building it out to about 40 different pages.

Blogging is something that is very important to us as well.

I see EE an excellent fit for some elements of our site, like the blog, and “Our Partners” page, as well as news.  But templates seem to be a little more difficult to work with than just dreamweaver, site manager, and dreamweaver templates.  I see you can save the template as a file and work in dreamweaver, but it feels like I am going to do more grunt work rather than less.

The admin interface seems heavily focused on WebLog editing and user membership.  I don’t seem to get the feel of “content management”.  The biggest reason I am looking at a CMS is to making it easier to maintain and add pages down the road.

I understand the value of how weblog is implemented with EE, and I see a lot of good uses of this, but what can EE do to help me manage more content focused pages?

Hi, Saxi—

This is more of a mind-set.  You can easy rename “weblog” to whatever you want, there is an option for that in the Admin area.  For instance, I often use “Section”.  So I’ll have a section that is a straight up weblog; but another section that handles things like “about the staff” type pages.  If the site as a whole has to manage a product, that could be another “section”.

It’s very easy to get lost in the “weblog” mind-set.  But if you step back and consider that you can set up your own category groups *and* custom field groups per weblog (/section), then you’ll see that you’re talking about managing data.  Each entry is simply data entered to describe a part of that section.

From what you describe, I would focus on ExpressionEngine and possibly the Multiple Site Manager (depending on how you want to separate your products/site).  But I think that ExpressionEngine easily fits the bill for your described implementation.

It sounds like you tried EE? But if not, go ahead and give it a whirl.

I’m actually very comfortable with the weblog concept (how EE does it), and I like it a lot.  I see it as a array of data, so presentation can be anyway you like it.  Very fond of that.

But where I am on the fence, is how EE will make my life easier for the non-weblog enabled pages.

For example, our flagship product will have 20-30 pages.  None of which will really depend on weblog functionality, it is more sales pages, and product description, as well as more in depth technical copy.

Also looking at managing lots of landing pages (entry points to particular products, services, or resources like a white paper into our site).

For blog and news I see EE will work great, but how can it make my life easier for other pages.

The way that I would handle your flagship product would be to, in fact, use a weblog.  For instance, expressionengine.com - about our flagship product, uses a series of weblogs to handle the data pertinent to ExpressionEngine; and does so under the Multiple Site Manager so that we can handle CodeIgniter separately.

So for your sales page, product description - depending on how in depth those are, I would simply make them weblog entries. Have you read Derek’s Behind the Curtain series in our blog? It goes into some details on how our own sites are handled.

no, but I will have a look at his series.

So your saying the page content itself would be an article rather than a specific page?

Our site, although not really all that much similar to, will function like http://www.cuteftp.com/eft/
Where we have a product or service listing, but they have very detailed pages specific to that product.

In this example, the content in the right side of the page would be an article rather than a specific page?  Then you would use categories for the products themselves?  I assume you support sub categories without a problem?

You would need to sit down and map it out; but I can easily see setting that up as a main product page, where the links are relationships to the product and therefore their own entries; or by using categories or other methods.  But essentially, yes, any content that needs to be added and edited should be an entry in a weblog somewhere. =)

Categories are hierarchal, absolutely.

Ok, I think I am starting to get the picture, so instead of just using weblogs for things like news, blogs, and other data that frequently gets updated, you would use it for the page structure as well.  So instead of having templates for all the pages in the system, you would have articles and the navigation would be built by the “categories” of that weblog.

In a nutshell, you would have a navigation bar, and a template or two for different page layouts, but pages would actually exist in weblogs themselves.

Yes, and you can use Relationships to build navigation as well; there’s a Behind the Curtain article on that which is pretty neat.  But yes, essentially, your content would all be stored as entries. You can also use the Pages Module to give custom URIs as needed. =)

If pages are stored in articles rather than pages.

How do you handle individual page data like unique meta keywords, description, title and such for each individual page, I am reading through behind the curtain and it seems like they are using shared meta data for all pages in a group of templates.

Pages simply give a custom URI to a weblog entry. 

You would handle individual data like that by using custom fields to store the information. =)

It’s a tough paradigm shift coming from a DW world…but you have to give up the notion of “pages” existing until your content gets rendered into the browser. 

You are not storing “pages” in EE - you are storing content in weblogs—be it metadata or visible content.  You are storing presentation in CSS and EE templates.  EE merges the css, EE template, and weblog entry (or entries) together into a page when it renders.

I put together a quick tutorial on static content in EE that might help:
http://www.boyink.com/splaat/comments/no-module-required-static-content-in-expressionengine

The working example of the code featured in the tutorial is here:
http://www.boyink.com/splaat/static/