Thread

Hi everyone,

I have been reading more about EE lately and would like to ask a few more questions.

Photo-Gallery Options in EE

q.) Can EE users create their own gallery? Much like some open source gallery software such as coppermine and gallery2? If so what kind of user permissions exist? Could I say restrict new albums and image uploads to the gallery to users who have made 10 posts or more in a forum?

User Permissions in EE

q.) Drupal seems extremely powerful in terms of defining user roles and permissions. Is it possible to create user roles and permissions in EE that are similar in power to Drupal? Or better yet, what kind of user permission control exists in EE? Links to Wiki’s / Documentation / Tutes would be fine.

Google Sitemaps

q.) I read a post by a Webmaster world member who mentioned some frustration setting up Google Sitemaps with EE. This was approximately a year ago so I guess this could have changed since then, however is it relatively easy to set up and maintain a sitemap with EE?

EE 2.0

q.) Finally I am aware that EE 2.0 is due to be released soon. If I bought a license now, will it allow me to upgrade to EE 2.0 at no additional cost? If not what costs would be involved? Also the screencast demo on the site for EE 2.0 didn’t work for me any ideas?

Thanks alot,
Cheers,
Gavin.

As far as sitemaps are concerned, here’s what I’m doing:

a) remove index.php
b) set up a “sitemap” template group
c) stick the code to generate the sitemap into this template group’s “index” template.

Google seems happy enough to pull “http://my.site/sitemap”...

Hi Gavin,

Photo-Gallery Options in EE

q.) Can EE users create their own gallery? Much like some open source gallery software such as coppermine and gallery2? If so what kind of user permissions exist? Could I say restrict new albums and image uploads to the gallery to users who have made 10 posts or more in a forum?

EE’s Gallery module isn’t like Coppermine or Gallery2 in that respect. Its meant to be a personal photo gallery for a single or small group of users. However, depending on what you want to accomplish you can configure a weblog to work as a community photo blog where members with proper permissions could contribute entries.

Allowing uploads based on number of forum posts would require customization.

User Permissions in EE

q.) Drupal seems extremely powerful in terms of defining user roles and permissions. Is it possible to create user roles and permissions in EE that are similar in power to Drupal? Or better yet, what kind of user permission control exists in EE? Links to Wiki’s / Documentation / Tutes would be fine.

I’m not familiar with Drupal’s member ship system so I can’t make a direct comparision. EE’s member system works via Member Groups where you assign a member to a group. You can have as many member groups as you need and can set different permissions for each group. You can find more information in the Member Module docs.

Google Sitemaps

q.) I read a post by a Webmaster world member who mentioned some frustration setting up Google Sitemaps with EE. This was approximately a year ago so I guess this could have changed since then, however is it relatively easy to set up and maintain a sitemap with EE?

The Google Sitemaps article in the EE wiki is a good starting place to review this. There is also a 3rd party Google Sitemaps module for EE. I’ve not used it personally so this is a reference, not a recommendation.

EE 2.0

q.) Finally I am aware that EE 2.0 is due to be released soon. If I bought a license now, will it allow me to upgrade to EE 2.0 at no additional cost? If not what costs would be involved?

The available information on 2.0, including possible upgrade costs, are covered in the Sneak preview faq. If its not there, the information isn’t publicly available yet.

Also the screencast demo on the site for EE 2.0 didn’t work for me any ideas?

The screencast uses the latest version of Quicktime, so that would be the place I’d start. What error are you getting or what specifically happens when you try to view the video?

I’m not familiar with Drupal’s member ship system so I can’t make a direct comparision. EE’s member system works via Member Groups where you assign a member to a group. You can have as many member groups as you need and can set different permissions for each group.

Drupal allows each user account to be a member of as many groups as you see fit, which makes it straightforward to tack on fine-grained permissions to individual user accounts. EE up to 1.6 at least is constrained by the lack of support for membership in multiple groups and the one member, one group model does not scale well to implement complex permissioning schemes.

I really hope that EE 2.0 will address this pet peeve of mine 😉

Hi, Gavin. Were you able to get your questions answered in this thread?

Sorry it took me a while to come back to this.

Expression Engine seems like a great solution, but what I really need is a way for users to to manage their own album, kind of like Flickr.

One of the sites I currently manage is a combination of 3 open source projects Joomla / Coppermine and SMF the SMF and Coppermine are bridged which allows for user syncronisation.

Users can write forum posts and upload images to the gallery. Joomla is used for front page content and articles.

For maintenance reasons and sake of simplicity I’m looking for a content management system that can handle all 3 tasks.

Expression engine seems to have the content management, blogging, articles, and forum discussions side of things handled well, its just a gallery that seems to be lacking.

So thanks for your replies so far.

PS: I was able to view the EE 2.0 screencast in the end, my internet connection was just a bit too slow that’s all.

The gallery really isn’t going to be a great way to handle it- I’d probably go with Les’s suggestion of using a weblog to create a communal gallery- and it’s not hard to allow them to filter it to show just entries by a given user.  On the flip side- you could just use Flikr and integrate that.  Those are the two options I’d explore.

Have you given one of the trial options a try?  That might be the best way to get a feel for how EE would work to meet your requirements?

Gavin,

Expression Engine’s gallery/XML generating capabilities + Solspace’s Gallery Extended 2 + Slideshow Pro is all you might be needing.
It takes a bit of tweaking but you can easily let users create a blog entry and attach photos to that blog entry. 😊