Thread

I’m a huge fan of EE, but granted there are situations where EE doesn’t fit perfectly.

For a Web 2.0 project, I was asked about good CMS solutions (OS and PHP based preferred) that are great in user submissions (incl. videos), rating/voting, profile based recommendations of new content and syndication (customized RSS/newsletters, pinging, ...). Customization/templating and development should be straightforward if possible.

However, I’m not really up to the latest developments here and it seems a lot of CMS are advertising “Web 2.0” features, but are somehow vague in what they offer, how robust they are and how easy they are to work with.

Anyone can share some recommendations/experiences in this field?

Thanks a lot

-Markus

The one you’ll hear come up a lot when your required feature set is discussed is Joomla. I’m not going to recommend it, but instead tell you to stay far, far away from it. If you use EE, Joomla will drive you crazy. I found it to be a CMS for people that just want to plug in a theme and be on their way.

That being said, I just finished a site in EE that has some of the features you list. A lot of it was custom modules, etc. but it is possible—just a lot of work.

Thanks, Ryan. Yes, I have some Joomla stories experienced myself ... know what you mean. I was more hoping for some of the lesser known “Web 2.0” CMS projects that are popping up here and there, but what I found was either lacking documentation, ease of use for the developer and/or stability :-(

You’re totally right that most of the features listed can be done with EE and custom coding, but honestly I don’t know the planned project in detail, so there might be license concerns involved as well (no knind of community/blogging service allowed).

Again - thanks for sharing!

Markus

OK, so you know what I’m talking about. 😉

Markus, this isn’t open source (or free) but full of features: http://www.socialengine.net/

I’ve never used it, but maybe worth a shot.

I’ve implemented Social Engine on one of my client’s sites. It works fairly well, and there are third party apps you can use with it.

I installed it in the same MySQL database so that I could do queries easily to show new members, etc.

Social Engine looks like it can get pricey quick!

I’ve had an idea for a site for a while, and it seems pretty straight forward. I want people to be able to submit user generated content (either anonymously or not), have it admin approved, other members to vote on that approved content, and after a set time period, the content gets a final up or down vote (or a neutral if no threshold is met).

Kinda like digg meets metafilter meets postsecret, but I can’t figure out a way to do this in EE (and the license precludes the final ideas I have), so I too have been looking around and not being happy with the search. I started teaching myself ruby on rails, but found out my host doesn’t support that. So I’ve been playing around with rolling my own, but honestly, if I knew that much I probably wouldn’t be using EE in the first place.

I’m kind of excited about codeigniter, but again, learning curve precludes me from doing what I want.

I’ve played with joombla and “php nuke,” but couldn’t get either of these to work either (for me needs).

I think I am in a holding pattern for EE 2.0 and I’ll see from there.

I ran into Dolphin a while ago.

Never used it myself so I can’t tell you if it’s flexible, or safe, but they have quite a few products that look interesting.

I think Drupal might be worth looking into for something like this.

Thanks for all your suggestions.

I wasn’t aware of Dolphin at all - looks interesting ... but perhaps I’m too used to EE: I found the customisation somehow frustrating and it seemed to methere is a lack of good documentation. And of course, nothing beats the EE community regarding support.

I’m still evaluating Social Engine - and Drupal got my interest as well: Even books are available on customising Drupal and it has a long history and a large community.

Honestly, I had a look at a lot of tools in the last ten days, but none really seemed to be comparable to EE in support and flexibility. (Which makes me feeling a bit proud to know and trust EE since the first PB 😊

Markus

There’s also PHPFox (http://www.phpfox.com). Its $300 but you can edit/customize the php script all you want. Has all the typical “2.0” features… (copy pasting from their site)
  *  AJAX Capabilities
  * Video Module
  * Music Module
  * Gallery Module
  * Blog Module
  * Forum Module
  * Poll Module
  * Group Module
  * Classified Module
  * Quiz Module
  * Event Module
  * Mulit-language Capabilities
  * Tags
  * RSS
  * Instant Messenger
  * Chat & Shoutbox
  * ProTheme Plug-in
  * Social Bookmarking
  * Plug-in Importer
  * My Account
  * User Profiles
  * Admin Control Panel
I’m currently implementing it on a site… installation was a snap… but trying to get a hang of the customization part.

I’d stick with EE and just customize where necessary (or use a great firm like Solspace to help with the effort).

Check out MatrixWatch.com as an example for what you can do with EE from a user-generated content perspective.

And if you find a way to execute on up/down voting, please let me know.