Thread

I recently purchased EE commercial in order to create a fee-based article library (subscription library).

After fiddling with EE templating for 2 weeks, I realize that I’m spending a lot of time on an area I may do better hiring an expert and still not “getting it”. I may eventually figure out how to design the templating structure to enable targeted subscription areas with specific member groups, but I’m afraid by that time, my content will be no longer relevant.

My question is, at this point, should I just enter data (i.e. start copying and pasting the articles to build up my library collection), while at the same time, look for an EE designer to help me with the templating?

Or should I first build the library itself (design, simple commerce module, member groups) before adding data?

I already have the design - it should look similar to my other pre-existing websites - so the templating is a matter of tweaking EE to look like that and not a matter of coming up with a new design or corp logo. Thus it was tempting for me to believe that I could learn how to work with EE tags, but the learning curve has been steep for me, and right now time is something I no longer have as much of.

Thanks for your advice -
Plurky

Entering the data requires the underlying data structures (weblogs, custom fields, statuses, ...) to be completely defined. Depending on your needs, someone knowing EE in and out might have some clever ideas for optimizing that structure to make it easier to achieve the goals. If you begin entering data and later find that it would be better organised in another way, that modification would require a lot of extra work. Therefore, I’d only begin entering live data if it is guaranteed that the data structures will not change when hiring an expert.

Markus

I always do content/data entry as one of the last steps of a project for the reasons Markus mentions; you want to be sure the site it set up properly (custom field groups, sections, etc) before committing a bunch of data to it.