Thread

Hello EE! 

I have a couple of questions about EE and CI integration and see if EE is the right application for my project. 

A little background info:
I have been using CI for about 10 months now for a huge range of different projects within my company.  I have built a CRM system, Survey System, and a Guest Portal using CI.  I love using CI, and i’m very familiar with all the classes and helpers, and I have done some hacking to the core system as well to get it to work just right for my projects.  I have zero experience on the other hand with using Expression Engine.  But from what I read they are both very similar. 

My Upcoming “BIG” Project:
I’m about to undertake for my company rebuilding their corporate intranet.  Its a fairly large site that was written in PHP when I was pretty new at writing PHP code.  There are also quite a few of sub applications like a IT Help Desk, job opportunity submission page, Vendor look up and submit, and individual department pages. 

The overall design is getting a major face lift and I want to use the CI Framework to build the core application and many of the sub applications like the IT Help Desk, AD Authentication, and the Job Opportunities submission page using CI.  On the new intranet I’m looking to create blogs for the different departments like: Marketing, HR, IT, Culinary, Green Committee, and ESOP committee. My original plan was to create these pages using Wordpress and a custom CSS style sheet.  I was hoping to find a way to log in to the intranet once with the CI application and have the user already logged in with the Wordpress sites. 

But I’m wondering if Expression Engine would be a better CMS for this task? 
Some Questions:

-Would I be able to have one place on the intranet to log the user in? And give them   editing/commenting rights on their respective department pages depending on their LDAP Group Membership?

-How can i create multiple EE pages for each of the departments.  If in the future would it be easy enough to add additional departments?

-Can the editing interface be modified at all?  I noticed in the demo that the post editing field relied on html tags for formatting.  Most of my users have trouble using Word, can I make this a rich editor?

-Can I use MSSQL for a database?

-Does EE have “Pages” and “Posts” and “Links” the same way that Wordpress does?

-Will I be able to hit the ground running, if I throw down the cost of EE?  Is there much of learning curve compared to CodeIgniter? 

Thank you for answering my questions.  I’m always interested in learning about new tools and evaluating to see which one will be best for the job.

Would I be able to have one place on the intranet to log the user in? And give them   editing/commenting rights on their respective department pages depending on their LDAP Group Membership?

You would need to custom code the integration between your apps and EE.  It sounds like you have the skill to handle that.  There is no out of the box LDAP ability, but a custom add-on may be able to handle it.  I have not yet seen this done, though I’ve heard of some betas that I never heard further on.  A search of the forum for “ldap” may be enlightening.

How can i create multiple EE pages for each of the departments.  If in the future would it be easy enough to add additional departments?

You could either use the MSM for a Site per department, or just a weblog/template group/member group for each department.  In either case adding a department is a manual process.

Can the editing interface be modified at all?  I noticed in the demo that the post editing field relied on html tags for formatting.  Most of my users have trouble using Word, can I make this a rich editor?

There are WYSIWYG extensions - LG TinyMCE is quite popular.  You can also use a stand alone entry form to give access to users to post outside of the control panel.

Can I use MSSQL for a database?

No. Here are the minimum requirements.

Does EE have “Pages” and “Posts” and “Links” the same way that Wordpress does?

ExpressionEngine is not a page-based CMS. IT has templates, and weblogs.  Templates are for presentation and weblogs are for content.  You can set up your own custom fields in the weblogs to store nearly any type of data you need to.

Will I be able to hit the ground running, if I throw down the cost of EE?  Is there much of learning curve compared to CodeIgniter?

CI is a PHP Framework, EE doesn’t require any PHP knowledge unless you want to extend it.  You’ll need to learn EE’s template and tag system in order to proceed.  There are lots of resources for learning, including train-ee.com and eescreencasts.com.

I’d recommend trying out EE. =)

Thanks Lisa for the quick reply.  I guess i’m having some trouble figuring out how to organize a project like this.  I’m wondering if I should have a CI application with EE contained within it.  Or have a EE Site with CI applications contained within it.  Any recommendations on this would be a huge help!

I have also been doing some reading about EE 2.0, and since its built upon CI, wouldn’t I be able to create a CI Application and then have EE Pages where I need them?  Also should I wait for the new EE, to start building the intranet?

Thanks,
Steve

Well, EE and CI are independent - CI libraries are abstracted from EE’s, but they don’t interact at this point.

As far as 2.0 you can read the Sneak Preview and our blog about it. =)

To chirp in here:

I use EE for my school - I built an inventory system and a trouble ticket system very easily. I’m also learning to use CI - albeit slowly.

Each department in my school has access to “their” section of the the website, so they can update their department news and information.  Sounds like that might be similar to your situation?

I think the advantage of EE is everything is already written for you -

user authentication? Done.
user groups? Done.
very friendly control panel? Done.
huge number of helpful add-on’s? Done.
larger number of people who “know” EE? Done.
lot’s of modules (blacklist, mail list, etc..) Done.
forum / wiki integrated? Done.

...and lot’s more…

Considering the upcoming switch to 2.0, and that EE will be written in CI, I can’t see a compelling reason NOT to use EE. If you need to extend EE to do something, it sounds like you can do that. I would write you intranet in EE - why reinvent the wheel? 

One of the things I really like about EE is how well it let’s me do cool stuff for my school - easily and quickly. Ellis lab writes clean, good, secure, optimized code. Support is excellent.

I would be happy to show you around my site - PM me if you are interested.

Warmly,

Bill