Thread

Hello -

I’m representing the Florida Native Plant Society (http://www.fnps.org).  We are getting ready to modernize our site which designed as a home-grown CMS—
—- we have some 33 groups with group privileges (mostly chapter calendars)
—- committees with group privileges (announcements, page design)
—- organization announcements and calendar
—- membership control (for organization, not logins, though there is some relationship)
Our existing site runs on the basis of directly editing pages once logged in (as per Expression Engine).

I’ve brought my personal site (http://www.shirleydenton.com) up in CodeIgniter with BackendPro as a test—works like a charm, BackendPro most mostly to test for potential FNPS use as overkill for a single editor site.

I’ve recommended CodeIgniter with BackendPro as a base

From what I’m seeing of ExpressionEngine, it might be a huge boost in the right direction.

Any thoughts on limitations I should be aware of ?

Shirley

Hi Shirley,

Welcome to the forums. =)

The only question I would have is what you mean by editing pages directly once logged in. The reason I ask, we have another CMS, very limited in terms of what you’re wanting to do, it’s more for less robust sites, but there is no forum control panel and the user edits directly on the page. (See: http://mojomotor.com)

ExpressionEngine is more of a traditional control panel themed management system.

In terms of memberships and group privileges, our membership module allows for all of that you were discussing above. Please see our documentation on that in the user guide found here: http://ellislab.com/expressionengine/user-guide/modules/member/index.html

Let me know if you have any other concerns.

Thank you for your response—

Our current site seems to be somewhere between ExpressionEngine and MojoMotor in its needs.  We have quite a few site editors, each of whom can edit selected parts of the site, and the site edits are done from the pages themselves.  We are looking to upgrade since the code has gotten past “old”—but we want to maintain that similar level of ease in editing.

It is sounding like ExpressionEngine requires signing into a backend and that the pages are then edited from there?  How similar are they to the publicly available pages?

In an idea world, what I would envision is a site that has multiple groups, each group with an ability to manage a “subsite”—by this I mean, we’d force a common header and common menu across the “top” that only the webteam could change, but we’d allow for some context-sensitive menu development within sets of pages “subsites” that are accessed off of that top menu, and the group responsible for a “subsite” could have a simple menu generated semi-automatically for that “subsite” (perhaps a secondary vertical menu).

I almost want to be forcing the subsite concept onto the MojoMotor concept.

Easier to start from one of these, or easier to build from scratch ? (would use CodeIgniter with BackendPro to simplify group management).

Hi Shirley,

MojoMotor is fantastic for what it was designed to do, but if you need more than that, look at ExpressionEngine or CodeIgniter.

ExpressionEngine templates correlate 1:1 with what the end user sees. You can edit templates using the control panel or using flat files (via FTP, etc).

Based on what you said I’m hesitant to make a recommendation between EE or CI; it’s going to come down to the finer details of your implementation as to which is best. You probably know that EE modules have access to CodeIgniter’s libraries and helpers, too.

We do offer ExpressionEngine risk-free for 30 days to help make that determination, so if you think that would be enough time to do so, give it a shot before you possibly re-inventing the wheel.