EE + CI pondering

We love CodeIgniter. We love ExpressionEngine. But, we don’t yet have what I would consider an elegant solution for projects that fall in between the two. An example of this is a website that requires a basic CMS front-end, but also an extensive custom-built customer portal.

The front-end would be an obvious EE task. But in many cases I find myself wishing we could develop the portal as a CI project. Note that there would also be a lot of areas of cross-over, like if you wanted the content in the portal manageable through EE’s control panel.

Options that we know of include:

1. Do portal as an EE Module?

In this forum, it seems that the general answer is to develop the portal using EE developer tools. In principle, since EE is built on CI, CI developers are “right at home.” But I’m not so sure. For situations like a portal, where there area many pages and sections, it seems burdensome to have to pass everything through module tags in EE templates.

2. Dual Install?

We’ve done projects where we’ve ran both an EE install and a CI install side by side, and we use tricks to route sections of the site to one or the other. This does not allow for easy sharing of template objects, and it is not exactly elegant.

3. Get Hacky?

We’ve thought about more hacky techniques such as extending the EE front-end controller in certain ways. They all are a bit ugly.

4. Use EE for Control Center /Content DB and CI for everything else?

We’ve recently been discussing the idea of building the entire site using CI (CI template extension etc), but using EE’s content database and control center. To help with this, we would port over code to make a special EE-in-CI model: something designed top make it easy to access channel entries from a CI project.

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Thoughts - are we missing an obvious solution here?