Thread

Hi guys,

me and 2 friends are starting a big new project and are wondering if it’s possible to do in EE. I know you can do ecommerce and membersites in EE, I’m just wondering if some of the more particular features are possible. I don’t want to start in EE and then realize I am limited by the technology.

Some Details:

It’s a platform that brings two different types of audiences together: the business owners and the people that can work for them. Sorry, cant go into more detail than that.

The site will have to be able to manage a maximum of about 500.000 members.

There will be 4 types of members: the business owners, the users, “premium” users and “premium” owners.

All business owners have to pay a monthly fee to sign up. Premium users pay a bit more for premium features.

We also take a small percentage from every completed transaction.

Premium users and owners will be highlighted differently from regular users.

You will be able to search for members and business based on where they are from, how far they are from you, budget of project, and other criteria.

Business owners will be able to post jobs, users will be able to apply to them.

Business owners can rate users after a project has been completed. Well-rated users will have a different visual styling from regular users.

In your personal area, you will be able to overview all projects you have participated in, add user’s to favorites, and edit all your core data.

Users have to be verified manually before they can participate.

We will sell ad space.

All Members will have their own public pages they can edit.

There will be an archive of completed projects that all users can access, for a fee. If they pay to access a certain project there, the money they pay is split between the business that originally posted the project and us.

Basically, it will have a lot of functionality that you’d see at a site like elance or yelp.

About me:

I’m an interaction designer and frontend developer. I can code a bit in PHP as well, but I dont know if I could code extra modules in CodeIgniter. Lets just assume for now that I can’t.

Is this possible with EE? What plugins would I need to get it done, if any?

The short answer: Yes, EE can handle this.

For additional modules to help you accomplish this, Membrr (http://www.membrr.com/) and Rating (http://www.solspace.com/software/detail/rating/) should get you a long ways toward your goal.

Rating members might require a “hack” where you set up an “entry” (think: “page content”) that represents each user so that it can collect the ratings.

Thanks EpicVoyage, I didn’t know about Memberr. Looks amazing. I looked at SolSpace member but that didn’t seem like it had the power to do what we want to do.

The search for members and jobs will probably look a lot like it does on major sites like ebay or amazon: left sidebar with filtering criteria, right content area with the listings, sortable by date, price and whatever else we can think of that is relevant. Any awesome search modules for EE?

In ExpressionEngine, you can add custom fields to your entries via the Channels that they fall under. When you create the custom fields, you can also select which ones are searchable.

And then if you really want to increase your site’s search speed, I’d recommend SolSpace’s SuperSearch. It will pre-index everything.

Thanks. So I’m assuming that if I create custom fields for my channels, I can also create a form that uses those custom fields, which the business owner can then fill out to create a new job entry?

What about things like ad space? What about being able to search for users based on how far away they are from my location? How would that work in EE?

You will probably want to use SafeCracker (now comes with EE) to allow job postings. This module allows data to be entered without access to the Control Panel.

Searching by distance and directly selling ad space are not items that I have dealt with so far. I have seen them done but I am not the best suited to answer on those.

If you have not found it already, one of the best collections of EE addons can be found at http://www.devot-ee.com.

Hi jamalnichols,

Thank you for your interest in ExpressionEngine and welcome to the Forums!

To add to what EpicVoyage has said, Membrr, Rating and a few other add-ons will cover the bulk of your functionality.

You might want to look at Zoo’s Visitor. It takes member management into ExpressionEngine channels. What that would enable is the feature rich editing you are looking for. The ability to relate members to projects. One to one relationships are standard with EE, many to one and many to many relationships can be managed with Pixel & Tonic’s Playa. Visitor would also allow for the use of Rating for your members.

Ads can be easily managed with Ad Man from Made by Hippo.

What about being able to search for users based on how far away they are from my location? How would that work in EE?

Looks like Geofinder fits that need rather nicely!

Did I leave anything off the list? Let me know if you have any further questions.

Cheers,

Thanks a LOT for the help dan. I heard good things about the EE Community, and it seems what I heard was right.

Is it possible to combine Memberr with Zoo’s Visitor? Or will they be in conflict with each other since they cover a few similar bases? In general, how do different add-on modules by different third party companies intermingle with each other? Are there any known conflicts?

Hi jamalnichols,

Most third party add-ons work fine with each other. I haven’t encountered any conflicts myself though I would check with both the memberr and zoo visitor developers to be sure you won’t have any problems.

Is there anything else I can assist you with?

Sean

Hi Sean,

do you have any examples of very complex sites you or others have built in EE? I checked http://show-ee.com, and there were some nice looking sites there, but none that had some of the peculiar features we’re trying to build. Have you personally worked with memberr or zoo visitor?

Also, Geofinder seems to only work for locations in the US. We are in the UK, Germany, and possibly Austria & Switzerland. Any ideas how to solve this?

Thanks

Oh- I hadn’t seen Geofinder, before.  Neat find, Dan.  jamalnichols, where’d you spot it was limited to the US?  I was poking around, and they have a country code parameter, which strongly suggests it’s not US limited.  I haven’t used it, so I can’t say for sure, but I suspect it’s not US specific by default.

I haven’t tried memberr or zoo visitor myself, but won’t speak for Dan or Sean on that one.  They may be able to chime in w/personal experience.

Geofinder does apparently support UK locatiosn, mentioned in the changelog http://natural-logic.com/docs/geofinder/#changelog - a quick email to the developers to clarify might be good 😊

Hi jamalnichols,

As an example of a complex sites built using Membrr and Visitor, look at http://ssih.org/. Another example is http://dermpa.org - built using Membrr and Solspace’s User. User is *similar* to Visitor, however, I think Visitor would be the better fit for the functionality you outlined.

And hey! Welcome to the Community!

Cheers,

Hi guys,

I looked at dermpa and ssih. I’m not a doctor, so I couldn’t join them. Would be great to see some more examples, but the ssih signup form and the way it handled payments looked pretty good.

It looks like EE can handle at least 90% of what we’re trying to do. It seems to have a good mix of features, flexibility, usability, price, available learning materials, and community. I have to talk to the others in the project, but I am leaning strongly towards going for it.

One last question: Should we ever come up with some obscure idea that no one has done yet in EE, how difficult is it to develop and implement new modules for EE in CodeIgniter? Is it something that you can learn in your spare time, provided you have some affinity towards programming? And if not, are there enough developers out there that we could pay to create new modules?

Oh and another question, REALLY IMPORTANT: What about integration with aweber? I saw there are plugins specialized for Campaign Monitor, but what about Aweber? Does Campaign Monitor offer any advantages?