Thread

Hi I sent an email to sales, but realised the forum might be a good place to get answers too.

I’m hoping migrating to EE can save us a good deal of time and re-inventing the wheel and would appreaciate some advice.

The current site is (hoping links are allowed on this forum!)
http://www.theartistsweb.co.uk
and comprises of the following components:

i) * Simple Members’ CMS system for artists to build their own gallery sites (hosted on separate domain names)
ii) Searchable Gallery of members artwork (added by the above CMS component)
iii) List of members profiles
iv) Members forum (phpBB)
v) Arts News Blog (word press)
vi) Wiki (media wiki)
vii) DMOZ style Link/Resource Directory (phplinkdirectory)
viii) Mailing List (phplist)

Plus we’d like to add
ix) Comment system on the gallery
x) Different types of user account - members using CMS, people commenting on artwork people buying artwork

*this component may remain outside of EE

I think most of these features are fairly bog standard requests, just the first feature (the main feature!) is a rather complex custom piece of work which creates the images and content for the gallery ii) and profiles iii) .

I’m wondering if the best way forward is to keep that external and have a brigde between the two, perhaps keeping the databases separate etc.

I’d be most grateful for some comments on the fesability and methods of such a migration, plus a few specific questions below:

Single Signon
—————————-
Would like a single signon between all the components and separate domains

Multi Lingual
————————-
We currently need to support Japanese and English, and perhaps other
languages in the future.

Customisability and Scaleability
—————————————————————-
Would like the core to be light weight and the system to scale easily.

License restrictions
——————————————-
I’m concerned of the impilcations of licensing that will affect our
future road map, especially from the wording on your licensing page:
“Use the Software as the basis of a hosted weblogging service, or to
provide hosting services to others.”

e.g. currently the Blog is our own, but if we started inviting memebrs
to post, or offered it as part of our CMS service. More over our CMS
service would certainly fall under this category so that might preclude
us from migrating that to EE

Comparion to Code Igniter
—————————————————
I’ve already reviewed and built a couple of small applications in CI,
and I would be pleased if EE was basically the same thing and had the
same efficient foot print.

I’ve also noted from a few comments on the forum that EE is perhaps not for ‘hardcore’ developers. If this is the case, then I’d stick with CI (or another lower level framework).

Built in Ajax Components
————————————-
It would be nice if there are some ‘out of the box’ ajax components for some common ajax tasks e.g. click/hide , auto complete forms etc.

Many Thanks
Chris

Tough one- and contacting sales on this was a good idea.  My biggest concern is that the ‘individual artist gallery’ straddles the line on being a ‘hosted blogging service’.  Sales will help you figure this one out- and since you already have a working site for them to look at, it should be fairly easy for them to give you a definitive answer on this.

IF sales gives it the ‘ok’, then most of the rest of it is a. doable; b. fairly straight forward.  Actually- the whole gallery part isn’t IF you use the gallery.  But I’d use a weblog to handle it, in which case, it’s straightforward.  If you need thumbs created, images resized on the fly, etc- you could use php_thumb- third party script a number of folks use.  I’ve also modified things to automate creation of thumbs/resizing automatic when using the weblog- so if you’re code oriented, you could just do that.  While I haven’t played with CI much, I believe the image classes share a lot of the same logic.

If you’re deciding between CI and EE- they are different critters, even though they share a certain perspective.  I know a number of the more code oriented like to use EE as a platform, since it takes care of 90% of what they want to do- rather than having to reinvent the wheel using CI.  Just a lot of stuff like captchas, comments, categorization- plus third party modules for tagging, rating, etc.  All of it doable in CI, but EE saves you LOTS of time, which can then be spent on the tweaks.  Well- except for the forum, which I’d imagine would take forever to build your own.  So if you want forum integration- using EE forums?  I’d go EE all the way, no doubt.

Anyway- need to square away the license issue with sales.  After that- I’d say it’s all doable, particularly if you use weblogs for your gallery.  To hit the specifics:
a.  Single sign-on, shouldn’t be a problem.  If you go with EE forums, that’s fully integrated with EE’s membership.  I’m fuzzy on who the multiple domains may be setup, but there’s no reason a single sign-on shouldn’t work- and depending on what you’re doing with it, be sure to check out the Multiple Site Manager.

b. Multi-lingual, there are a couple of ways folks have approached this- see wiki 1 and wiki 2- and I’m sure there are other options.

c. EE’s highly customizable- and as long as your servers are setup to handle dynamic sites and your template code is clean, it should scale very nicely.  If you’d like a list of some of the high traffic sites running on EE, say the word.

d.  The license- yep, I’m concerned on that one as well.  Sales will need to get that one resolved before making any real decisions on how to proceed.

e.  I haven’t played with CI enough to be definitive on this one- though from my limited experience, the logic is the same.  I picked up CI quickly when I installed it.  Derek is deep into CI, so he may comment on more depth on that one.

f.  I don’t think there’s much built in ajax- no js library ships with EE.  But- there are plugins that make use of it- I believe a live search, there’s a click tracker, everybody and their brother seems to be using slideshow/lightboxes (some using ajax)- EE handles ajax very nicely (and being able to set templates to xml can be handy in that regard).  So- while I can’t think of a stock feature that uses it, plenty of extras do and it’s easy to use on an EE site.

Hope that helps a bit- and sales should get back to you with more info re: licensing.

ETA- a note on selling goods- that may/may not be doable ‘out of the box’, depending on how you need it to work.

Thanks for your reply Robin very helpful, I’ll have a look at the links.

Yes I was thinking EE would save a lot of time in certain areas, especially the forum.

Regarding licensing, as I mentioned I’m thinking that the individual members sites will be outside of EE, especially to begin with and I think that would be the closest to the blog/license issue, but I’ll see what sales say.

Anyway I’m interested to hear more about the CI EE comparison.

I have no doubt that CI would be a good framework to use, I’m just wondering if I can have my cake and eat it with EE in that it’s still ultimately as flexible as CI with a great set of classes to build on and will save a load more time with the built in modules.

I hope Derek can comment!

(from the sales email reply)
> Robin has given you some excellent answers in your forum post; so I am going to address what she hasn’t.
>
>I can say easily that the artists’ websites would be against the license. These are their own mini-sites. ExpressionEngine >simply isn’t geared towards that kind of setup. This is explained more in this KB article: http://expressionengine.com/knowledge_base/article/myspace_blogservice/

So clearly there is a licensing issue with the CMS component.

Now as I mentioned I was thinking this would probably be a separate component, but it will be interacting with the other components, so I’m anxious to understand any possible licensing issues that might later appear - we don’t want to heavily invest in EE only to find that it’s restricting our later business decisions.

The CMS component is our own work and EE doesn’t provide this sort of functionallity anyway so this would involve custom work. However, can you help me understand at what point the licensing of EE applies for example:

1) The CMS is an entirely separate code base, but shares information with the EE app via XML-RPC
2) The CMS is custom code but on top of EE, using it’s classes etc (a module perhaps)
3) The CMS is separate code but is working on the same database.

In addition to the above licensing issue I’d like to add the following.
I’ve been reviewing the developer docs and trying to get a better picture of how development will pan out. In particular I’ve been comparing ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter, I’ve come up with the following list of advantages and disadvantages I’d be grateful for some feedback on my observations (appologies if these points have been covered elsewhere already):

Advantages of EE over CI
—————————————————-
Several key components built in
* Forum
* Wiki
* CMS
* Member management

Commercial Support

Disadvantages of EE over CI
————————————————————
Older codebase, version 2 in dev but would upgrading difficult?

Missing tools:
* Active Record Database Class
* XML RPC Class
* Lots of other nice CI classes

Less community and contributions

Ultimately Less flexible

Potential licensing issues and restrictions

Hi, Chris!

1) The CMS is an entirely separate code base, but shares information with the EE app via XML-RPC
2) The CMS is custom code but on top of EE, using it’s classes etc (a module perhaps)
3) The CMS is separate code but is working on the same database.

For these scenarios, 1) would be fine, and 2) would not be acceptable.  I’m not quite following for 3, but you can certainly use the same database (you’d use different tables) to store whatever data you want.

Leslie Camacho (our VP) has explained this recently over in this pre-sales thread; and I think that will clarify the matter for you.

Hey mrkirkland.  Welcome into EE.

EE does have an XMLRPC integrated - in fact, the CI one is abstracted from it.  In EE, we use it for pinging and a few other tasks, but it isn’t as well documented as CI, this is true.

While in general the CI community attracts a lot of developers, ExpressionEngine enjoys one of the most technically proficient audiences of any CMS, and the community contributions (support and code) are truly staggering.

If there’s anything that still hasn’t been addressed, feel free to write back and I’ll be happy to follow up.

Hi Lisa, thanks for your reply.

I just checked out that thread and I couldn’t find clarification that scenareo 2:

2) The CMS is custom code but on top of EE, using it’s classes etc (a module perhaps)

would be fine, in fact I found the opposite. On the subject of building ‘social networking’ features on EE:

deronsizemore asks

With that said, if someone wanted to pay a developer X amount of money to develop this functionality so it could be used with EE (maybe a module or something?), why would EE want to stop that?

and lesie replies:

Because technical considerations are not the only reason for the restriction. There are also business issues involved that really aren’t up for discussion at this point. If you’re dead set on creating a social network application with an EllisLab product, let me highly recommend CodeIgniter smile

It sounds like there is a conflict of interest here (business issues) and this is not permitted with your license terms. So now I’m confused as to why you say it is fine, could you clear this up for me please?

If there is any uncertanty as to possible licensing issues then this a show stopper for us.

So let me re-iterate this point:

Can we build our CMS application which does run other peoples own websites on top of the EE code base with our custom code (perhaps as a EE module, though I don’t fully understand the dev model yet)?

In fact I think we’d need a precise definition in writing what modifications and uses are permitted and to confirm this would not be a licensing issue - I think there are potential conflicts of interest here that might affect our future growth that I’m keen to avoid!

And thanks for the reply Derek - I have some more questions, but until the licensing issue is resolved there’s no point in taking your time.

Chris

That is correct, Chris - Option 2 would not be allowed. My apologies there, I did mis-type it, and I have edited my post.  You may not extend ExpressionEngine in any way which is not allowed by the license.

😖 typo!

Anyway thanks for clearing that up.