Thread

Hi all, I’ve posted before in my research stages but I’m about ready to go and start building.

Basically, I’m tasked with building an online community for a software company. The platform I choose needs to have the following:

Blog:
EE looks fine for blogging - I’d like a company news page in a blog-style with multiple posters and a picture or avatar for each poster. I’d also like blog commenting to be done via the forum. I’m 99% sure EE can do all of this

Forum
I’ve looked at integrating vBulletin with Joomla but because there’s so many parts (bridges, community builder, etc) there just seems too much that could go wrong. I’m sure no one would argue that EE’s forum is better than vBulletin but it certainly seems decent enough. Your thoughts?

Incoming RSS News
Basically, I’d like a page for each of the company’s markets/industries containing news. We already have a news monitoring service who will provide an individual news feed per section, so basically, I need a number of pages with an RSS feed on each. Reading other posts, I’m pretty sure this is no problem as the service provide the link as RSS, XML or HTML. Is EE capable of styleing the incoming feed to blend in with the rest of the site?

Private areas
Is it possible to make certain content private, i.e. only available to certified (or paying) users? How easy is it to do this?

Email marketing
What I’d love to do is, for example, send a monthly email to all members (who have subscribed) which has the 10 most recent forum topics, 10 recent blog entries, etc. Is this easy to do? Is this sort of functionality built in?

Themes and content automated by date
What I mean by this is… if, for example, I wanted to make up a Christmas skin/theme and have a Christmas message. Is it easy to set this to be displayed from 23-25 December for example? Rather than manually changing it? I’d love to have a message for specific holidays and occasions.

Installation on a MS server
Finally, I’d like to install EE on a MS Server. Can this be done using WAMP?

Think that’s about it. Thanks very very much in advance!

One more wee question.

Is it possible to assign an image to a member group, so that it appears under their avatar or in tehir signature?

For example, if some of my sites members select a custom field in their profile, a corresponding image appears.

Example: “Games Console” option in profile. Choice of Wii, Xbox and PS3. Whatever they choose, a logo appears under their avatar?

Does that make any sense - I’m not so sure!

Let’s see:

1.  The blog bits sound very standard- and if you use the EE forum, you can create a forum post when you create the article- and link to it to handle comments no problem.  (It’s done on this site for the ‘Blog’ section.)

2.  I think integrating with a third party forum is a lot of trouble unless you really, really need a feature that the EE forum doesn’t have.  And even then, I’d lean toward extending the EE forum rather than syncing a third party. 

3.  EE comes with the Magpie plugin installed- it’s used to pull in EE news to your control panel.  It sounds like it should do fine for what you want, but you might want to take a look at it and confirm.  But- doesn’t sound problematic.

4.  It’s very easy to make certain content available only to specified member groups.  How you sync that up with a subscription model is less simple.  If it’s a one time payment, then the Simple commerce module might work.  If not- I believe folks have used aMember to handle the payment end of things.  But yes- lots of ways to make content private- you can use conditionals in a template to show some fields to logged in members- or members in a certain group- and not to others.  Or- you can restrict access to entire templates, redirecting those who don’t meet the member specifications to a different template.

5.  While EE does come with a mailing list, you can’t ‘automate’ sending the last 10 entries or what have you.  However, it wouldn’t be too difficult to set up a template that outputs the content you want to send- and then manually sending it to the mailing list.  Still- a bit of tweaking required here.

6.  Hm- you could check out the Special day plugin for showing a message.  But, I haven’t played with that one, so I’m not sure it would do.  It honestly wouldn’t be difficult to build one.  As for swapping themes- while there is a style switcher plugin, I don’t know that it really fits what you want to do.  And note- EE doesn’t have a ‘simple themes’ swap out.  It wouldn’t be massively difficult to flip themes on a given date- but this isn’t going to be ‘out of the box’.

7.  For the last one- I’m a little fuzzy on what you’re looking for.  Sounds like you could just use a custom member field and let them select from a dropdown maybe?  Though that really doesn’t tie into member group.  Not sure on this one.

Have you tried out one of the trial options yet?  I always think that’s the best way to get a feel for things.

Blog:
EE looks fine for blogging - I’d like a company news page in a blog-style with multiple posters and a picture or avatar for each poster. I’d also like blog commenting to be done via the forum. I’m 99% sure EE can do all of this

Yes, easily done.

Forum
I’ve looked at integrating vBulletin with Joomla but because there’s so many parts (bridges, community builder, etc) there just seems too much that could go wrong. I’m sure no one would argue that EE’s forum is better than vBulletin but it certainly seems decent enough. Your thoughts?

Better in what way?  vB has a lot of features as it is solely a forum package, but those are features that many people may never use.  Our forum module integrates with the rest of the site, utilizing a single member database and single sign on.  This is a huge feature that is of vital importance to a great many communities.

Incoming RSS News
Basically, I’d like a page for each of the company’s markets/industries containing news. We already have a news monitoring service who will provide an individual news feed per section, so basically, I need a number of pages with an RSS feed on each. Reading other posts, I’m pretty sure this is no problem as the service provide the link as RSS, XML or HTML. Is EE capable of styleing the incoming feed to blend in with the rest of the site?

You have two options for this.  The Magpie plugin, which ships with ExpressionEngine, and the FeedGrab plugin, which is third-party, but can add entries from RSS as entries in your weblog, giving you a great deal of control.

Both can be styled in the style of your site.

Private areas
Is it possible to make certain content private, i.e. only available to certified (or paying) users? How easy is it to do this?

Again, there are a few options for this.  You can protect entire templates by member group, or you can use member conditionals to protect portions of a template.

Email marketing
What I’d love to do is, for example, send a monthly email to all members (who have subscribed) which has the 10 most recent forum topics, 10 recent blog entries, etc. Is this easy to do? Is this sort of functionality built in?

This can be done with an extension, and I believe there may be a third-party addon entitled UpdateMail for this as well.  You can also read our Developement Documentation here.

Themes and content automated by date
What I mean by this is… if, for example, I wanted to make up a Christmas skin/theme and have a Christmas message. Is it easy to set this to be displayed from 23-25 December for example? Rather than manually changing it? I’d love to have a message for specific holidays and occasions.

The templates are fully under your control, so you can certainly add features like this in your templates. 

Installation on a MS server
Finally, I’d like to install EE on a MS Server. Can this be done using WAMP?

Here are the Requirements - there is not a particular Operating System.

Is it possible to assign an image to a member group, so that it appears under their avatar or in tehir signature?

Absolutely, there is a tag that makes this very easy, the custom member profile tag.

Thanks a lot Lisa and Robin - your expert comments are much appreciated!

EE definitely looks like the thing for me! I have downloaded the core version to ‘play with’ on my own personal hosting and will puirchase a hosted demo in the next couple of weeks.

It’sgood to know that there’s support out there and that different people have knowledge of different features/areas!

All the best,

Daniel