Thread

I have a few pre-sales questions about the flexibility of the database and how the notion of members and member groups work.

Here is a my scenario, I will use a an analogy most everyone can grok rather than go into gory details of how our particular organizations/membership needs to work. Think of a local Little League organization. There are multiple teams. Every kid is a team member, but the site sections are broken up into different teams, and of course one kid can’t be part of more than one team, but they are part of both a team and Little League as a whole.

Can EE and the current multiple user/member groups concepts facilitate this or will we need to customize? If so how much?

Also, you can imagine how each team would have different calendars, email subscriptions, information that is private to that team. Like a mini-site within the über-site. Does EE manage this kind of concept and if not has anyone modified the base to do something like this?

Also, ideally there could be resources like say baseball fields, batting cages, shared gear, etc. that needs to be accessible and scheduled or allocated across all the teams. I doubt it, but are there add-on modules or some ways to work with resources in this way?

Finally, how does CodeIgnitor fit into all of this? I came across CI first and love it. I want to build the site using CI, then I saw that you guys do EE as well. EE may not be an exact match but, I would like customization to be as easy as using CI. Can someone speak to that a little too.

Sorry for the tome, just thought I would get it all out and see what people say.

Cheers

Here is a my scenario, I will use a an analogy most everyone can grok rather than go into gory details of how our particular organizations/membership needs to work. Think of a local Little League organization. There are multiple teams. Every kid is a team member, but the site sections are broken up into different teams, and of course one kid can’t be part of more than one team, but they are part of both a team and Little League as a whole.

Can EE and the current multiple user/member groups concepts facilitate this or will we need to customize? If so how much?

It sounds like EE will meet your needs “out of the box” in terms of permissions. In EE permissions are determined on a Member Group basis and a registered Member can only belong to one group. So you can assign a member to a unique Member Group (Team) and create sections that are specific to the Member Group (team) and a section that all Member Groups have access to (the league).

Also, you can imagine how each team would have different calendars, email subscriptions, information that is private to that team. Like a mini-site within the über-site. Does EE manage this kind of concept and if not has anyone modified the base to do something like this?

Its important to understand a couple EE fundamentals. First, a “weblog” in EE is simply a way of saying “a collection of data”. Weblogs have no default associations with templates or visual presentation. This means when you create a weblog you can associate content in almost anyway you want.

In your case you can create a weblog for each team that only that team has access to. You can also create a weblog for the league that all the teams have access to.

You can present these weblogs visually any way you want. For example, you can have a league news blog on every individual team page.

EE can probably handle the calendars and email subscriptions but it would be helpful to spell out your specific requirements there to make sure.

Also, ideally there could be resources like say baseball fields, batting cages, shared gear, etc. that needs to be accessible and scheduled or allocated across all the teams. I doubt it, but are there add-on modules or some ways to work with resources in this way?

Again, its not a problem to specify that all Member Groups have access to certain content.

Finally, how does CodeIgnitor fit into all of this? I came across CI first and love it. I want to build the site using CI, then I saw that you guys do EE as well. EE may not be an exact match but, I would like customization to be as easy as using CI. Can someone speak to that a little too.

If you’re comfortable working with CI than you certainly have the skills to do any customizations you may need for EE. There is currently no default integration between CI and EE. CI is a framework and EE is a web publishing system. Its the same team of developers so if you find the code in one to your liking you’ll almost certainly like the code in the other.