Thread

Hi -

I’m a java/php developer used to developing web sites from “scratch”. I’m considering trying a new website with EE. This will be interesting in that it seems you pretty much wire together things from EE’s web based GUI rather than “programming”, per se. We’ll see…

A couple of questions I haven’t been able to answer from a quick perusal of your documentation:

1) For your typical web sites with a reasonable amount of look and feel cusitomization, do people actually program much in php? Or is it mostly just some PHP snippets in HTML pages with EE tags?

2) If there are circumstances where you need to develop some significant amount of php, what development environments do people use for debugging? I’m partial to PHPEdit, myself. It’s a somewhat typical xdebug IDE. Would PHPEdit be OK, or what would you recommend?

3) I would probably use my lunarpages account for development. However, they don’t have InnoDB tables in mySQL - only ISAM. Is this a requirement by any chance?

Thanks.

Larry Lewis

1) No, not much. If the built-in functionality of EE is not sufficient, you might want to add a line or two of PHP here and there, but it’s not always necessary.

2) Totally left up to you. I have no preferences myself.

3) Both are fine. All you need, really, is a MySQL db—the storage engine is your choice, if you actually care about that level of details.

Just to chip in about using PHP snippets… I’ve yet to use one in all the EE based sites I’ve built. the chances are you won’t need them unless you’re doing something really out of the box, but it’s nice to know you can if you need to.

3) I know we have customers on Lunar Pages but the best thing to do is to try on your specific account. We have a Server Wizard you can use to test your account’s compatibility with EE or you can also install EE Core as well.