Expression Engine or TYPOlight

[mmmdreg]

Hi guys,

I've designed a site and am ready to code it up using a CMS. I've used ExpressionEngine for previous work as I felt Drupal/Joomla were too bloated, and EE just seemed to do things logically (although this is obviously subjective). However, I've just come across TYPOlight for the first time and it seems to be a very clean CMS, reflected by the website.

From browsing the site, it seems TL would excel at making fairly static pages. I gathered this off the screenshots showing page hierarchies. I'm just wondering the extent to which it can handle more dynamic sites. EE takes the approach of making everything a blog and elements of these blog entries (title, body, custom fields) can be embedded anywhere and sorted by a variety of factors (alphabetical, date, random etc). For example, if I was running a shop website and I added a new product by making a new blog entry in the 'products' blog, it would automatically get its page, be listed in the product directory and perhaps on a 'most recent' part of the home page.

Another feature I like is the ability of being able to give 'categories' and 'relationships' to entries. For example, if I was on a product page for a hard drive, I could embed something in the page displaying other items from that category (ie hard drives). I could also pull related entries from two different blogs and present them on the same page. I can't think of a better example than the one in EE's documentation: http://expressionengine.com/docs/mod...d_entries.html.

So.. I guess the question comes down to whether TL can easily achieve this basic functionality or is it a different market?

As an aside, is this TL forum using the helpdesk extension or is it a custom job? (or is it core functionality?)

As another one, I'd just like to thank everyone who replies in advance. The TL community seems quite vibrant and I would really like to open source software where I can.

Cheers,

George

[FloB]

Well, the answer should be mostly no. The catalog extension might help you a little bit with what you like to have (but I haven't used it yet thus I can't say wether it will help or not). I'd say, to have a similar functionality like EE, you need to create a custom extension (if it's possible to implement this).
I can't tell you any more on that as I am not really familiar with the topic.

To answer your other question: This is a phpBB forum, the German community uses vB and the old forum used the Helpdesk. I think there are also some bridge extensions in the repository to integrate some forum software into TYPOlight. And I might code a completely new forum extension for TYPOlight, as soon as I find some spare time.

[mmmdreg]

Thanks FloB. I wish you luck with your extensions and also TYPOlight in general. As I said, it looks promising.. just not what I need in this case =)

[Medianomaly]

Am I missing something, or is what mmmdreg described EXACTLY what the catalog extension does perfectly.

You can set up multiple catalogs of items, each of which you define fields of any number and type you want. Then you enter individual products into these fields. You can also create relationships using the taxonomy module to enable select boxes, check boxes, and radio buttons to incorporate into these fields in the backend.

On the frontend, you have advanced sorting options, filtering options, and there is indeed a related items module that does what you are looking for.

I've tried about 15 different content management systems, including EE before settling on TYPOLight. I think one of the main things that bugged me about most of the others is how they treat everything like a blog, with "oh-yeah-we-can-do-this-too" features thrown in for good measure. But the interface is centered around being a blog, with everything else sort of in the periphery -- which in my opinion is not all that intuitive to an end user.

Everything is not a blog. A corporate Website, or a product Website is not a blog (although it may HAVE a blog). I like how TYPOLight doesn't treat everything like it is.

My 2 cents.

B

P.S. There is full-featured integrated e-commerce solution extension being Beta tested right now, that uses a lot of the principles of the catalog extension. You can find out more here: http://www.isotopeecommerce.com/

[Ibn Saeed]

@ mmmdreg , if you dont mind me asking, how did you find out about Typolight ?

[marketing_guy]

Your right the catalog extension does do exactly mmmdreg described, and a whole lot more besides.

Am I missing something, or is what mmmdreg described EXACTLY what the catalog extension does perfectly.....

Everything is not a blog. A corporate Website, or a product Website is not a blog (although it may HAVE a blog). I like how TYPOLight doesn't treat everything like it is.

My 2 cents.

B

P.S. There is full-featured integrated e-commerce solution extension being Beta tested right now, that uses a lot of the principles of the catalog extension. You can find out more here: http://www.isotopeecommerce.com/

[Ben]

It sounds like mmmdreg has moved onto different CMS pastures, but to build on what's been said, I'll add a hearty YES to the Catalog extension being exactly what is needed for the scenario he described. Here are a few places I've used it:

• Whitaker Oil Company - notice the related products on the detail pages[/*:m:2fzj5ers]
• Aquazul - the rates and outside photos are pulled from another catalog using the Related module[/*:m:2fzj5ers]
• Visual Outdoor Advertising - the maps are generated by a custom module (thanks Fred) that plots points using lat / long[/*:m:2fzj5ers]

I thought EE treated everything like a blog post from my testing of the system of the years. I'm glad Medianomaly was able to finally clear this up for me, as I thought I was misunderstanding how they managed content. I have never understood why people use blog software for non-blog websites.