February 3, 201016 yr Hi guys, I have been thinking about developing my own online "presence" for my work (I'm a musician - composer, conductor etc.). I have reasonable HTML/CSS/JS/PHP/MySQL chops (also quick to pick things up too), and I'm good with developing graphics, so I'm going to give it a go myself. The general structure of the site will be very simple. The only real "updated regularly" section will be the blog, which will also double as the "news" section (there will be a news category). Given that I will be essentially hand coding the site, I'm not going to use anything like Joomla or Drupal, because firstly I feel it is overly complex for this requirement, but also because they give you a lack of control (and the code is very messy). I like ExpressionEngine very much, but again I'm wondering if it will be overly complex. Would you experts recommend a full on CMS system like EE, or a site built around a framework such as CodeIgniter with a blog "bolted on" (using WordPress)? Many thanks Martin
February 3, 201016 yr I'd say it really depends on what your non blog/news content is going to be. If it's just a few pahges that won't change very often then Wordpress might be worth looking at. Alternatively if you want to manage several distinct content types then EE would be a pefect fit - I'm thinking about your musical portfolio and associated content.
February 3, 201016 yr Author Yeah that's true actually... I suppose the weblogs would make it easy to manage music and video demos. I'm right when I say (thinking back to a post of mine on the EE forums last year which I think you replied to!) that the data itself isn't stored in the database - only a reference to it? So I could set up a weblog with the fields "Title", "Description", and "Filename" (or similar) where the filename is as an example "foobar". Then within the page I could create links pointing to "foobar.wav", "foobar.mp3", "foobar.flac", "foobar.wma" etc... Hadn't thought of that until you mentioned it! Could be useful though. Cheers! Martin
February 3, 201016 yr All the data is stored in the DB except for uploaded files, but you can split up your content into different weblogs/channels and reference them however suited. For example you could create a weblog/channel for your audio files as you say, with title, description and file/filename. This then gives you the freedom to associate (relate) any other content item with any audio file, from there you could treat the audio file in many ways such as: 1. Auto create a direct link to the file (ie for downloading) 2. Auto embed an audio player in the entry to play the file 3. Auto create a link to the audio files detail page You could also use the same audio weblog/channel data to output a listing of all audio files, categorised if you like, searchable, with or without embedded player, even produce specific listings based on genres, A-Z, most viewed etc etc.
February 3, 201016 yr Have you got any music online already? Would love to have a listen... I second that!
February 4, 201016 yr Author Thanks guys. As this moment in time, I've nothing online - I've managed to get releases from several of my clients for music to put up as demos, so I'll be getting it up in the next month or so. If you've ever seen a musical in the UK, the chances are you will at least have heard my work As for the weblogs in EE - is it possible to have a "latest entry" link on a page, and also have a page of "all the others"? I'm developing some freeware music tools (MIDI/audio processing etc.) and would like to be able to add each version release as another entry in a weblog, and the link to the latest release is always on the homepage, whilst still having an archive page of previous releases. Cheers, Martin
Create an account or sign in to comment