Site Spotlight: BestNetworkSecurity.com - Part 1

Lately, it seems that there are a lot of new sites coming to ExpressionEngine. When moving to ExpressionEngine from another content management system, eventually you will most likely be doing some type of conversion. Recently, Adam Khan converted BestNetworkSecurity.com from Joomla, another popular CMS, to ExpressionEngine. The following is the first part of an interview with Adam where he talks about the site and converting from another content manager to ExpressionEngine.

Tell us about yourself and how you got involved in web development.

I wanted to be a journalist in order to become a novelist. I did
eventually get to work at a newspaper but by then I’d been doing freelance
web development for enough years that I was more interested in reforming
the paper’s website than doing the legwork to write stories. Web
development is fun because it brings together programming, manuscript
design, thinking about organizations, and writing itself. But it does
involve spending far too much time alone in front of a computer.

Recently you ported BestNetworkSecurity.com from Joomla to
ExpressionEngine. In your opinion, why would someone want to leave Joomla
(or any other CMS) for ExpressionEngine?

Three reasons:

1) sculptable weblogs, IE, different fields for each one and the
open-ended thinking that this fosters
2) powerful templating
3) intangibles, such as support from Lisa and Robin, direction from Rick,
and taste from Paul, which together form the nexus of an ecology one can
trust.

It sounds like you may have done quite a bit of customization on the
back-end - different field sets for different weblogs etc. From an
organizational/mapping perspective, how do you personally like to go about
sorting out changes like this?

As someone once said, things should be as simple as they can be but no
simpler. Not every object to be published on a site is the same type of
thing. Rather, they can be abstracted through discussion into various
types, each of which type should be definable. That’s what I meant before
by sculptable weblogs. Without them, objects to be published are squeezed
into a standard shape of title/summary/body. When your structure is too
simple for what you’re trying to do with it, you end up complicating
things hopelessly. And people must get pretty hopeless indeed because it
appears to be no small thing to switch systems – you really must have
reached the end of your patience.

So the client and I discuss all the different types of things on the site
and how they relate and what needs to be done to each of them. To express
it another way, we’re creating a series of related database tables where
previously they were all being squeezed into one table. This review and
exploration needs to be exhaustive because it’s what determines the
architecture of the site. Revelations arriving later can throw little
spanners in the works. It’s easy and I think actually fun to discuss this,
and in my experience it’s when the client starts to get excited as well,
thinking, yes, this is how it should have been all along!

In Getting Things Done, David Allen says don’t be afraid to add another folder to your system even if it only contains one item, and to therefore always keep a
stock of empty folders - around a hundred. A hundred! Similarly, I don’t
flinch from opening up another weblog and field group. In fact, it’s only
much later, when it’s been demonstrated that two weblogs actually do have
the same shape, that I go back and eliminate one of the field groups,
allowing both weblogs to share the same field group.

One of the real power features of ExpressionEngine is the ability to shape and mold the manager to your site. That is very refreshing when you are coming from a more rigid management system. This freedom can also be intimidating but once you get your head around ExpressionEngine, the possibilities are nothing short of exciting. If you are new to ExpressionEngine, or maybe just checking it out because you are tired of other content management systems, take a few moments and check out the ExpressionEngine Video Tutorials which walk you through some of the basics. Be sure to check back for the continuation of our interview with Adam.

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