I am interested in using Expression Engine for a client site, but I’m worried about the licensing.

On this page (http://ellislab.com/expressionengine/user-guide/license.html) it says you cannot:

“Use the Software as the basis of a hosted blogging service, or to provide hosting services to others.”

Is this still the case? I honestly don’t know the full scope of everything we will be asked to build for this particular client project, so it would be unwise for me to start using a platform where I can’t do what’s required of me at some point in the future.

Would it be possible for you to spell it out, exactly what you mean by this phrase? What does it mean for social networking applications?

Would it be possible for you to spell it out, exactly what you mean by this phrase? What does it mean for social networking applications?

Hi klezmer41,

You can build a site with social networking integration without worry. The issue here is that you can’t set up a site that allows a third party, aside from your client, to set up a blog or site as a sub-section of the main site. So if your company as a coffee shop, you can’t allow customers to log in and create their own blogs with that coffee shop as the main URL. Does that make sense?

That somewhat makes sense, but I think there’s a lot of gray area.

Let’s say that each member of the organization will have their own blog, is that appropriate?

And if it’s a social network of any kind, then public users might be able to have a public-facing profile and public-facing pages. I’m just not sure where exactly the line is, and for that matter I think that having any restrictions might just be limiting your market penetration.

FYI we use 95% Drupal for everything we do on client sites. For internal projects it’s about 80% CodeIgniter. I’d love to give EE a try, but I need to know that as a developer I can do what I want to do, or need to do on client sites.

If you have an organization - let’s say a band.. and each band member has a blog, that’s ok.

Where it wouldn’t be OK is if each fan had their own unique blog, that’s the difference.

Each fan can still post a blog entry, but they’d post to a global fan blog, not to something like fan123’s blog.

Does that make better sense?

Thank you Sue for the response.  But to tack onto the initial question… I’ve seen forum posts that recommend having all fans post to a global fan blog (as you’ve stated above), but then to sort entries for each user and display the respective posts to each member’s profile, essentially creating a de-facto personal blog for each user.  Would that be breaking the licensing agreement, or severely hamper performance?

I would like to allow member to update their profiles with blog-like entries; I’m actually thinking of just encouraging members to start a blogger.com, tumblr, etc account, and just pull in and embed the first few entries onto the ee-powered profile.  (though that may kill seo-rankings, as google would see that my site is reposting text from other sites).

Hi, pacific_water,

What this comes down to is the intent of the site, as well as scalability and ExpressionEngine’s appropriateness. We don’t want to see you invested in a solution that won’t scale to your site’s needs.

In answer to your question, you can certainly have a shared area and then limit the view by author.  If this is a community site that is using a shared knowledge-base to congregate information, then that is fine.  But if the primary goal is to give others their own private, segregated space -then EE is not a good fit for you.

It is a bit of a grey area there; if you want to go into specifics on your project, we can do that in private - just email us and we’ll be happy to work with you and figure this out.