Hi everyone,

I am new here and planning to buy a Personal Project License by ExressionEngine and was wondering if I could extend EE with Codelgniter and fit it to my own Concept for Backend and Frontend and all this without buying Add ons or upgrading?

Does anyone have experience with this?

Art Director and Junior Programmer from Germany,

Ehsan

I have experience with this.

Let me tell you this EE is, in my personal view, very limited for expanding on with CI.
I work faster with CI making custom apps. EE has always been working against me.
It’s difficult in many cases to add on because there are no hooks and you have to do some very intrusive changes.

No I would not recommend it.

It depend what you mean by “extend”.

If you want to change core EE functionality, then you have only two options - to hack the core code (bad idea) or to use the available extension hooks.

However, if you want to create some new functionality, then you can do anything you like by creating a module. These are essentially CI packages including libraries, views and models. The controller concept is not really present as EE is the controller, but you can use your own techniques to route code once it reaches your module.

You can use modules to create complex interfaces in the CMS and any kind of web app imaginable in the front end. For the latter the entry point would be a custom tag inside an EE template.

EE 2.x is built on top of CodeIgniter.

darrenm - 04 October 2012 02:05 AM

It depend what you mean by “extend”.

If you want to change core EE functionality, then you have only two options - to hack the core code (bad idea) or to use the available extension hooks.

However, if you want to create some new functionality, then you can do anything you like by creating a module. These are essentially CI packages including libraries, views and models. The controller concept is not really present as EE is the controller, but you can use your own techniques to route code once it reaches your module.

You can use modules to create complex interfaces in the CMS and any kind of web app imaginable in the front end. For the latter the entry point would be a custom tag inside an EE template.

Yeah, that’s my point if there are no hooks you can only hack which is bad. So easy to extend? No. Certainly not if you have CI in your fingers. EE is a closed fortress and imho not extension friendly.

I have to disagree with some of that.

It all depends what you want to extend. If you want to extend the behaviour of EE sessions you’re not going to get very far.

If however you want to extend the behaviour of the channel entries template tag, then there is a huge amount you can do.

Perhaps the OP could clarify what the end goal is which would help establish if EE is the right tool for the job.

Well for example I needed custom membership privileges and it was just not possible with hooks. (maybe that has changed now)

It does matter what they want to extend, but I don’t think it’s unfair to say there could be a lot improved on that side of EE.