Extreme Elements TV quits Joomla for ExpressionEngine

Adam Khan, Wednesday, January 16th, 2008

Since EngagingNet doesn’t work with any content management system other than ExpressionEngine, it’s hard to say for sure whether it’s the best. But Florida-based Extreme Elements does—or rather, did: While EngagingNet built one site in EE for the adventure travel company, another agency built a second site in Joomla. After about a year Extreme Elements principal Paul Caswell threw in the towel with Joomla and asked EngagingNet to redo that second site, extremeelements.tv, in ExpressionEngine.

The web site for Extreme Elements TV, built using the free and open source Joomla content management system, was not only difficult to maintain, but parts of it were simply not working properly and eluding a fix. Extreme Elements principal Paul Caswell decided to abandon the system and asked EngagingNet to wrap the site within the installation of the ExpressionEngine content management system that powers the ExtremeElements.com site.

This required importing:

content, comprised of video and blog entries
members
member comments
statistics, such as number of views of each video

The client also wanted to add new navigation, features and content, such as search, multiple RSS feeds, breadcrumbs and a dynamic About Us section.

Solution

EngagingNet has now performed a quite number of data imports into ExpressionEngine, so even though this was the first from Joomla, the basic procedure was clear. Then, once the data was imported, the HTML and CSS was brought in from the old site, turning the pages into EE templates by placing EE tags within them.

We took advantage of EE’s new and wisely-engineered Multiple Site Manager, which enables the site owner to very easily navigate among an unlimited number of sites, and the sites themselves to easily access and display each other’s content.

Membership and participation is a vital aspect of this site, so we added the Stand-alone Entry Form to let members submit their own videos. This way user-submitted videos are added to the videos content stack, just where they’d be if added via the control panel by a site editor.

Results

One important business goal of the ExtremeElements.tv site is to promote the ExtremeElements.com site. Now that the two sites can access each other’s content, the .tv site can display context-sensitive travel information from the .com site to help send visitors to it.

Managing content is now easier in two ways. All content across the sites is added and edited on a single standardized interface. And due to the inter-relatedness of the content, less needs to be entered each time, since it’s available from pulldown menus. When adding a video about a competition, there’s no longer any need to enter the competition dates or location because that data’s already in there.

Another benefit of the change is that the two sites now share one member list.

And, most importantly, the thing now works!