FLEXIcontent vs. Fabrik - advice please

Hello, I have been a web developer for 10 years, and a Joomla developer for 8 months. I have just found FLEXIcontent today and I am highly impressed. I have played with a local demo copy for about 1 hour and I can't go to sleep I am so excited!

I have been building a client website for the past 2 months using Fabrik (fabrikar.com). Half of that time has been spent just learning Fabrik. After experimenting with FLEXI for a short time tonight, it seems to me that FLEXI can do nearly everything Fabrik can do. I have a few questions that will help me determine if I should scrap Fabrik and rebuild everything on FLEXI.

Questions:

1) Groups: Fabrik has excellent "Group" management to manage fields and elements in a form. Is there such a feature in FLEXI? Or would I just achieve this same result with the FLEXI templating?

2) Database joins: Fabrik is very powerful at the low level allowing multiple databases to be joined. For example - I have a FAQ database and a PRODUCT database. I wish to link each Product with it's respective FAQ. How can this be done in FLEXI? I am thinking tags would be useful for this?

3) CSV Import: Fabrik allows for very easy import/export of large amounts of data. Can this be done in FLEXI? Or would I have to do some MySQL import voodoo? I have 100 products I wish to import to articles, please advise the best way to do this in FLEXI.

4) Front End edit: This feature is not as important, and I apologize if these topics have been covered elsewhere, but what are the FLEXI plans and/or existing capabilities for editing on the front end?

5) e-mail forms: Fabrik has versatile plugins for different form submission actions - does FLEXI have the capability to e-mail forms upon submission? I will poke around today and see if I can answer some more of my own questions

That's all I have for now This is not meant to diminish Fabrik in any way, I love Fabrik and have a paid subscription, but FLEXIcontent is much easier to use in building rapid prototypes, the drag & drop placement of fields is a huge plus above Fabrik at this point for me. Also the FLEXI interface and user experience is very slick, stable and inviting - well done.

Thank you for this software, I hope you are being consulted, or involved as a part of the Joomla 1.6 development. I bow to your exceptional coding skills, thank you for your time.

Wow, this is deja something...been doing exactly the same, have the same questions and thoughts.

One other question

Search - is it possible to do a Country State City type search where states are conditioned on countries and cities on states?

I so want to jump in - but it would require dumping a bunch of work. In the joomla world CCKs have been the black hole of wasted effort- though maybe my requirements have been to high.

Maybe Flexicontent is the breakthrough!!

Site is awesome - however I really would suggest having someone focus on the forums - at this stage you have a lot of momentum - just needs one real good communicator to explain and educate.

The members over at www.alltogetherasawhole.org seem very talented it may be worth introducing yourself over there I am sure they could hook you up (particularly Amy Stephens).

After playing with FLEXI all day I have decided it is the right choice for my project(s). I understand it's the holiday so I'm happy to wait patiently for answers on my previous questions. I will also mention that, with the help of ccQuery and Fabrik, I have been able to learn a great deal about the structures and functioning of FLEXI. I have also learned that I can happily run both FLEXI and Fabrik side-by-side.

I'm basically using the excellent FLEXI front-end for quickly creating my content types, fields, and templates, while using the power of Fabrik on the back-end to do the heavy lifting with import/export/adding items. I've created database links to FLEXI from within Fabrik that should allow for CSV import/export. Though I'm still working out how to create the joins between jos_content and jos_flexicontent_fields_item_relations from within Fabrik, it looks like a LEFT JOIN from jos_content.id = jos_flexicontent_fields_item_relations.item_id will do the trick...

I'm going to sleep on it, wake up early tomorrow and experiment further... and probably blow the living hell out of my site... that's what backups are for.

I have a paid subscription over at fabrik as well, and I use it on my live site. However FLEXIcontent has a more appealing design and user interface. When the frontend submission comes It be awesome

What I do miss from Fabrik is the ability to import from other tables and the relations. With Fabrik I was able to migrate my non-joomla site very quickly. I had two tables, Artists and Songs which was related by artistID and I just use these old tables with Fabrik. I choose what the relations should be and BANG it works, almost right out of the box

I'm a little scared to migrate to FLEXIcontent as I hate the mysql coding migration... I did it for MightyExtensions Resources and when I went live it crashed my server with all the SQL querys. I don't have time to go through that again, and I don't want to as I do have a working solution

I see them as two different tools that happen to have overlap. Fabrik is like a swiss army knife. It's a database utility and forms generator in one. It has a lot of neat elements (fields with mini-apps) that flexicontent doesn't have, and yes the ability to do joins. They've even rigged it make it easy to do "CCK".

Flexicontent is a more dedicated CCK with the main purpose of extending Joomla's articles. If that is mainly what you need, it's a lot easier and faster to work with... especially when you factor in templating. It's also going to be more straightforward to use for your clients. But I think it comes down to the right tool for the job.

Linuus wrote: What I do miss from Fabrik is the ability to import from other tables and the relations.

AND a more active forum. This forum is a little dead. I guess it'll get more active as the component spreads (At least I hope that )