cms

Finally I achieved to move my whole blog to expressionengine.com technology. I bought the full license already a couple of years ago, tried in a sandbox and have to say that I always gave up after a couple of hours as you do need some leisure time to understand the logic of the software. So most of the time I reinstalled wordpress, drupal or joomla and sometimes played with offline tools like rapidweaver for Mac OS X or even dreamweaver. All these tools (and there are more, see following review to get an impression: http://www.openjason.com/) have th big advantage that you get quickly productive. Installation is as smooth as ExpressionEngine is, but you get faster very promising results with wordpress for example. ExpressionEngine (although some templates available) is a tool which overs you ALL possibilities but with the limitation that you’ll not get a fancy homepage out of the box by simple installation of the core platfrom.

I was first attracted to Expression Engine because it appeared to offer a solid all in one package. Seamlessly integrating multiple pieces of software to bring a site together can be at best a laborious task and at worst impossible. Even once it’s done you then have the hassle of one login for every section of the site, whether it’s the gallery, the news section or the downloads area. The idea that I could configure every aspect of my site through the same templates and then make updates through the same login made EE an appealing purchase. It includes a forum, a gallery and even a small e-commerce module for basic functionality.

Being a closed software platform it offers less modules, plugins and extensions than the open source alternatives mentioned above. However, before my purchase years ago I was already impressed by the quality of their customer service, the good documentation and the strong community - really everyone is polite and helps you as a newbie to go through the difficult steps of a learning to navigate through a new environment.

You have to get used to the templating philosophy. But once you did, you’ll be impressed by the possibilities. It’s just great that expression engine separates CSS, RSS, etc, means the layout with the dynamic content. You’re building your sites as you would do with a tool like a dreamweaver and you only replace your content mainly with variables and loop “through dynamic content statements” to get your content show up in the templates you defined.

For each of your content sections you can define own input fields, mandatory fields, categories, etc. You as the owner keep the control over the whole content management system. This means that a different selection of fields can be displayed, depending on the blog being posted to. For anyone who has plans to ‘hand over the keys’ so to speak and let their clients update their own sites, this is a very useful feature as each field can be clearly labelled and configured to suit.

ExpressionEngine is a full content management systems which can display as well only a blog, but you have the whole power in and this makes it especially for people who only want to implement quickly a blog less convenient than most of the above mentioned tools. But(!) … even though I have to admit that installation of wordpress is much easier at first glance I was always disappointed about the speed of the software and I was tired as well of hacking away at core files and scouring the net for essential third party plugins or even to develop own ones as I did with flickr-slideshow-wrapper for wordpress.

Having now implemented expression engine successfully I know what the biggest advantage is and why it was worth spending my leisure time in the learning curve: SPEED, SPEED, SPEED!!! I’m just amazed how fast expression engine renders my pages (with comparable functionality) to my former implementations with joomla, wordpress, drupal or rapid weaver (the last one being very fast compared to the other, due to its static page concept).

Nevertheless, tools like wordpress, joomla, drupal are today commodity. Download, install and start blogging. For expression engine you need some time. I’m not affiliated with ellislab.com the company behind ee, but I can only suggest their software expression engine to any blogger, who does not want to compromise with any may be limitations. Expression Engine can really do whatever your design dreams are.

Ryan Irlan (http://www.ryanirelan.com) made some absolutely fantastic videos which will give you a fantastic deep dive-in into expression engine philosophy. Although building in his casts an example “news” page, you’ll easily understand the philosophy behind ee, and with only some basic CSS, HTML and programming skills you’ll get tremendous benefit out of his lessons (worth each penny, and again I’m not affiliated to Ryan either ).

The only thing I’m missing is a plug-in for http://www.websnapr.com/. If any reader has a hint or a workaround (easy to implement and to use) I would appreciate if you could add a comment to this posting with your advice! Many thanks in advance.

Update: Since 4th october this blog is again running on Wordpress, mainly for the reasons of a long delay of the Expression Engine 2.0.