EE Site Launched

04/01/2008

The results are in and as a developer, my vote goes for Expression Engine. Why do you ask would I be willing to pay a license fee for something that can be had for “free” in some other content management system? The only way to truly appreciate the power, flexibility and usefulness of any content management system is to use it. I have worked with a number of CMS in the past. I have worked with home-grown corporate versions that worked, but I always felt boxed in. 

I tried Mambo (now Joomla) and while there was a degree of flexibility, it too was heavily linked to the architecture of the system. I have tried Plone, and while I really liked the styling on the finished product and many of the aspects of the system, I never could wrap my head around Zope. Next I worked through Drupal, both version 5 and some on version 6. After a lot of around and around I was able to understand the basic system, but the interface was so painfully difficult to modify and the themes didn’t always work with the content, so I moved on to WordPress.

WordPress is so handy. It is like one of those tents that you unfold and it just pops up, a fully standing tent. Just unfold the sleeping bag and you’re ready to blog. But then came along an opportunity to build a website for a local church. There was a lot of enthusiasm from the community, not to mention the financial incentive, to have a site they could maintain themselves. Was WordPress up to the task?

I tried and tried, and the more I tried to fit their site into WordPress, the more I felt like the King’s vallet trying to force the glass slipper on one of the step-sister’s feet. It just wasn’t going to work. True, there are a number of WordPress sites that have been customized to resemble a content management system, but there was no way that I would be able to build a website with more than 40 pages, 15 ministries and three blogs, including one in Spanish, that I would be able to wrestle WordPress into submission. So away with the microwave CMS and in with Expression Engine.

My first experience with Expression Engine was colored by the notion of themes. I thought that you had to find a theme that you could tweak enough to call your own. But then, as mentioned in an earlier blog, along came Michael Boyink with a remarkable tutorial on Building an Expression Engine Site. This completely altered my perspective on what could actually be done in EE. Basically if you can design it and build it using XHTML and CSS, you can build it in Expression Engine.

So my wife, Donna (the designer) and I worked closely with the church group to understand their needs and develop a design and system that they could basically manage themselves. And out of it came the new website for Grace Bible Fellowship. They are still busy updating content, but they have been extremely happy with the results and frankly so have we.

The EE templating system and the architecture lend itself naturally and intuitively to a system that can grow with the organization. For me as a developer, it was so much fun to work with that I can’t wait to get into the next project, which, handy for me, begins tomorrow.