Impressions of Expression Engine

03/11/2008

I have been working with Expression Engine (EE) for a bit now. At first I was perplexed with the lack of obvious direction with EE. There is a fair amount of material on the EE site about the program but the initial video tutorials were too fast and too assumptive at the same time. Now that my feet are we and my hands dirty, I understand the tutorials much better.

The first obstacle for me was getting over the notion of a Theme. This is a critical element in many CMS tools. You select your theme and then build the site. While EE comes with a default theme and you can select from about a dozen alternates (that must be uploaded before you run the installer) or you don’t have the option to use one of them, it is not where you want to focus with EE. It blew my mind when I realized that you can totally design your site in xhtml and css and then you can port it over to EE and work from there to “chunk” it apart and create the beginnings of your new site.

Once you get this foundation started you can begin to create parts that will can be included as content. The more I have gone with EE, the more I like it. The initial learning curve is a bit steep, but not near as steep as Drupal, but after a bit it really begins to make sense. I find myself thinking in terms of EE structure. So I won’t be under the necessity of backing into the project. My impressions at this point? Expression Engine is Powerful and Fun!