Why I Chose Expression Engine As My Content Management System

December 04, 2008 | David Raffauf

Whenever I’m working on a website of any scale, one of my first tasks is finding a suitable content management system.  I’ve used a lot of the popular CMSs including WordPress, MovableType and Drupal.  And I’ve had various problems with each of these tools, until Ellis Lab’s Expression Engine came along.

WordPress is an amazing, free publishing tool but it still doesn’t have the flexibility a CMS should have.  I was blown away by their new control panel but just couldn’t accomplish some of the tasks I wanted to do.  I felt like for a blog it really worked well, but I had trouble expanding beyond that concept.

Movable Type seemed pretty flexible but I didn’t like the pricing structure.  Having a programming background it still seemed a little hamstrung especially for a commercial product.  So a more technical associate turned me onto Drupal.

After playing around with Drupal it became apparent to me that it could do almost anything.  But I soon found that it can do anything in the way that a mad scientist tooling away in his basement can do anything.  Making any modifications to how it was setup felt hacked together and extremely inelegant.  This left me yearning for another solution.

After doing a little poking around online I stumbled into Expression Engine.  I was quickly sold on the simplicity of their approach and the encapsulation of different tasks.  It felt like it was really aimed at web professionals.  Designers and programmers alike should be able to understand how to take advantage of it.  The more familiar you are with good programming practices the more flexibility you can get out of the system.

I’ll briefly try to explain what makes EE so great.  Say you’re making a site about movies.  You can create a blog about actors that includes their name, photo and awards.  You could then create another blog about movies, including the movie title, date and actors.  Now you could make a template (webpage) that displays the actors and a template that displays the movies. 

Here’s where it gets fun.  You can then relate the actors blog and the movies blog on actor names.  Now you have the ability to make a template that displays each movie.  Within the each movie you could pull information on each member of the cast.  You’re using one template, two blogs and a relationship between the blogs, actor names, to create a helpful and easily maintainable webpage.

Add to this that there are a growing list of high quality modules (yes, that’s aimed at other CMSs) I had no problem spending the $250 for a license of EE.  If you’re working on a personal project, or just want to take the core CMS for a spin, Ellis Labs will let you use a nearly full featured version of EE as long as you’d like.

I think any web project, from small personal sites to large scale projects, could use EE.  For large organizations EE provides publishing workflows, group and user management, and email communication lists.  But most importantly it provides the ability for the appropriate person to own their corner of your organization’s website.

The amount of power you have at your fingertips after setting it up will pay off that $250 price tag in an afternoon.