Why I’m Switching to Expression Engine as a CMS Part 1
Anyone visiting my site can see that I don’t get much of a chance to write or keep up with my blog. I stay very busy between working at Stay In Touch, Inc. and Jailbreak Creative. However, after being introduced to Expression Engine while working with Aaron Mills of Jailbreak Creative, I decided I had to write a personal entry about this amazing CMS.
Because of my limited time, I won’t be able to share all of my thoughts on this subject in one post. However, I will give an introduction for this post, and then go into more details in a follow-up post.
My time with Wordpress
About 3 years ago, I really started getting into Wordpress while working for Site Builder Corporation. We started using WP for a lot of clients because it had grown into a great CMS that our clients could use. So over these last few years I’ve really invested a good deal of time in learning how to use Wordpress. All of the freelance websites I’ve built are based on Wordpress.
Wordpress is certainly one of the most popular blogging/CMS systems available, and for good reason. It boasts TONS of plugins that can extend the software, it has a lot of really nice Wordpress themes that are free or cheap to purchase, and it gets a lot of “Google Juice”.
However, what I’ve never liked about Wordpress is that in order to do anything creative, you have to learn at least some PHP in order to manipulate your layouts, templates or other functionality. Now, Wordpress.org has a lot of great documentation and WP tutorials abound online, but the learning curve it takes to really have control over Wordpress has always been a headache for me. I’m not a programmer, and even though I enjoy the challenge of manipulating a PHP or Javascript here and there to benefit my current needs, I doubt I’ll ever immerse myself to the point of being classified as a programmer. So when I have to figure out how to manipulate some PHP to get simple results for Wordpress, its very frustrating and almost not worth the effort.
Enter Expression Engine
Well once I started working for Aaron of Jailbreak Creative back in late February, he introduced me to Expression Engine and my understanding of what is possible has forever changed. Even though I’m a novice with the software, I’m able to do things 10x faster than when I was using Wordpress.
Before I go any futher, I’m not saying that Wordpress is now obsolete for me, because as a blogging software, I think WP is still exceptional, especially since it is free and has such a large community of support.
BUT, for as for a CMS, I’m finding that Expression Engine is SO much better and makes my life much easier. The way EE has been designed allows for almost endless control of the websites I build. With EE, I’m able to give my clients as much control over their websites as I deem necessary. I’m not limited to my limited knowledge of PHP when setting up dynamic pages. Expression Engine uses its own coding language that is based on PHP. So I get the power of PHP without having to know all the different coding elements of the language.
That doesn’t mean that using Expression Engine code can’t get deep or complex, but even some of the deeper stuff isn’t to difficult to grasp for this non-programmer.
From a client standpoint, going in and updating content is very easy because I have the control to make it easy. If a client only needs an area to put in text and an image, I can create those areas very easily with Expression Engine’s custom fields. So they put in their text and image into the custom fields I created and hit save. Then they go to their site and see that their entry is displayed nicely on the page.
I have so much more I want to say about Expression Engine but I can see I’m already rambling a bit to much for this post so I’m going to stop for now. Please subscribe to my blog if you would like to read my future posts on “Why I’m Switching to Expression Engine as a CMS.”
