I have been working with Expression Engine for the past couple of months on a website redesign for WhoIsGrace.com that we just launched last night.  Having worked with a few content management systems in the past, including Drupal and Joomla, all the way to the big guys like DotCMS and RedDot, I was happy to take on the task of building a site in Expression Engine.

Expression Engine is a PHP-based content management system that I would put somewhere in between WordPress and DotCMS.  The focus for EE is mosting a site that is basically a collection of blogs.  For the free core version of the CMS you get a fairly full-featured content management system.  If you decide to pay the extra to get the personal licence, you get access to quite a bit more that makes EE a viable CMS for a small operation.

EE for the Enterprise?

While EE does offer a Corporate Edition at a reasonable price, I wouldn’t recommend it for a large enterprise.  If you have the ability to host a server that you have root access to, DotCMS is still free and has way more features.  Though if your a smaller oparation or individual and are stuck with hosting your site on shared hosting plan, I would recommend EE as long as you have a little programming know how.

Strength in Blogs

EE handles blog-type content very well.  It is very easy to set up multiple blogs and have them up and running very quickly.  It also has a nice mailing list module that makes sending a newsletter fairly easy.  Forms take quite a bit to set up if you want to do something custom, but there is a nice easy way to set up a contact form without too much hassle.  Though this might sound silly, I actually thought that making static content was too much hassle than it was worth.

How am I going to do that?

EE’s Template system is quite different than most CMSs I’ve played with.  I think of creating a few templates such as:  Homepage, One Column, Two Column, and Three Column.  And then each page follows one of those templates.  In EE each page is a Template of it’s own.  Now, you can do things like create templates to embed in other templates.  That way your you can reuse some content.  But they way it all works in EE just left me scratching my head quite a bit.  I found myself thinking .. “Now how am I going to hack EE to make it do this” … way too much for my liking.

Structured Content?

One thing that I really like about EE is how it handles structured content.  You can basically define your entries to have any feilds you want.  It was a little hard to figure out how to do things like image fields and the such, but the upload file functionaility in the Editor is nice a feature.  My users don’t have to worry about FTPing their images and documents to the system beforehand anymore which is really nice.  I also tried to integrate TinyMCE into the system, but I didn’t have much luck with it.  If I knew more about TinyMCE I am sure it would’ve been possible, but I had to spend my time figureing other stuff out.

Modules Everywhere

Another strength of EE is in it’s modules and plugins system.  I found it very easy to find and install modules to do a lot of the things that I needed EE to do.  One set in particular were the modules anmd extension from Mark Hout.

Conclusion

Expression Engine is a good choice for anyone that cannot get their own server with admin access.  It is as easy to install and use as something like Drupal or Joomla, but comes packed with a lot more features.  For $100 it makes a great buy for an indivudual wanting to run their own CMS.  I would definitly recommend using EE to those users.  However, for the enterprise, I still reccomend using and Enterprise level CMS like DotCMS.

If you do plan on trying out Expression Engine, I would highly recommend reading some of the tutorials from Train-EE.  I found his series on building a church website a ton of help when I was just starting out.