Chad's Miniblog

Trying out Expression Engine

I have been thinking about, and wanting to experiment with, some different Content Management Systems, so I can see what is out there, and what I might want to use when I grow up and have my own firm. Based on recommendations from some of my Twitter peeps (@aprilholle and @chuckreynolds, that means you) I took a look at Expression Engine. It is a commercial product that offers a Core version that is free for personal use, and offers several other license options, ranging in price up to $249.95.

I used the tutorials created by Michael Boyink that are based on a typical, real-world scenario: creating an Expression Engine site based on a static HTML/CSS layout that someone else designed.

I will be dividing my review into sections as I progress through building my first test site.

Building the Site

Overall, when creating the site I liked the flexibility and relative modularity of the content, but the nomencature seems kindof stilted. When you slice up your code, you put the code snippets in template files, even though they aren’t templates, but are slices that go into a larger template. Maybe this is just one technique of many that are available, and maybe this is just a result of the fact that the CMS is so modular that there are a lot of approaches to solving the same CMS issues.

I will say that in comparison, EE offers a much cleaner process than creating sliced .php files for Wordpress by hand. I think it is just terminology that will take some getting used to.

Dynamic Content

The next step in the EE development process is creating the dynamic content that makes up the core of the website. In EE, these items are all called weblogs, regardless of whether they are footer items, sidebar items, etc. All dynamic content goes under the heading of weblog. Again, as with the term template that EE uses, the term weblog can lead to some confusion. As I begin to work with it more, I realize that this is really a testament to the flexibility of the EE framework. While the terminology may be odd, the flexibility it provides is enormous.

The best feature of the weblogs in EE is the ability to create a practically unlimited variety of fields to hold different types of data. Fields that contain the title of an entry, and url are automatic, then from there the choices are almost limitless. Typically, one would create fields for body text, date, etc. The more I think about the way EE is set up, the more it seems like EE is the way I had always pictured a CMS that I might design, if I had the time to create one.