Out of desire to learn something new, and in part due to specific needs on upcoming client engagements, I sat down and plowed my way through Expression Engine. After about five or six hours of slugging through Michael Boyink’s amazing tutorial, I’m feelin’ a bit like Neo (youtube video below)

Having started out hacking out sites in phpNuke way back in the day, then b2 (the predecessor to Wordpress, that’s how old school I am), and moving to mainly Wordpress and a little bit of Drupal, not to mention numerous homebrewed solutions for client sites, I had a laundry list of things I was looking for.

Here’s what is awesome.

  • Custom Field Groups - When you are building a site, most pages have more than one block of text. It’ll have some content boxes on the side, intro text, images, etc. While, say, Wordpress, is only really is suitable for having a title and a main body of text, in EE you can build sets of content, and assign them to specific template pages. This makes it ridiculously easy to build out and administer complex pages.
  • Separation of content and display. ExpressionEngine handles organization and entry of the content. The template, when called, pulls any content it requires from the database. Most content management systems work vice versa, where templates are called to display specific pieces of content.
  • PHP-less templates. I had gotten used to telling my web designers to avoid touching anything between <? and ?> . EE uses template tags that resemble Smarty. And, in my opinion, is easier for a non-developer to understand.
  • Minimal need for plug-ins. Because it has so much built in, there isn’t that much need for them.
  • There are a ton of other suprises - you’ll really only learn if you work your way through the tutorial.

But:

  • It’s not free. You can download a free version to learn off of, but if you want it for commercial use, it’s $250 bucks. It seems pricey, but for what you are getting in the short and long run, it’s a drop in the bucket.
  • Building a site in EE relies heavily on wiring things up in the control panel (the tutorial spends 75% of the time in there), which can be confusing and often mind-numbing.
  • Because of that, it’s hard to rely directly develop the design and the site together. The design should be set and all CSS/HTML completed before you even think about firing this up.
  • While, yes, it can run blogs, it was built as a general-purpose CMS. If your site is primarily a blog, I would still recommend using Wordpress or MovableType.

Mindy over at Viget has a great write-up of switching from Wordpress to ExpressionEngine. She points out some of the same issues, and gave some great pieces of advices for those used to Wordpress.

Looking to start out in ExpressionEngine? Download the core edition, and then pop over to Boyink’s tutorial. It’s a whopping 17 chapters, with a lot of repetition, but it is worth it to really lock down the cycle of building templates, weblogs, field groups, etc.