Interesting news about Expression Engine 2.0
Matthew from Digital-Web offers this tidbit about the EllisLab Sneak Preview event down at SXSW:
Derek Allard announced that EE will be powered by CodeIgniter, their open-source PHP framework. This is a big deal, immediately expanding the community base of both systems and ‘promoting’ CI developers to instant ExpressionEngine experts, as well as giving CodeIgniter a bunch of very powerful libraries that were only previously available in EE.
He goes on to say that the brilliant Veerle Pieters has redesigned the admin panel, which will be more highly customizable and AJAX-driven.
For most smaller projects, our design firm still relies heavily on Wordpress, but in recent months we’ve been preparing to use EE for medium and large sites. Having done a few test installations myself and watched other developers put together sites with EE, I’m excited about using it more often.
Regarding the price (EE is technically open-source but costs $250 for a commercial license), clients already paying $10,000 or $20,000 for a website regard it as quite a good deal, especially considering its flexibility and great support. Software as well crafted as EE can pretty much sell itself.
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Wonderful!
I was thinking about learning Expression Engine at some point and 2.0 might be a good time to start.
Thank you for the news :)
Hi Darren - new poster here, so first things first: you have done a superb job with your blog and the Mimbo theme. The educational articles in your blog are excellent! Thank you.
I am intrigued with your investigation of Expression Engine for medium to large sites while reserving WordPress for the smaller sites. My emphasis lately has been to turn to WordPress as a viable CMS alternative rather than simply a blog. Your current development of Mimbo Pro would appear to enhance the CMS approach.
So what sort of limitations have you found in WordPress that would lead you to invest the time in learning and implementing a new system. Conversely, what have you found in Expression Engine that turns your crank!
@Don: glad you’re enjoying the tutorials!
My emphasis lately has been to turn to WordPress as a viable CMS alternative rather than simply a blog.
I admit I sometimes speak out of both sides of my mouth on the issue. As a co-worker pointed out lately, these days it seems like there’s confusion among clients about paying for a CMS-driven “website” versus paying for a “blog”.
As far as small websites go, Wordpress is often a great choice because the post & category functions can be re-imagined in a number of ways. A “post” is still essentially a method of getting data in and getting data out, and it doesn’t need to resemble a traditional blog post. That’s something we’re seeing in a lot of ‘niche’ themes these days. Add a few strategic plugins, and you’ve got a very useful and powerful site.
But out of the other side of my mouth, I acknowledge Wordpress is not a true CMS in this sense: the ability to create custom, complex relationships between types of data. This is where larger apps like Expression Engine prevail, with the custom fields and field groups working to associate blocks of data across multiple sections.
The flexibility of the custom fields allows more refined and consistent display of data, rather than stuffing all of a page’s content in a wysiwyg editor, ala Wordpress. Because you can store data very specific and granular fashion, you’re also able to restrict a client from botching up their site ;)
You may have looked at EE’s native template tag language, too. It seems to require a learning curve, but is actually very readable (like Ruby). You can use it to find/display data in a way that resembles WP’s loop function.
Another EE advantage (which WP 2.5 will also offer) is a more flexible admin panel which looks and acts differently depending on the site you’re designing. It’s long been a practice of EE to define all post/loop containers as “weblogs” but that too can be edited in the admin panel. These customizations are important when it’s time to hand over the site to the client because you don’t want things sounding any more technical or disorganized than they need to sound.
One last thing, as a co-worker discovered recently, EE can also handle a complex variety of access levels, meaning a client with 6-8 people on their team can grant/restrict access at many levels on many sections.
Overall, the templating system, efficiency and aesthetic of EE put it more within the ‘new school’ of web software as compared to the clunkier, bloated, table-based ‘old school’ examples of apps like Joomla and Drupal (which have both admittedly come a very long way recently, but still don’t have the agility of EE).
Hope that helps!
Darren - that helps immensely. Thank you for the detailed and informative response. I’ll have to take another look at EE for the one large site I take care of. In the mean time, it seems my recent decision to go with WordPress for the smaller sites I am working on, was still a good one.
Hi Darren,
I’ve enjoyed your site for some time.
Regarding, “EE is technically open-source but costs $250 for a commercial license” tells me that it isn’t technically or otherwise open source. Unless, someone is trying to subvert the definition?
Being an open source and WordPress zealot, although I’m excited for EE being powered by an open source product CodeIgniter, unless the system is wholly open source you won’t find me enthusiastic.
I’ve seen some of the amazing work that Susan Gardner, Travis Smith, and hopstudios.com have done with EE. It is clearly a great tool or it wouldn’t be these fantastic people’s tool of choice, or in your tool box.
You are right on about the level of control and complex data types not being native to WordPress. I think it is worth mentioning, how well WordPress will work is completely dependent on the C in CMS. It all depends on the nature of the content.
The reason why I can’t get excited about EE is because at the end of the day you still have vendor lock in. I think the economics for most sizable projects — you know maintenance will some day add up to be the greatest cost — leads to using a great open source solution on the PHP stack like WordPress or Drupal.
I’ve faced it many times where a customer was eager for the cheapest up front costs, but I wouldn’t have been doing my job if not looking at the total cost. I will readily admit that will sometimes still mean EE is the tool to choose– today anyway.
Besides, I would have a hard time investing myself to become an expert of a proprietary system.
Meanwhile, I’m just stoked Lloyd reads the blog! (Lloyd is Automattic’s talented Digital Entomologist and an unrepentant Canadian)
Regarding, “EE is technically open-source but costs $250 for a commercial license” tells me that it isn’t technically or otherwise open source. Unless, someone is trying to subvert the definition?
The open-source-but-costs-money characterization of EE is something I’ve heard repeated by other developers in the past year and I have (maybe mistakenly) understood it to be definitive. The code can obviously be edited, but the license for the full codebase is what costs money, and obviously redistribution is forbidden. I guess the most accurate characterization is still up for debate.
It is clearly a great tool or it wouldn’t be these fantastic people’s tool of choice, or in your tool box.
It’s interesting how that works — the whole reason I got into Wordpress was because people I respected were singing its praises. And the whole reason EE became cream of the crop for me at first, mentally, was because top British developers were using it and then Veerle endorsed and blogged about it. After testing it out, it because obvious that the A-listers in question had some very valid reasons for using it (though it still seems like overkill for basic blogging purposes).
I’ve faced it many times where a customer was eager for the cheapest up front costs, but I wouldn’t have been doing my job if not looking at the total cost. I will readily admit that will sometimes still mean EE is the tool to choose– today anyway.
It’s definitely interesting to see what clients will and won’t pay for. Most of ours don’t even seem to read their contracts so they’re not necessarily clued in to exactly how much the CMS itself costs. They’re so much more interested in the total cost and the perceived fairness, rather than specific line-items. But on occasions when we’ve told clients that we’re using EE and that it’s an additional $250, their response is surprisingly sober. Live and learn.
Besides, I would have a hard time investing myself to become an expert of a proprietary system.
This next year on my employer’s clock, I’m going to have to do major bench-testing and research on EE. I’m not a purist, but it remains to be seen how much I’ll want to be an expert on proprietary systems either, fwiw ;) If there’s paid software that didn’t make me squeamish, though, EE would be it.
Thanks Darren!
You definitely won’t hear anyone with good understanding of open source spreading that. Open source has a clear definition. The code being readable and modifiable is essential but not sufficient for something to be open source as I wrote recently in “Open Source Free Web Site Templates without the Open Source”. Someone can definitely charge money for open source, but can’t restrict being a good neighbor (redistribution). Established now many years ago, and continuously championed, the definition will not be easily subverted, if myself and the rest of the open source communities can do anything about it.
If you have any questions about what open source, I’m happy to help or get you in touch with people that can. (If you would be willing to correct your article above that would mean a lot to me, and many, many others.)
As I tried to express, those are up front costs and a very small part of what I consider the total, which will be mostly in maintenance. A popular open source platform ensures maintainability (or transition to another popular open platform) and no vender lock. Sure, it can be good for your own business to use tools that require specialized knowledge and much fewer people have expertise in ;-) but even then having to maintain it may affect your sanity later ;-)
I appreciate many pieces of proprietary software, but on the open web, particularly when solving general problems, that cost becomes that much higher. I would far rather spend that time and money helping the eager open source developers solve the problems that tempt me to use proprietary software.
The big question: Expression Engine or Drupal?
Interesting discussions here about Wordpress, EE and a mention of Drupal.
I sit more in the designer camp and I have used WP most often because it’s easier for me to wrap my head around the CMS and the design.
Recently I have been put on larger projects which will require the use of EE or Drupal or Text-Pattern. All have a learning curve.
I feel that in the long run I’d be better off learning Drupal but I am not a PHP programmer and that sort of keeps me at a distance. Am I correct with that thought? So that’s why I am looking seriously at EE despite some of its oddities and opensource issues…
Thanks for any input.
Greetings from East Africa everyone!
Oh, Darren, great blog dude. I’m excited to make ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter a corner stone of my future web development work - whether I do it myself or outsource it for projects that need to be completed quickly.
Is there an EE book or something for complete beginners? I really feel that IT schools down HERE should be teaching stuff like EE/CodeIgniter as it’s more applicable in the web-enabled world.
Max (aka MaxTheITpro)
Just Google around and you’ll find lots of helpful screencasts. I’m actually tooling around with CodeIgniter this week and going to build out a test site. Pretty flexible from what I’ve seen so far.