ExpressionEngine

[Medyman]

Does anyone have any experiences with ExpressionEngine (http://expressionengine.com/)? If so, could you please share how they've been.

I'm considering switching over to ExpressionEngine as a default CMS to base all of my websites off of. Currently, I'm using a home-grown CMS but that gets to be tedious to maintain and personalize with each project I do for a different client.

Thanks...

[ddadmin]

I use EE actually here on DD, specifically, the CSS Library (http://www.dynamicdrive.com/style/) section. Here are my thoughts:

Pros:

- Highly customizable in terms of the final output of the data stored in the CMS. Almost no chunk of data is tied down to a specific format, so your page can look as unique as you want it to be.

- Very fast thanks to the caching system. Very secure, I don't think there's been one reported incident of a security breach.

- Flexible custom fields and statuses that can be added on the fly. They're very useful for adding additional logic to your pages.

The cons:

- Very small list of usable 3rd party modules/ plugins. Something easily found in most other popular CMSes, like Polls, Ajax rating scripts, wysiwyg editor, Tagging, etc are either non existent, or very very hard to find a quality one for. There's about only 1 commercial plugin developer that I'm aware of that offers some decent plugins, but they are way overpriced IMO.

- Poor multiple writers/ contributors support. By that I mean, if your site will be accepting content from site visitors in the form of writers or contributors, the built in membership levels system is definitely lacking compared to other CMSes. There isn't even a public content submission form for the purpose out of the box. Basic things like file uploads for file types other than the predefined, wysiwyg editor etc are all crippled in some way or the other.

- Custom fields doesn't support non string type values out of the box. This means you can only sort by a custom field alphabetically, instead of numerically.

It's a great CMS, but I wished it has more features out of the box or via dependable plugins.

[afe]

Wait a minute, your telling me that there are other softwares that make pages for you and I'm going crazy over here trying to make a website? What's the point of making a website manually when you can use those softwares?

[tech_support]

What's the point of making food when you can just buy it from the supermarket?

[Medyman]

@ddadmin...

Thanks for the input.

I downloaded EE last night and have been playing around with it. I'm fairly impressed thus far.

The one con that I have already run into (as stated in your post) is lack of a WYSIWYG text editor. I was able to insert tinyMCE into it fairly easily, though. So that doesn't seem to be too big of an hurdle.

I think for the bulk of my sites, this will do perfectly. Lately I've gotten into kind of niche market of coding online literary magazine type sites so I won't necessarily be needing too advanced features. It's all about saving and recalling content which EE seems very powerful at doing.

If anyone else has any thoughts/recommendations on other CMS, feel free to post.

Thanks.

[thetestingsite]

I kind of like Expanse CMS (http://www.expansecms.com). It used to be a commercial product, but then the developers stopped supporting it (so it is free now). It is very stable and customizable. The download link is in the source code if you want to download it.

Hope this helps.