Our clients rely on the developers here at Fragment to recommend the best technology to fit their online needs. When it comes to choosing a prebuilt content management system, as opposed to building a completely custom solution, we usually lean on ExpressionEngine. In this post, I’m going to outline some of our reasons for using ExpressionEngine instead of some of the other open source and free alternatives.
I can’t put it any better than Ryan Irelan, maintainer of ee-insider.com and creator of a series of ExpressionEngine tutorials: "[ExpressionEngine] acts like a CMS, not a blogging tool." WordPress is a popular choice for building websites, but often a client needs more than just a standard blog. ExpressionEngine fills this need, but can also cover blogging.
ExpressionEngine can be tailored to fit a diverse range of client needs. Some clients might post "blog" entries, others may enter "news" entries. Some might not even have a blog and instead they’re just creating pages or adding employee bios to the site. ExpressionEngine lets us customize the fields we provide. When a client goes to add a bio to the site, they’re not clicking a link that says "Publish a new blog entry," they’re actually publishing an "Employee Bio". They have customized fields for name, headshot, and job title - not just title and body content.
We’ve found that these back-end customization options help our clients easily navigate the management and maintenance of their own site.
Because ExpressionEngine is a commercial product, which requires a license to be purchased for use, EllisLab developers (the creators of ExpressionEngine) are constantly working to keep the software secure and up-to-date. The support provided by EllisLab within the EE forums is phenomenal, often with a response time of just a few hours. ExpressionEngine, while open to many of the same vulnerabilities as WordPress or Drupal, is less often targeted by malware producers due to being a commercial product. Security patches are added to ExpressionEngine within the regular version updates of the software.
The highlights:
- ExpressionEngine has a more flexible model than the standard blog with pages
- ExpressionEngine can be customized to fit the content it is providing
- ExpressionEngine isn’t free, which means more updates and better security
Learn more about... Web Design, Application Development, Content Management System
Jason LeeFri, Feb 04, 2011 at 5:53 pm
Amen to that. Why try and ram a square peg in a round whole? EE assumes nothing about your content, allowing you to shape your CMS to your design as opposed to the rigidness of other CMS.