If you haven’t had a chance to come visit Oniracom, you should know that we can get pretty nerdy here. Even during our daily lunchtime gatherings where we tend to talk about other topics, we still end up talking about content management systems and the value of open source. This just happened the other day. The White House has just transferred whitehouse.gov to the drupal content management system. Sean mentioned that it is highly customized version of it, created with a lot of internal development. Hopefully they release a lot of their changes to help the community. We are a smaller shop though, and are better suited to outsourcing that work to a third party. We chose Expression Engine as our main content management platform. It is not a matter of which CMS is better, but what fits the needs of the project.
I have been working with Expression Engine lately for some of our new sites. Although my initial impressions may be novice, I feel there may be value to anyone else looking at expressions for the first time.
Likes
A core building block of Expression Engine is the concept of a weblog. This makes features like Pages really powerful. With Pages you can create a webpage based on a singular weblog entry. This works great for contact and bio sections of websites. Also with small customizations, tour shows can become weblogs as well.
Dislikes
I don’t like the publish page, it is cluttered and confusing. I know this could be fixed with customization, but I feel like it should be more usable out of the box.
So overall I am really happy using Expression Engine, and eagerly awaiting EE 2.0.
