Whew! I handed over the new Expression Engine CMS to the client just now, and not a moment too soon – the family and I fly out tonight, so I’ll be leaving work in a few hours. I thought I’d better note my impressions of EE down before then. I’m happy to report that EE is every bit as good as most say, and as tough to pick up, with a few other slight drawbacks.

Firstly, the admin or control panel is not very user-friendly, for the site designer or their client. If you want a more user-friendly CMS, your best option is still WordPress. However, for sites with more advanced features or large numbers of visitors, you’ll want to run a more integrated solution such as EE and put up with its UI shortcomings. WordPress can overcome these problems with the use of third party plug-ins, the management of which is easy, but come security update time, you might not be able to rely on every plug-in author delivering in a timely fashion.

So what’s wrong with EE’s interface? As designer, I became slightly frustrated having to switch between my template and custom field admin pages which took 2 – 3 clicks each time. As a publisher, finding the desired page or content container to edit from what quickly becomes a lengthy list, even with filters, seemed suboptimal. Furthermore, the edit page is a simple form page with few WYSIWYG elements. There’s nothing unusual in that, but compared to the WordPress UI, it pales in comparison.

It’s all worth it though when you start using EE tags to build your page templates. While using EE tags is still a lot like coding a page from scratch, writing the PHP and SQL to achieve the same behaviours yourself would be a lot more painful. What’s more, EE does all the optimisation for you so visitors don’t flood the server with database queries every time a page loads. You do need to know HTML and CSS, and a smattering of SQL and PHP will go a long way.

Seeing simple tags create powerful and versatile behaviours from a range of content containers is the famous lightbulb moment that newcomers to EE strive for. This can be a long time coming, and it’s not helped by EE’s UI or its insistence on calling all sections or content types ‘weblogs’. However, when it does happen, it’s all very satisfying, especially when you know a little bit more about what’s going on under the hood of your site than you do when using WordPress.

Let’s get it straight though, WordPress is still very much in the running. On a site like Pixel ace, I much prefer the WordPress UI, so WordPress it is. For more commercial sites, EE is the clear winner despite the $250 price tag. With both products expecting major upgrades soon, WordPress 2.7 and Expression Engine 2.0, it will be interesting to see if either can take the lead. If EE improves its UI, or WordPress improves its server loading and adds more custom content features, that could well be the case.

In conclusion, everyone wins, except the third-rate CMS peddler. With Expression Engine, we’ve got an enterprise-level solution for a fraction of the cost, the intellectual property of the site’s structure is within these four walls, and we have the capability to build more sites like this in the future.