I’ve had an on-again, off-again relationship with ExpressionEngine for about a year now. I’ll install it somewhere and play around, but I never get too serious. It’s not because learning it is too difficult; I just haven’t made the time to really dig in and make use of it.
All this changed when I finally decided to buckle down and learn the thing. Fortunately this coincided with the release of Ryan Ireland’s screencast for building sites with ExpressionEngine.
The screencasts are broken up into 30-minute segments (roughly) and start with some very simple tasks. Once the basics are established, Ryan shows you how to make more complex systems using ExpressionEngine. At the end of each episode, he has you doing things you never thought possible 30 minutes before. I’ve even heard colleagues who are experienced ExpressionEngine developers marvel at some new thing Ryan has shown them.
The only way these screen cast could be better is if Ryan were sitting next to me telling me exactly how to do things. With his guidance, I was able to move the core of the Refresh Seattle website to ExpressionEngine in a few hours (We’re still tweaking it a bit) and pick up a healthy knowledge of the CMS.
ExpressionEngine is definitely one of the best out-of-the-box CMS solutions I’ve used. If you’re going to learn it (and why shouldn’t you?), you owe it to yourself to check out Ryan’s screencasts.
Watch your back Kevin. When you least suspect it, Croft is going to knock you upside the head with his Django book.
No worries I can smell his hair products a mile away.
Hehe…Jeff does love his Django, but he’s fond of Expression Engine too!
And while we’re still behind Django as a company, we’ve found that for most of our clients, Expression Engine is a better choice.
Savoy (the Django CMS framework we’ve been using) is extremely flexible and powerful and perfect for projects that require lots of custom work, but Expression Engine offers a pretty amazing level of flexibility and power and it’s much more polished in many ways. As we’re all learning it (and big props to Ryan for the screencasts) we keep finding new things about it that make it even more awesomer.
As a business owner I like having the ability to offer to go to Savoy and more easily deal with really custom stuff, but I think Expression Engine is something we’ll be looking at for most of our CMS needs going forward.
@Greg
I don’t know if Django and EE really compete with each other. If you keep adding plugins to EE it might start having the versatile functionality that Django provides, but the two are like seperate sects.
EE’s really good for a site with a lot of word-based content, but if you’re doing kickass dynamic application stuff, Rails, Django, .Net are more versatile.
I love them all as if they were my children though, they all make the web better.
Ryan’s screencasts are just what ExpressionEngine needed to kick start people into giving it a try, especially with Jambor-ee being down.
Yeah, I don’t really consider Django and EE competitors at all. Django is a framework for building web application (such as a content mangement system), and EE is a web application. You could use Django to build something that competes with EE, but the two don’t compete directly.
As Keith said, the suite of Django applications I’ve built and we use at Blue Flavor (which we call Savoy), is more targeted at sites that need a lot of unusual custom development — the type of stuff you just can’t easily squeeze into a CMS like EE or Wordpress. For more typical content-based sites, something like EE is extremely appropriate. It’s more polished out-of-the-box, it’s pretty flexible, and it’s easier to get a site up and running with.
It’s like this: Wordpress is a Honda. EE is a Ferrari. Django is a great engine, a chassis, a transmission, and several other parts. If you need a Honda, you use Wordpress. If you need a Ferrari, use EE. If you need some kind of car that hasn’t been thought of yet, you take the group of parts that is Django and build it yourself.
I totally agree with Jeff.
After using Wordpress & EE for client sites it’s clear to me that EE is much more flexible for standard cms sites, such as blogs than Wordpress. Even for the simplest sites Wordpress, for me, is still a far distant second option.
It’s true that developing modules and extensions for EE is one way to push its functionality but even that can only take you so far. Developing extensions has a fairly steep learning curve and their is only a handful of quality developers out there.
Personally I don’t think EE even comes close to the capabilities and flexibility that Django or Rails has in its current form, no matter how many plugins you build.
When you need to take it to another level and create a web application or something with unique functionality, I think you have to build from scratch. Django and Rails have that covered.
However its important to remember that EE 2.0 will be built on the Code Igniter framework, which will increase its power and ability to be extended as a platform. So with CI & EE 2.0, the theory goes that we will get a tried and proven development framework with commercially developed modules (ExpressionEngine, Forums, etc).
No doubt there will be alot more interest in EE in the near future. Exciting times ahead.
All I know for sure is that:
I’ve been looking for an opportunity to dive into EE development myself - it does look to be a great solution, certainly a long way from it’s original form. Does Blue Flavor still use WordPress for lighter CMS setups? Also, with regards to the CMS/framework discussion, are you planning to utilize the codeIgniter MCV once it becomes integrated with EE?
Hmm, MCV, must be something new I just made up lol, the pattern of the future!
@Jim
Yes, MVC and possibly MCV (tell me about this technology!) will be something we will incorporate with the correct client, but will probably stick to barebones for most clients who want EE implementation. Development on our end of plugins, add-ons, etc. to EE would be a different story and of course stick to Codeigniter convetions. We don’t use Wordpress here, not because it’s bad, but because it doesn’t fit our needs.