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For the past year or so, the content of this website has bounced around between ExpressionEngine (EE) and WordPress—primarily because I am not completely satisfied with either platform. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. Because of this, I continue to look for better ways of doing things. The following is by no means a comprehensive list, but a few observations after working with both platforms for a while.

ExpressionEngine advantages

• Elegant templating system—outputting content is easy, and template tags instead of PHP keep the markup clean.
• Flexible content structure—organize your content how you see fit. You are not limited to the typical post/page setup.
• No assumptions are made about the content or the presentation.
• Secure and stable platform.

ExpressionEngine disadvantages

• As a commercial product with a smaller development team, progress on the platform itself can be a bit slower than desired.
• Some features need refinement, and add-ons may be used to fill the gaps.
• Updating the software is a manual process.
• Deploying can be more cumbersome than the competition.

WordPress advantages

• WordPress is open source software with a large user base.
• The control panel is well designed, intuitive, and accessible.
• Content editing is a smooth process with revisions, drafts, and previews built in.
• Updating the software is an easy process.

WordPress disadvantages

• Templating is unintuitive and restrictive.
• There is the potential for security problems if the software is not updated regularly, or if plugins or themes have security holes.
• Creating custom content types and fields is not built into the admin UI by default.
• The system can feel limiting at times, even though it can be extended with plugins and custom development.

What about Craft?

Some EE developers have moved to Craft. The control panel looks beautiful, and the templating appears to be very similar to EE and almost as elegant, though slightly more complicated (https://gist.github.com/brandonkelly/8584132). However, I don’t like the idea of being locked into another commercial platform. So that option is less appealing to me.

What about Drupal?

When Drupal 7 was released, the design and functionality of the control panel was way ahead of anything else I had used at the time. The designers factored in keyboard and other accessibility features which are often an afterthought. The Drupal system itself may be overkill for most of my projects, but I would like to take another look at the CMS when I have a chance.

What about EE as open source?

ExpressionEngine would benefit from an open source approach, and I’ve run across the idea of an open source version of EE in various forums and blogs. We do have EE core now, but it’s not open source. It’s free, but the community can’t contribute to it. Any type of modification would violate the EllisLab license agreement.

I think an open source branch of the software would make a lot of sense. Enhancements could be integrated into the commercial version, increasing the frequency of updates, and helping the software to evolve. This hasn’t happened yet, and I don’t see this as part of the company’s plan. However, there could be an open source version at some point.

Other alternatives

I’ve seen MODX and ProcessWire mentioned in a few places as comparable systems. They could be worth looking into. For now, I’m sticking with both ExpressionEngine and WordPress, and looking forward to EE 3 later this year. We’ll see what happens.

ExpressionEngine (EE) is well suited to a custom site design. It’s the fastest way that I know of to convert a static custom site design into a dynamic site powered by a CMS. I’ve been using the software since 2008 to build custom websites for my clients. I’ve always appreciated the approach that EE takes to site design. The general idea is that you fold the CMS into your design, and not the other way around.

Back in 2008 or so when I was looking for a CMS to use, the standard approach of most CMS software was to build your design on top of the CMS framework. There was an existing structure that you had to deal with, and good luck if you wanted something a bit more out of the box. You could wrench your average CMS into a pretzel to get it to do approximately what you wanted, and you were then stuck with markup that was less than ideal, odd class names, weird structure, and general wonkiness.

If I remember correctly, my first experience with a CMS (aside from websites with a custom back-end) was with Mambo, which was eventually forked into Joomla. It had a lot of useful features like advertising banner campaign management and a mailing list, but it felt like using a sledgehammer to drive a nail. Try to use a blunt object for a task that needs precision and you end up with a mess.

In my search for the perfect CMS, I evaluated many along the way: WordPress, Movable Type, Textpattern, LightCMS, Joomla, Drupal, SilverStripe, concrete5, Squarespace, and others that I no longer remember. I eventually found my way to ExpressionEngine. When I first tried EE, it was refreshing. I could add the template tags into my design very easily. Converting a static site to a dynamic one was now a matter of hours and not days.

At the time, I had also worked with WordPress on and off but considered it more of a blogging platform. I always liked the WordPress environment and considered the interface more user friendly than EE, but it did not suit my need to easily build a site with a custom design.

EE has worked well over the years for building custom sites. However it does have some drawbacks. Maintaining the software itself is a bit of a hassle as it requires a manual update, or the use of a plugin. Updates don’t always go smoothly and sometimes things break. My own installation became a bit unwieldy due to changes in design, and use of the Multiple Site Manager. And there are core features that are simply lacking and require the use of third-party plugins.

Recently, I needed to update my portfolio, and make sure all pages of the site used a responsive design. I made a few attempts at redoing the design, but ultimately it became easier to switch to WordPress and use an existing theme. I spend my days implementing custom sites for individuals and companies, and I just did not have the motivation to build my own design on the off-hours.

I want to get back to generating content and working on side projects when I’m not handling client work. Switching to WordPress frees up some time otherwise spent on updates, maintenance, tweaking the design, and allows me to focus on the content.

If you have a significant amount of text content, WordPress is ultimately a better tool to manage that. Drafts are saved automatically, revisions are built in offering a form of version control, previewing content works well, and different user levels assist with multiple authors. The process of writing just feels smoother on this platform than it does on ExpressionEngine.

One could argue that it’s just a matter of picking the right tool for the job. I will still use EE to build custom sites. I am also using WordPress more to build custom sites due to client demand. For the time being at least, this site will be running WordPress. I look forward to the next version of EE, and with some needed updates, I could be convinced to move back.