[Web4lib] anyone use ExpressionEngine?

[Alnisa Allgood]

 Okay, I sent this to the list yesterday, but it still hasn't arrived,
so here it goes again.


Hi Tana-

I love Expression Engine. It truly is a powerful and flexible content
management system (CMS).  Lots of people compare it to blogging
systems like WordPress or TextPattern. But it far surpasses those
items, and is more comparable to the multi-thousand dollars CMS
systems that large corporations use.

We've switched all of our clients, except a few with custom-built,
legacy systems over to. It handles everything from the simple blog, to
the high end sites. You can set-it up with a single weblog, a couple
of fields, and a basic template—or do a multi-site, multi-domain,
multi-application system.

For example for one of our larger clients, a single install of
Expression Engine handles: 10 domains, 20 different 'content types'
including—headline news items with associated RSS feed, print to web
publications with flexible PDF creation options, photo galleries,
event calendars, opinion articles, translations into five languages,
two different directories—one a nationwide listing of consumer
services, the other a regional listing of recommended resources, a
hotline application that tracks complaints and the organization
response, and sharing with media, legislative positions and more.
They currently house about 10,000 records in their system, and it
grows by about 20-30 records per day.

You can create multiple level of access, front-end and backend data
entry forms, control views of data based on membership groups, and
more. There is even multiple ways to handled multiple sites with a
single install—for example for one client, all data gets published to
a main site, and gets filtered to subsites as appropriate, so content
is shared; but for other clients all the data is separated, so the
system can be set-up so logging into one domain, only displays the
sections, publish forms, and data for that particular domain.

It can handle static content, the obvious dynamic content, has
numerous methods for expansions—extensions, plug-ins, modules, custom
queries and accepts PHP code directly in the templates.

If all that is a bit overwhelming. Then think of it this way. You
could start out with a single blog, writing about new books, and grow
the system to contain a cross-reference library of authors, books,
topics, user comments and ratings, and even pull data from Amazon or
other sources to compliment your solutions.

The learning curve to go from basic to more intermediate can be a
little step for some people. I've seen some people get their 'ahh-ha'
moment in a couple days, and others go for months, before it comes to
them. But that said, as someone who use to custom-build PHP/MySQL
solutions for clients—EE (Expression Engine) is one of the most
powerful, flexible, fluid, and easy to use system that I've come
across, and its super affordable. It really is comparable to a number
of CMS that cost $10,000, $20,000, or more. Hell, we even have one
client where we just trashed their $50,000 system, exported the data,
and started all over in EE (NDA in effect), but they love the system
and are publishing far more content then ever before, because of its
ease of use.

For those who would argue, open source, open source. I should also
state all source code is viewable and modifiable by the developer. Of
course modifications don't get rolled back into the system. But I
consider that a good thing. EE's code is very clean and very secure.
Yeah, they have bugs, but they've only had a single security issue in
3 years, compare that to WordPress.

That's not to knock any of the other open source comparison whether
its TextPattern or Joomla; but Ee just rocks, and its growth is
amazing. I haven't regretted switch our clients over to it yet, and
while I have to use custom code or queries here or there to fully
realize what I want, so far I haven't found anything out of it's
reach.

Alnisa Allgood
Nonprofit Tech
608.241.3616

On 10/9/07, Tana Elias <telias at scls.lib.wi.us> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I recently came across a content management system called
> ExpressionEngine (http://expressionengine.com/)
>
> Is anyone out there using it for their library?  If so, might I ask
> you a few questions about how you use it and how happy you are with it?
>
> Thank you in advance,
> Tana Elias
>
> Tana Elias, Web Librarian
> Madison Public Library
> 201 W. Mifflin St.
> Madison, WI  53703
> http://www.madisonpubliclibrary.org
> telias at scls.lib.wi.us
> 608-266-4953
>
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