I am on final stages now, gathered our entire content (hard copy and soft copy) to web based plain text format..
Tested Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal both all of the above lack somewhere..
Finally considering EE as the solution I would like to know advantages of using Express Engine compared to 3 above.
We don’t use those other systems so we don’t really have an official comparison to give you. The best approach is to search the forums for discussions on Joomla, WordPress, and Drupal. This question has been asked before and the community responses are plentiful.
I have used all of them. Though I do support for pMachine I most of my post count was made as a regular user…
Drupal: Of all the mentioned systems Drupal is probably the more popular and gets the most attention. I know of many more bigger websites running Drupal than the other open source systems. Drupal is good for having a homegrown forum but that forum is pretty light on features.
Cons: Very difficult to style. The system does not have a great templating system. Out of the box, Drupal does not have seperation betwen the backend and the user facing pages. When you install a template, it applies to the whole shebang. This is a huge PITA but it can be changed. The Civic Space flavor of Drupal does fix this but it is still not pretty to deal with.
One of the best Drupal websites I have seen the the Flock site. The Designer had a quote on his website about Drupal.
A lot of the site was already finished when I came in, I just had to apply the new color scheme. It was also my first chance to play with [Drupal][5]. Unfortunately, although it’s a very powerful CMS, I didn’t have the greatest time with it as it came to be one of _the most cumbersome_ and roundabout pieces of software I’ve ever worked with. Maybe, I’m just too used to how WordPress works. But if you’re looking at applying a theme to a Drupal installation, remember that there’s quite a learning curve when trying to conquer those quirky nodes and blocks.
Joomla: This is a great system for putting something together quick and being ready to go. All the features are right there and easy to implement. The control panel is seperated from the rest of the site and looks good. The problem with Joomla is that I find it to be very rigid. Templates are alot of work to put together.
Wordpress: This system really doesn’t really compare to EE, Drupal and Joomla. Wordpress is much more specialized as a blogging engine rather than a general purpose CMS. I think Wordpress has a much better templating system than Joomla and Drupal and is easier to customize because of this.
One huge problem with Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress is that each seems to have regular updates due to security bugs. I think EE has only had one security bulletin.
EE blows all the other systems away in flexibility and ease of development. If you are paying someone to build a website for you then you would most likely save a bundle using EE even though you would have to pay for the system itself. With EE you also get a dedicated support staff and developers that make their bread by creating the best system possible to drive your website.
Personally I think developing in those other systems is about as fun as poking my eyes out.
I have used Drupal and Wordpress before, amongst other CMS applications. Drupal is a lot heavier and more bloated than Wordpress. Drupal has tons of features out-of-the-box which is a bit impractical for me as I’d not like to be confronted with a bloated system of which I’ll only take advantage of a small percentage of what is already pre-installed. Wordpress is much lighter, has tons of plugins but the way the system operates is not flexible enough for me and I do not like having to install dozens of plugins, work with php within templates etc. in order to accomplish what I want. For smaller sites, Wordpress is definitely good, especially for blogs.
Another option would be Textpattern. Textpattern is my second favourite CMS and I still use it for some clients. But for myself I have gone for ExpressionEngine because its templating system, weblog management and customization options surpass that of any of the other CMSes I’ve used so far. It’s probably in the same/similar league as e.g. typo3 or eZpublish, though, the latter two are so heavy and bloated and with a much more complex learning curve. I used to use typo3 for bigger projects, but have dumped it as Expression Engine does almost all the things that these code monsters do, only in a much more intuitive and organised, easy-to-comprehend manner.
I tried Drupal, well as mentionedd above, its a bitch. Go for it if you have a hardcore developer to support you. The themes, well forget about it… they use a PHPtemplate engine and you have to change at quite a few places. CSS based design is supported but the PHP engine just destroys the purpose and increases the learning curve. The control panel is not intuitive either.
For ease of themes, its EE. Because from the control panel, you can strive for a pure CSS/ XHTML based design. Easy, simple and straight forward. My only gripe is that Pmachine’s features arent as complete as Drupal and Joomla, esp for communities. The Pmachine agreement says that you cannot do a weblog hosting service like Myspace or Friendster. But with the move and emphasis on community websites now, this is the modus operandi or reason why we need a CMS in the first place. Social Networking.
Joomla, I have tried a bit. The features are much more than EE with good support. The online docu is not good, hence you have to figure things out yourself. The templating is also CSS based so that is easy.
Wordpress is a pure play blog engine, so forget it.
If you want to do a simple, no frills, easy to maintain website without Social Networking, EE is the way.
If you want Social Networking and a full featured and free CMS, Joomla is the best choice. Drupal is written for php geeks and gurus by phps geeks and gurus.
1) I like that Joomla’s default design is nice (a corporative style), a visually nice control panel. There’re some first tries to integrate it with fora (but with unstable results).
2) I like Drupal because it can be seamlessly integrated with vBulletin.
And I like these products are free.
I think they can be used when the situation is the CMS must be free of charge—if 1) a user/consumer doesn’t have money enough to buy what he/she really needs or 2) the total price of design+CMS is too high (but I don’t think $100 for the CMS is really a “too high” or high price at all).
The main problem with EE is you should become a web designer But I think that is a standard requirement to be a modern, competent specialist in any field now.
So, you need more time to get your completed/finished website based on EE :( But to change such a website much easier than to change Joomla/Drupal.
(My personal advice is to start learning EE with the Query module and plugins—that gives a full access to EE’s potential. And to read various examples in this forum.)
If you want to create/have a website and forget about it—use Joomla. But you should understand there’re regular security problems with Joomla/Drupal (so, you may not “forget” about your site completely even in this case). And why then to use PHP/MySQL? Much cheaper to use a simple HTML hosting then.
So, that mainly depends on your plans, but I don’t know them
I’ve used and installed all; WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, as well as others, including Typo, TextPattern, et al. All have their place in the blogging and CMS world. All have a different approach to building web sites.
WordPress - very, very easy set up and many themes (styles) from which to choose. Heavy focus on blogging. So simple your mother could use it. So simple your mother will grow out of it. Customizing style and layout is not simple. Many plugins available; many of dubious quality and functionality. Learning curve to functionality is minutes.
Joomla - very easy setup, many templates (styles), but not as simple to use. Focus is on content as a CMS. Your mother could login and add content, but have difficulty with the many features, extensions, etc. Customizing style and layout is difficult for non-experienced. Learning curve is weeks.
Drupal - not your mother’s CMS. Lots of control but not easy to set up new or different styles, difficult to manage. It’s like living in Peoria and owning a Fiat. Once you get it running, it’s OK for awhile, but you need someone living next door to keep it running. Drupal is not for the faint of heart. Learning curve? Get a calendar and a book on PHP.
Expression Engine - the approach to site building is substantially different. You start with a clean slate, a blank white board. Site pages are built with basic XHTML and CSS. The template system in EE is the most elegant in the industry. Pages are constructed using templates (not layout or page styles as in Joomla or WordPress) which fit together to form the page and content. It’s a remarkably well designed approach which gives you nearly full control over design and content. There’s really nothing quite like in the open source or commercial CMS world. EE’s “expressions” integrate simply with XHTML and CSS to form pieces of pages which EE’s template system pulls together as complete pages without knowing PHP or MySQL.
EE is highly stable, highly scalable, very flexible, and has an unparalleld security record. Recovery from catastropic problems is straightforward, support is quick and accurate, and the development team excellent. EE’s other components and features (modules and plugins) integrate seamlessly, without external third party hacks that break with a new updated. But EE is not point and click web design. It’s a creative tool for completely customized site layout with nearly a complete separation of layout and design, the content, from the back end system of PHP and MySQL. If you know what layout you want and can build it, EE is the best way to go.
I ended up hating Drupal for a whole list of reason. I put some of my thoughts together on it in an entirely too long blog post. But the gist of it is that the template code is a disaster the support/documentation is horribly out of sync with the actual software versions, addon modules are EXTREMELY varied in quality, Member permissions are not nearly as granular as would be ideal (though there are some spotty modules that are supposed to fix this I could never get any of them, I tried 3, to work), finally updating it to newer versions is ridiculously complicated.
Not a fan.
WordPress is nice for blogs but I find the amount of work required to fake a true CMS with it not worth it.
Like a previous poster said EE lets you begin with a blank slate and about the only thing holding back what you do with it is your imagination and skill set. If you’re an accomplished HTML/CSS ninja with design skills you can pull off some beautiful stuff with EE.
My favorite feature of EE is the extreme flexibility of the section templates. You can do ANYTHING with them. Really. I work at a web development shop full of Java and .NET developers and we really push those as solutions. Every so often I am able to sneak an EE site through when they aren’t looking but I continue to tell people that EE could be used for 95% of our client work. Of course nobody wants to hear that because that would mean laying off half the company. But that’s an entirely different story.
WordPress I really like too and often recommend that for clients that only need a small site. It does require digging in the code much more than EE (in EE you don’t have to dig in any of the php if you don’t want) but once you’ve used it a few times it isn’t that difficult to use.
Now Joomla and Drupal I can’t stand. I’ve been building sites for over 10 years and consider myself pretty fluent with HTML, CSS, etc and spend a lot of my spare time installing and messing around with different packages just to see if there is anything better than EE or WordPress. I can hands down tell you that Joomla and Drupal aren’t anywhere close, at least for me.
Drupal is okay, but it is fairly rigid. If you had no other choice but to use it I wouldn’t complain I guess. On the other hand my worst ever experience has been with Joomla. It flat out sucks. It’s a disgrace to the other three (yeah i’ll even throw Drupal in, that’s how much I despise Joomla) to even have it in your vs. comparison.
Joomla is in my opinion one of the worst CMS’s ever to be created. Stay as far away as you can. That said I wish somebody would port the vey good band calendar module somebody built for it. That was the only reason I even tried to use Joomla, but Joomla became such a pain in the ass that it wasn’t worth it.
If you asked me I’d tell you to use EE 99 out of 100 times.
I will agree to Phil’s remark above that Drupal is quite rigid and wordpress is for small sites ( you really cant do much or something big on wordpress). I have not tried EE before but i think i will give it a shot on my third site, second one being joomla. I did read a lot on Drupal Vs Joomla before finalizing on Drupal, the main reason being its support for multi-site features as well as its SEO friendliness, which I think is a integral part of any website development today. So far it has been really good with SEO part.
One thing that i really disliked about Drupal was lack of quality and varied templates. There is not really much to choose from. I have however compiled some of my ideas on my blog and will be updating them at Drupal Vs Joomla, you can visit if you have time.
One thing that stands out in favor of Drupal is that it is the choice for some of high profile websites like
http://appel.nasa.gov - NASA
http://www.theonion.com - The Onion
http://www.goodstorm.com - Good Storm
http://www.projectopus.com
http://www.airamerica.com - Air America Radio
http://www.linuxjournal.com - Linux Journal
So may be if you are looking for a hint, then this should be a good one.
EE also has a number of high-profile intense traffic sites. That, in itself, is no “hint” as to which system is better. Here’s a quick comparison based on the first few that came to mind. If market dominance were the Holy Grail of what is best, then we’d all run Windows and use *shutter* dot net for web development.
Overall there are a lot of government, large corporations, medical/research institutions, grade school -> graduate schools using EE, along with home/small/medium businesses, personal web sites, or blogs. Keep in mind a lot of web sites simply may not post on their sites they are using EE. Some organizations they may not be directly allowed, by internal policy, to discuss technology used as it can be seen as them endorsing a product directly.
Honestly from the EngineHosting side of things, we host far more SMB, corporate, educational, and high traffic web sites powered by EE then we do personal/blogging type sites. You would be surprised by some of them too I would imagine.
To update my previous post here, I’ve now come to the realization that Wordpress can be thrown in the heap of systems I would rather not use. Love it, love the story behind it and think it’s great they’re growing. But personally the amount of work it takes to get a WP site running compared to an EE site isn’t worth it. Even if you’re paying the $249 for the commercial license.
I wish we could disclose a couple of the bigger companies using EE that require non-disclosures from their vendors. One of them is among the most recognizable brands in the world. It would be immensely beneficial to us if we could showcase them, but unfortunately we can’t. They are very, very big, though.
I wish we could disclose a couple of the bigger companies using EE that require non-disclosures from their vendors. One of them is among the most recognizable brands in the world. It would be immensely beneficial to us if we could showcase them, but unfortunately we can’t. They are very, very big, though.
Rick you know that just makes us want to know who it is even more.
No kidding, I am trying to put together a site for my mom. Actually, I have already put together a drupal site (zemea.info) but she never users it. After using the site myself, it is obvious to me why my mother doesn’t use it, and I wonder what I was thinking to use drupal.
Unlike other users here, I’m okay with the template, in fact I really like the one I chose. I am not interested in changing the template, that’s not the problem.
The problem is: drupal is too difficult for my mom to use. For example, you click on galleries, that is fine to look at photos, but if you want to add photos you have to leave the galleries, you have to go: Home » Content » Create content, and go thru all the steps to correctly upload a photo. If you want to create a new gallery, you leave the gallery and and go to: Home » Administer » Content management. If you want to make changes to the appearance of the gallery, it’s: Home » Administer » Site configuration. It is just not intuitive, all that stuff should be in one place. I also tried to add a simple address, to keep family addresses - if you are not familiar with drupal, you won’t believe how difficlult it is just to enter new addresses.
I am thinking about ditching drupal and going with wordpress. Any thoughts?
Well normally I might say wordpress would be ok, but you mention a gallery. Which wordpress had no good support for. Even Matt from the wordpress team uses Gallery2 to run his photogallery.
I wish we could disclose a couple of the bigger companies using EE that require non-disclosures from their vendors. One of them is among the most recognizable brands in the world. It would be immensely beneficial to us if we could showcase them, but unfortunately we can’t. They are very, very big, though.
Some big brands are -
Boeing (Italy)
Nike Soccer
Governor Schwarzenegger
If you want something free that’s so simple even your mom could use it, Vox is probably your best bet. It has a function called ‘Collections’, which can be used to easily create photogalleries. The only drawback is it doesn’t have a forum. But if you think of a blog as a type of forum, that shouldn’t matter.
If you’re ready to pay a little bit (this is your mum, no? ), for only $9 monthly, the very best thing you could do for her is Doodlekit. It is even easier to use than Vox, and has a very pretty gallery, forum and blog.
If you want to host the site yourself, you might just have to cobble together the simplest open source forums, galleries & blogs. The problem is, open source products generally aren’t created for mum to use, and so aren’t as user-friendly as the Vox & Doodlekit.
But I think that is a standard requirement to be a modern, competent specialist in any field now.
