Briefly, what are the advantages of these two systems? I’m an EE user (two licenses) and EE does what I want it to do, but how is WordPress better/different/worse than EE? I see a lot of sites that use WordPress and wanted to know your opinion.
WordPress is a blogging tool, and an Open Source one at that. Nothing wrong with that, but it can’t pass water to EE (Core) in terms of flexibility and power. A lot of nice templates, though. Why not simply give it a try? It’s free, after all.
I have used Wordpress in the past. I find it’s easier to use when you start developing your Blog, as it is not as sophisticated as EE.
I liked Wordpress on the beginning very much, but after a while I got somehow frustrated of managing all the different plug ins.
Many times one Plug in did not like the other one. Support does only exist in public forums, some professionalism is missing.
So I switched over to EE and found it on the beginning quite overwhelming. But after some digging into it, I’m glad that I made the change over to EE. Forum help is exceptional and immediately, one does not have to wait 3 to 4 days till someone answers. My Blog is picked up by Search Engines quite well even though I don’t have that much traffic. And I even play around to move my Site completely over to EE, even though I’m not an Expert. It’s well worth the money.
I’ve gone the Open Source route before (phpbb, postnuke, nucleuscms, etc.), and I find that at my level as a web designer, either the product is exceptional or the support is good. My experience with Open Source tells me that while people <i>are</i> very helpful, only a professional, paid product can serve my needs completely.
I suppose my question runs more along these lines: Is there something WordPress does that EE doesn’t? Or, is there something WordPress does better (exceptionally better) than EE?
I’ve uploaded WordPress and I’ve messed around with it a bit—because you’re right, you really can’t know a product until you use it—but I’m not seeing anything that’s more remarkable than EE.
I’m not looking to start a big topic on this, but it would be helpful to know a few things about WordPress by way of comparison.
This is a difficult comparison. You can only compare them if you are using both for strictly the same purposes which is probably blogging.
My experience with Open Source tells me that while people <i>are</i> very helpful, only a professional, paid product can serve my needs completely.
I think this is an important site. If you have a business that relies on paying customers (and what other type of business is there?) then you are probably better served by those that are in the same boat. You are not going to staff your business with volunteers, so why would you rely on products that are volunteer driven?
Sure, when talking about open-source you can point to PHP, MySQL and Linux which are the primary tools being used to run ExpressionEngine but in these cases open source does not mean free. Linux, PHP, and MySQL have a great deal of funding and commercial interest behind them to make sure they succeed.
I use both EE and wordpress they’re both great pieces of software regardless of whether its paid product or not. Wordpress to me seems to be a scaled down CMS and does Blogging Very Well, I would say its better than EE at it.
In terms of usage Wordpress is far more easier to use than EE and IMHO the interface looks alot slicker than EE but its just not as flexible as EE nor as powerful.
I used Wordpress at one point before moving to EE and there were a number of different things that I did not like. One of the problems, a small one I admit, was there was no spell check built in. I use the spell check function all the time so it became an issue.
As someone else has said the support offered was next to non existent.
I found with EE that the system has everything I want. Previously I had multiple programs to manage the content of my (rather simple) site. It was like trying to learn three different languages all at once and that for me was the biggest problem. With EE because everything is included I only have to learn ‘one language’ so to speak. That and the amount of support offered on this forum is fantastic. No matter how simplistic, to some, the question may be someone with more experience always seems to come and point me in the right direction.
I primarily use EE. Occasionally, a client wants an OS alternative in which case I use Textpattern or WordPress.
Out of those three, EE is the most sophisticated and the most flexible content managing system. If I were to compare WordPress to Textpattern, I’d vouch for Textpattern as it is far more flexible than WordPress but not quite as flexible as EE.
The advantages of EE over WordPress for me are (in no particular order):
1. Templating system (this is by far the most intelligent, powerful feature EE has)
2. Custom fields (have not seen any other CMS, commercial or non-commercial that handles these as well as EE does)
3. Weblogs, template groups, category groups
4. Extremely high flexibility - perfect separation from content/presentation/behavior
5. No need to fiddle with php inside templates unless absolutely needed for extra capabilites
6. Great templating language, easy to understand, easy to implement, manifold combinations possible
7. Plugins that actually work and are well designed and don’t cause security issues
8. Wonderful support
9. Ability to set up complex information architecture
These are the main features that make EE invaluable as a primary content management tool for me.
WordPress also has custom fields but its capabilities do not compare in the least.
For simple sites or blogs, WP is good. For more complex tasks than the tool is initially intended for, it requires so much customization that it can become a true pain and is nearly impossible without a good knowledge of php. Not to speak of the upgrading hassles that occur with a heavily customized WP installation.
Textpattern does a better job in many regards than WP in my opinion but that is another topic.
I’ve been using WordPress for about a year and am working on my first EE project. The two platforms are quite different, so a direct comparison isn’t really possible. However, they are both excellent platforms for creating dynamic websites—the choice, in my opinion, comes down to what your specific needs are.
WordPress is great if you need to have a blog or simple dynamic website but don’t want to spend a lot of time installing & configuring it. You can literally have a WP site up in a couple of hours. You can install any of hundreds of plugins to extend the functionality of the basic configuration, but relying on lots of plugins will (as another poster noted) make upgrades fairly time-consuming, and you always have to expect that a new version of WP will break some of your plugins. Plugins come and go, as authors lose interest or move on to other things. WordPress requires frequent upgrades (including urgent security patches), so I’d suggest that you keep your use of plugins in WordPress to a minimum.
EE is really a different animal. You have unlimited flexibility when it comes to creating templates, so it pays to take some time to think about your site architecture and carefully design your templates. There are more pieces available to use, so it takes more time to put those pieces together. As EE is a commercial product, the upgrade schedule seems more conservative and there aren’t as many patch upgrades required. And last but not least, you get commercial-grade support with a paid version of EE.
In short, if you want a quick, free, out-of-the-box get-up-and-go blog or simple website, WordPress is probably a good choice. If, however, you have a complex website, want to have a lot of flexibility with your site architecture, and want commercial-grade support, EE can’t be beat.
The biggest difference I can see between WordPress and EE is the major show stopper for us. We built a few client websites (article-based sites) using Wordpress and it went okay, but then we hit a point where we wanted custom fields or wanted two main text areas on a page, and WP just doesn’t work well like that.
With EE, you just create a custom fields group and add fields. You can have multiple field types, associations with other weblogs, etc. It’s amazingly flexible as a CMS. WP is great for blogs, and I use it on dozens of them. But for a true CMS, EE blows WP away.
I use wordpress and its pretty good for what it does, but its a blogging tool and not a CMS, although u can kinda hack it to be more powerful with plugins and some coding.
Here is where i decide what to use.
If the site has
1.) More than a simple news system | standard single pages
2.) Scalability plans
3.) A client that isnt looking for the cheapest price ( we generally skip projects like these anyway, they aren’t worth it.)
WordPress is a re-purposed, free publishing tool. EE is an application software platform.
Think MS WordPad vs. DreamWeaver and you should get the idea.
Don’t ever discount need + free + useful = popular. WordPress won the blogging platform war, but it wasn’t with EE, it was against MovableType. EE just comes with a default “{we}blog” setup using their log-data-to-the-web approach (custom fields and whatnot).
I have a Wordpress blog I use for announcements for my ham radio club, but I wouldn’t want to use it for my personal blog. WP just doesn’t have the flexibility I need.
How I’ve used WordPress with decent results. I checked out several platforms before starting a blog over two years ago and went with WP because of the theme options. I was just learning html and css, so I was able to find a few that I could tweak and learn from. Then I built a business site for a friend using WP and another, more complex, personal site for another person. WordPress was a good options for each of those situations because of the many templates available, the variety of plugins out there, and the easy learning curve.
Hacked! (kind of) One of the downsides of WP was noticed several months ago when someone (or a program someone wrote) exploited a bug in my install and was able to insert link spam into my posts as I saved edits. This was noticed by the Google borg and my site was flagged as containing “badware.” The problem was corrected, but I believe the vulnerability was due to the open-source nature of the product. I had been vigilant about regular updates - which happen far more often than with EE, often for security reasons. Perhaps these things have happened with EE, but I suspect the paid staff is far more thorough and conservative when it comes to security compared to the open-source community.
Why I’m using EE now I came back to EE after a friend and client asked me to build a site that needed three separate data sets - two which could be added to by site visitors. These data sets needed to be displayed in various ways on different pages and it was clear WordPress wouldn’t be a good choice for the job and EE could do it without a problem. It has taken me far longer than expected to get the site up and running, but with each step I’ve been more impressed with EE’s capabilities. At some point I’ll be competent enough to offer web design services as a side job. Knowing what EE can do, I would much rather use it than WordPress.
Why I’m using EE now I came back to EE after a friend and client asked me to build a site that needed three separate data sets - two which could be added to by site visitors. These data sets needed to be displayed in various ways on different pages and it was clear WordPress wouldn’t be a good choice for the job and EE could do it without a problem. It has taken me far longer than expected to get the site up and running, but with each step I’ve been more impressed with EE’s capabilities. At some point I’ll be competent enough to offer web design services as a side job.
If you think about it like integration, you have vertical integration (“We must dominate our category”), and you have horizontal integration (“We must provide all functionality” within reason).
WordPress is a dominant force in the journaling sphere that works very well for publishing journal-like information.
EE, though, abstracted the database, creating a situation where an objective is met (“Must store data”) instead of subjective (“Must publish article”), which freed the developers from being tied to a point-of-view and a pre-determined end-result.
Another way of looking at it is Subjective v. Objective, Commodity v. Value-Add, Big n’ Lumbering v. Small n’ Agile, etc…
There is no “better way.” There is the way that works, that brings profit and *sustainable* growth.
Also, technically, EE has a visible source; hackers could find weaknesses by going through the code. Security, though, is hard, and “free” software often loses security to make it accessible. That’s the downside.
The upside (or opportunity) is to sell your product to actual paying clients at a premium with security as an integral part of the experience, thus embedding security in the brain’s of those using the software, where it is actually useful. EE is for power users.
I have a Wordpress blog I use for announcements for my ham radio club, but I wouldn’t want to use it for my personal blog. WP just doesn’t have the flexibility I need.
I agree, although I go a step further: Since we have EE Core, there hasn’t been a single reason to use WP on any new project.
Perhaps these things have happened with EE, but I suspect the paid staff is far more thorough and conservative when it comes to security compared to the open-source community.
Their security-awareness borders on paranoia, at times. As a result, there has only been a single public security issue (relatively minor and rather theoretical in nature), that they had a hotfix for a few hours after being notified. That was 2 years ago, nothing before or since.
