Personally I’ve found Drupal to be a total dog of a thing. Two separate installations became corrupted and had to be reinstalled. Fortunately they were test installations, but if they had been ‘real’ client sites then it would have been a disaster. A couple of developer friends had the same problem - after creating and deleting a few pages the sites seemed to break and were irrepairable. This was a couple of years ago though, so it may be more stable these days.

Wordpress on the other hand seems to be pretty rock solid, and the documentation is great - better than EE in fact. The drawback (I’ve found) in using Wordpress is that you need so many plug ins to get it to act like a CMS as it’s really a blogging tool - so when you upgrade the core system half your plug ins stop working.

Despite the difficulty in finding out how to do things in EE, it seems by far to be the most stable and well written system, and is worth the time investment required to learn how to use it. The beauty of it, for me, is that I don’t need stacks of plug ins to get it to work.

I had looked into expression engine a while back.  I was looking to replace my own home-rolled content management framework that I had developed over some time. I thought that EE was fine but decided to go with Drupal.  For me it was a matter of cost and my ability to program. Since I was replacing code that I had already written and looking at refactoring some sites as the clients asked for enhancements, I did not want to encumber myself with licensing costs.  Drupal does have a steep learning curve and is not easy, but I am now starting to launch some sites with a certain level of success. I may still look at a commercial content management system for some high end sites that may come my way and EE of course will be one of the ones that I consider along with things like Alfresco and NetSuite.

I just wrote a beast of a reply that didn’t post. Here’s the upshot:

WordPress is great at what it does. It can be tweaked and run as a junior CMS. Go for it – it’s a great tool.
Textpattern is like EE’s older brother. Seems to be some tension brewing and going downhill. I hope I’m wrong, it’s very well-conceived.
EE costs money and should. It kicks ass. Great product, cool company behind it, and the help (which you’ll need with any system if you’re like me) is nonpareil.

If you do client work, do you really want to spend all those hours and hard work learning a system that may blow up because of some politics between PHP geeks breaks out? Me neither. That’s why I gladly fork over a reasonable fee for an outstanding product.

Drupal is industrial grade but not much fun to template. Ditto for Joomla.

Honorable mention: Silverstripe and ModX.

Bottom line: Only fools worship tools. Do what works for you in your situation.

trif3cta - 03 May 2008 01:54 AM

Bottom line: Only fools worship tools. Do what works for you in your situation.

lol - I need to find a way to make that a little more PC and put that line to good use.

Hello all, I found this forum from a google search, and I’m hoping that you guys can provide some guidance.  Basically, my friend and I are in the process of setting up our own website, but neither of us are web developers, or anything close to it.  I’m fairly good with computers in general, and he has a small amount of knowledge of web design through his work (a marketing company), but besides that, we are utter noobs at this.  We have a pretty tight budget (otherwise we’d shell out the money to have something professionally made), so we have been looking at open source stuff.  If the benefits of EE are great enough though, we could afford it. Ideally, we want to design a really slick looking site, but for the time being, we’re willing to compromise and have something that looks decent and provide basic functionality.  Right now, we have a Wordpress blog running, and though I like it for the blog aspect, I want to have a real site on top of that.  We found out about Joomla, saw some of the templates and thought they could suit our purposes with a little tweaking.  I’d also heard about Drupal, did a search to compare the two, and landed here. 

My question is, given our lack of experience, what would be the best option for us?  From what I’ve gathered, EE is the best for people who know what they’re doing, but how about for utter amateurs like us?  It seems like EE might be like a Porsche 911, but we probably need something more like a Toyota Camry.  BUT, at the same time, we don’t want to be crippled in any sense, we’d like to have a more whiz-bang site down the road when we either have more experience or more money.  Any thoughts or suggestions?  Also, we’ll probably be adding vBulletin to our site soon, would there be any issues integrating that with any of these CMSes?  Or for that matter, would there be any issues incorporating our present Wordpress content?

Sorry for the verbosity and general noobishness.  :D Thanks in advance for any advice!

Hey Tim C,

BUT, at the same time, we don’t want to be crippled in any sense

Forecast forecast and then put it all on paper in form of bullets....things you would like how now, tomorrow and and near feature. Then look through feature set http://ex.com/overview/features/.

The only ‘catch’ to EE is that you can’t power a myspace-like site where any member can start a blog or content collection about anything. But 98% of the time this is not an issue...chances are you will have a few topics or areas (weblogs) of your sites general direction that till will not destroy the ‘community’ feel to the site.

I have gone through CMS and CMS-alike packages (15-20 of them) aprechiating each for what was there...most developers here have given you honest opinions about the 3 favorites and I can only agree with them.

Just about anything opensource is bound to hit this:

do you really want to spend all those hours and hard work learning a system that may blow up because of some politics between PHP geeks breaks out?

Personally, I was away from web stuff for YRS (read: asp classic,tables-shimmys-1pximages-javascript loaded...agh when the tables rules the layouts). I wanted to get back to some design as hobby and certianly could respect what it takes to create some feel of unity/portal on the web. By no means was I ready or had time to do this as 1man show for a hobby. CMS it was.

Also, goal was that I re-learn html and css.
I saw EE back in a day and had no extra time or $ to try it so I moved on. After all the CMSs out there I came back to EE as I was getting tired of not having anything really done all the way...we are talking 1.5 yrs into my ‘comeback’. Not to mention that I still was just ‘tweaking’ other peoples code with high levels of frustration and support by those who fathered it.

Few weeks ago I ‘broke down’ and searched for that ‘commerical/paied’ version, I saw EE agin and watched videos....read posts through community (huge fan of ‘helping hand and sharing’)...and I was sold with out ANY pre-sales question or even downloading core.
Here is how I measured it.
IF all fails THEN
- there is the other CMSs so some content will be there
- I lost few days of my time and some $ (’some’ is subjective)
- I still have my HTML/CSS design skills
Even if you are not designer you can use some editor such as DW to create some layout of your own choices and stick EE tags in it. Hell, you can even download simple HTML freebies out there…
The prize winner...NO MORE aborted plugins/widgets/extensions and snips that no one will ever support and I now have inherited as security issue.

At the end of the day I really aprechiate the sense of commitment, support and direction from EE staff....and yes as you can see on profile...still EE noobie here
All the best!

I think using the WordPress Pages feature and a few plugins is the shortest route from A to B for you. EE affords a fantastic level of flexibility, but with freedom there is some learning (there is like 5 ways to do anything, it’s awesome and simultaneously daunting). You could even pay a designer to create a theme and use the hosted version of WP and just drop the theme into place. You can map your own domain name to it as well.

Google “wordpress CMS” or “wordpress CMS plugins” if you are interested in that route. A premium theme might be an option as well.

If you’re willing to take a more long-term approach and would like a more robust system, I’d learn EE over the Joomla or Drupal any day of the week.

Just thought I would chime in with my 2 cents…

I just finished installing EE Core and Drupal, side by side, on my server. So far EE works flawlessly. Drupal, not so flawlessly. I installed both after spending over 5 hours trying to fix an error in a client’s Joomla! site. With Joomla! I received no support and when I went to the forums, I was greeted by many posts that had the same problem as me, but with no helpful replies. In fact, most of the replies were stuff like, “Hmmm..It’s probably an issue with (a certain PHP file) and Apache mod_security...maybe...I think...” In addition, there were errors being caused by 3rd party plugins that my client oh-so-thoughtfully installed on his own because, you know, they existed. After tracking down the 3rd party authors on Joomla!’s extension repository I was able to visit the help forums for the plugins. In those forums there were hundreds of posts and requests to fix bugs, questions about error messages, etc. The majority of the posts had ZERO replies. And the ones that did were from other frustrated users posting things like, “I’m having the same problem, too!” Seems that the plugin creator was nowhere to be found…

In contrast, when I have visited the EE forums, there are always quick, helpful replies from EL employees and community members. Combine this level of support with the configuration and templating abilities of EE and I don’t think I will ever install Joomla! for another client ever again. Not even if they paid me..."one million dollars!”

Now I know why they have an exclamation point after their name: After hours of struggling you are likely to start screaming, “Joomla! Joomla!!!! JOOOOOOOMMMMMMLLLAAAAA!!!!!!”

In fact, the client’s webhost support tech said, “Yeah, we get a lot of calls about problems with Joomla! sites. Most of the guys here use Drupal as it seems to work without major hacking or security issues.”

Just my 2 cents.

@ anonymoushero: Absolutely right, I had the same terrible issues with Gallery2 and Wordpress. Everything looks fine until you get into real trouble, then there is no real support. I spent days digging around in code and forums, nice if it’s a hobby project but a major disaster if you have this setup for a client who is in panic because his photo gallery is gone.

Support, reliability and flexibility are THE factors to look at if you’re aiming for a serious website and EE excels in these. You do need to invest in EE knowledge but this is very worthwhile

noregt said:

“Support, reliability and flexibility are THE factors to look at if you’re aiming for a serious website”

I said:
“Words to live by”

Hello!

I’m new Been trying to dig up pros & cons on Wordpress vs. Joomla & ended up here

Basically, I wonder how easy it is to upgrade to EE from either WP (with plugins) or Joomla or another freebie… I’m new to this websiting thing, & just had a (free) blog or two before… SO WP seems easiest… ‘easy does it’ & free would suit me best now… But in time (especially if the sites even actually made any money:)), I might wanna upgrade to EE… I love the idea of something that’s actually stable & doesn’t need to be fretted over - not sure what I’d do with ‘security alarms’ (been to a Joomla forum too… ) & has good tech support:)
Would I be able to upload all my content created on free sites easily? (eg blogs & forums too)?

Thanks! & Sorry if this is a very silly question… Just learning this all & yup, there’s so much info my brains are a bit fried already

Also, does EE plan in advance to add ‘Myspace/individual members blogs’ & such in time too? From what I read that is the only feature that isn’t added now.
(I mean, apparently even the Wordpress has added galleries since that has been discussed...? ) Not that I would need them now, but maybe, in time… Who knows? I like to dream big or know things can be added ‘just in case’…