What an excellent thread, thank you for starting it Dave. The primary “state of EE” question typically gets answered twice a year. Once at the beginning (my post) and once at EECI (next month). I’m reviewing this thread to help inform some of the things I’d like to address as part of my keynote at EECI next month. Specifically I’d like to give more insight in to where EllisLab wants to go as a company and with EE specifically. 

Next year is the 10 year mark for EllisLab and I am convinced of one thing. We have experienced continued growth again this year, but I strongly suspect that the model that got us to this incredible point is not the one that will allow us to exist for another 10 years. My job as CEO is to set EllisLab on a path that has the best chance of success for another decade and I’ve been doing that since day 1 on the job. I came in with a specific plan and I’ve been executing it as fast as possible. I know I share most of the concerns expressed in this thread and have since taking over back in January. Again, part of my EECI keynote will be reporting on that.

For those of you going to EECI, I encourage you to find me in person and talk to me about the topics in this thread. I’m perfectly willing to pick up the conversation here post EECI as well, I just know from experience that talking this type of subject through in person is worlds better than forum discussions. For those not attending, you’re always welcome to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) directly as well.

Just like Les, I love this thread. I think discussions like this are good as it gives us a chance to hear what you are thinking. There were a few things I wanted to talk to that came up. Just to clear a few items up as I think they are interesting points.

Dave, I can relate to your original concern. There are going to be instances where you will have no ability to sway someone. But I was a Joomla user prior to coming to ExpressionEngine and have had to sell organizations on why EE is the right choice. I have now built probably 60 or so websites in EE. The main reason why I made the switch was because I wanted a commercial product that was going to be stable. At the time when I came to the EE community there was a lot of dissent in the Joomla community regarding GPL (not saying that there is now as I have not been back in 4 years). The even-keeled nature of EE was alluring to me. You don’t have to use the comparison to another OS system. But if I was in a sales situation I would mention that EE has been around for 10 years and is very methodical in their approach to software development as part of my presentation to the prospect. Getting it in without coming across as slimy is tricky but can be done. You may be surprised at how it gets your foot in the door. Another talking point is the lower cost of ownership when compared to other systems. It’s not just the $300. I get that.  Anyway, just thought about those example from when I was actively selling my services.

In regards to the complexity of sites you can build with EE… I just checked and we do have some custom add-ons that we use that are specific to our daily operations, but the only add-on for the forward facing site that I could find was really a ratings module, a more robust captcha plugin and some other plugins like word limiter and stuff. Fairly innocuous stuff. The rest is straight out of the box. So Steven was right about the complexity of site that one can build using native EE. The demo site that I use for showing people EE is native only and has image rotators, audio players, video players, lightboxes, a blog and a bunch of other stuff that is possible all straight out of the box.

About our presentation or representation in the pre-sales forum… We don’t actively present EE as a competitor to WordPress or Joomla. If that is coming across in our pre-sales forum then we may need to change the language that we use. Often times people come to us with experience in X system and we try to speak their language to show functionality that could be completed using EE. But it is not that we are saying we are ‘exactly like’ those other systems because you are right, we aren’t. While we can accomplish many of the same tasks it is not a 1-click install to get there. But the end result is often times easier for a non-technical client to maintain which is a HUGE selling point.

Gist mentioned a link regarding Presidential Candidates using OS systems. First, we are not aware of all of the various websites that EE gets used to build. I wish we were. As it would make all of our lives easier if we could say ‘so and so uses it’. But there are a bunch of high profile sites that use ExpressionEngine. Just a taste...

Last thing.. 2 weeks ago we made the decision that I will be spending more time in Community Help. We did this because we did not want people to feel like when we moved them out of Technical Support that they were being banished to a forum where their thread would die. The idea is that Technical Support forums are for technical issues. If you are getting into an area where you don’t really have an issue but are trying to accomplish something and need some help then we may move you to the Community Help forum. But we are trying to stay active in there, and if any of the EE Pros want to ‘give back’ then we would welcome their expertise.

We know threads like this are written because you are oftentimes basing your business on EE. It is not a responsibility that we take lightly. Not only are we providing for our own lively-hood but many times we are assisting the community to make their livings as well. So don’t hesitate to take Les up on his offer. Or email me if you want. I’m always up for hearing ideas on how we can make ExpressionEngine (or services and support) more awesome!

I am just thinking out loud. This is for Leslie Camacho.

I think implementing a bench mark survey will be great. It shows you where you are at and what you need to improve to get your goals. The problems with comments like these in the ofrum is that only the ones who are just too concerned or like to voice their concerns get heard. This may not represent the majority orthe major problem.

And when people do question the popularity and if EE has improved as you say so, you can just bring up the survey results rather make subjective comments of where EE is how much EE has acheived.

Very interesting thread indeed.

EL employees have to be fed, naturally but some software companies have made software OS and then done become very profitable indeed from paid support. I dont think it should be totally 100% ruled out, and is food for thought.

I personally have no problem paying $300 ++ with add on, half decent clients pay for it pretty easily.

The OP said he is losing out on large jobs because they choose to go open source which they have there reasons for. As Erik said however, the chances of EE becoming OS itself is pretty slim. Id think of changing your client targets or using other software.

Great stuff.  I agree that I have also lost work because of the cost of EE + addons.  Typically my builds come with about $500 in licenses.  While I don’t think that EllisLab should just flip the open source switch on EE (we all love what we do, but we also have to profit from our endeavors), I do think that it would be nice to have a scaled back version of EE - much like the freelancer license, with no member management, none of the advanced tools etc, that would be open source and allow for building smaller client sites that just don’t have the budget.  Just with the channel management / custom fields alone, and the ability to use modules, you could build awesome sites that would do everything a low - budget client would want.

Just my thoughts!

-Todd Perkins

anoopbal - 02 September 2011 09:27 PM

I am just thinking out loud. This is for Leslie Camacho.

I think implementing a bench mark survey will be great. It shows you where you are at and what you need to improve to get your goals. The problems with comments like these in the ofrum is that only the ones who are just too concerned or like to voice their concerns get heard. This may not represent the majority orthe major problem.

And when people do question the popularity and if EE has improved as you say so, you can just bring up the survey results rather make subjective comments of where EE is how much EE has acheived.

We’ve done this several times but typically we don’t make the results public. Based on my 9 months as CEO, the feedback from surveys, the Feedback Machine and threads like this, I think we have a good plan for doing that. At this point I’m confident of what we need to do with EE 2.x and especially with EE3.

In terms of selling EE vs. open source, its true that open source’s reach is way beyond EE. It always has been. However, I want to point out that EE is the #1 commercial CMS and 3rd party tools like Built-with back up this claim. This is especially true in the top 10,000 websites. Note that they count vBulletin in there, but its a forum system first.

Overall we’re the fourth system and we recently surpassed Joomla in popularity. Unless we did open source EE I don’t think we’d ever be the #1 most popular system. And even if we did, like people in this thread pointed out, EE isn’t made for non-developers or designers. Its built specifically for web professionals. Open sourcing EE would not change that (though would definitely increase its reach).

In the macro, even WP only has 5%-10% of the market, Drupal 2.5%. Most websites use a custom system or no system at all. In terms of room for growth, its huge still. In other words, I’m most concerned with “how we grow” because that will make all the difference. I think our current business model and approach is at its peak and will stop being as effective as its has been within the next 12-18 months. We’re going to be ready to make that switch.

My number one concern is that our Community constantly out paces us and that we aren’t leveraging that. Instead, we’ve let it be a negative hit against us. The irony is that this is exactly what we hoped for and I said as much two years ago at my EECI keynote. I said I wanted to make EE2 the best platform possible and I think we’ve achieved that to a large extent (CP excluded from that statement). I just didn’t anticipate that people would praise our community but hate on EllisLab for enabling the very thing they love the most about EE, a killer 3rd party professional dev community.

Some people then assume that we, EllisLab, aren’t doing anything significant. We don’t get credit for building and maintaining a platform that let’s things like Assets, Structure, Channel Images, Super Search etc… possible. Those awesome tools exist because we made EE in such a way that those tools could exist and thrive with no hacks and we work very hard to continue to improve it as such.

We did this on purpose to make EE better and placed our bets that our dev community would just rock it. And they have, more so than we could have possibly hoped for. I mean, depending on how you spend your budget, you can make EE almost anything you want with add-ons. That’s a significant achievement, one that EllisLab could never have accomplished if we tried do that all in house.

This has given EE a completely unique position in the market that is just awesome. For less than a thousand bucks you get a system capable of running a 7, 8 figure website with tools made by a collection of the best php devs on the planet. No other system has this like we do. What we need to do next is build up a structure around it that champions that, makes support for those 3rd party tools a lot better, and makes it easier to acquire, upgrade, and receive business class support for them when needed. 

Those are all things being worked on right now.

The real, honest to god knocks against EE itself are also a concern. They are:

1. The installer.
2. The CP.
3. Support.
4. Stability (aka bugs).

From there, the list gets really broad, but just about everybody agrees that the installation/upgrade process needs to be better, the CP needs a refresh, and that we need a support system geared toward business needs vs. just the forums. Most of the major stability issues come from the installer/upgrade process. We get that overhauled, we solve a lot of 1, 3, & 4. Hiring James as our Chief Creative Officer is the way we solve #2 and he has us on track for that.

At EECI I’ll be able to lay out more about what’s being done and where we’re headed. I just wanted to make clear that my head isn’t in the sand and we’re actively working on making things better daily.

Leslie Camacho - 06 September 2011 02:41 PM

Some people then assume that we, EllisLab, aren’t doing anything significant. We don’t get credit for building and maintaining a platform that let’s things like Assets, Structure, Channel Images, Super Search etc… possible. Those awesome tools exist because we made EE in such a way that those tools could exist and thrive with no hacks and we work very hard to continue to improve it as such.

I’d say a lot of people overlook that very fact

@Les the comment about the unintended consequences to EllisLab for enabling a killer 3rd party develpment community is most legitimate. Nothing fails like success.

I feel the two needed tweaks to minimize the weird disconnect are ever-clearer delineation of the vendor-anticipated boundaries between core/non-core and a no-apologies presentation of the platform as suitable for ‘x’ sized projects (> $5K) where the product cost is expected to be EE ($300) plus $300 for integrated addons to fulfill said project.

The fact that EE’s development community still seems ‘surprised’ by the aggregated product cost suggests a need for still more meta-education about EE as a platform. Ironically, this means dropping the argument that EE core can ‘do most everything’, beyond its obvious theoretical defense. From a marketing/business perspective, either it ‘really’ can, in which case the 3rd party costs become a major aggravation, or (at most) it ‘can, but shouldn’t’ given the vendor’s strategic integration of the community into/with the platform.

EDIT: In other words, EE costs $600 (est.) to the client, not $300, because add-on costs are ‘planned’ by EllisLab. They are not a misfortune caused by vendor incompetence at developing/extending core. Brandon Kelly was not an unforeseen pregnancy, but a much hoped-for addition to the family and on that note ...).

Wow, looks like a lot of thread I missed out on!

Thanks Leslie, I certainly look forward to EECI and seeing what you have to say.

A few people have made mentions about “oh, must be the same government departments that use windows” (like there is an alternative), and “oh but there are no good open source products really, except Firefox”.

Here is the thing, which I think a lot of people don’t seem to understand about open source: It is only successful when the consumers are developers. It is basically the perfect model when the users would actually know how to fix problems it in the software itself. Sure, there are some exceptions (like Firefox/Chrome), but these are basically treated like commercial software, with a free codebase.

Case in point: I recently built the FreeMember add-on, so that we could have a login/signup form in our site, without shelling out $100 or whatever for Solspace User. Call me stingy if you like. Now it probably took me a couple hours. If EE was open source, I would have just fixed this in the core of EE, and made a pull request. I don’t think anyone here can argue that a CMS should come without member functionality, and the current member template system in EE doesn’t look like it has changed since EE1 (at least the code doesn’t).

Now, the reason EE has succeeded without being open source is exactly my statement above - open source is successful when the consumers are developers. I believe most EE users aren’t developers. EE is perfect for freelance designers, who don’t know PHP, but want to build complex websites. This is why it has succeeded so far - it has a great templating system (though not very well implemented, another thing I would love to have a crack at solving), which allows you to build complex sites very quickly.

However, there are those of us in the community who are PHP developers, and could be contributing to EE instead of wasting EllisLab’s time by reporting issues in the forums, placing bug reports etc. In that way, the EllisLab developers would become “guardians”, deciding what code is accepted, rather than needing to code everything themselves. I think we can all agree that no matter how many developers EE hires, they are never going to be able to keep up with the expectations of the community.

If EllisLab are happy being a niche product for freelance designers, then they can keep doing what they are doing, and I’m sure it will be reasonably successful. But as Leslie stated, this business model is reaching a peak. $300 isn’t a lot of money, but it is a huge barrier to entry, and that is the fundamental problem preventing EE from growing/improving. Of course if EE became free, EllisLab would need to find a better business model, but they are smart people, and this is a problem that has already been solved by a huge number of companies worldwide. I assume this is what the “Professional Support” Leslie is talking about will be.

I think the question shouldn’t be about whether EE becomes open source, but how. The important thing is that instead of becoming a complete mess of features etc, EllisLab maintain control over what is and isn’t in the core product, and keep the quality high. I don’t think anyone is expecting EE to compete with Wordpress and Joomla - those are CMS systems for amateurs. However, it would certainly be possible to set your sights on competing with larger systems such as Drupal, which are used by the professional web community.

@Adrian & @Russ - Smartly said.

Adrian, I loved your comment above. I’m going to make all our staff read it.

Leslie,

Reading your comment above, I got the first reminder in a while of the kind of vision that EE needs to have to thrive.  Thanks for sharing, and leading.

TTFN
Travis

Leslie Camacho - 06 September 2011 02:41 PM

credit for building and maintaining a platform that let’s things like Assets, Structure, Channel Images, Super Search etc… possible. Those awesome tools exist because we made EE in such a way that those tools could exist and thrive with no hacks and we work very hard to continue to improve it as such.

And that’s why I’m really looking forward to the next year. I believe EllisLab has something awesome cooking, something that takes advantage of the same framework that Mitchell and Brandon and Parscale and Jack/Travis and everyone else do.

Great post Leslie. Looking forward to EECI!

Great discussion. As a relative newbie to EE I’d like to add in my thoughts on why I shifted my site development to EE as I believe it confirms the views above in regards to what motivates people like me to move to EE. After 6+ years working with entirely open source CMS, Textpattern mainly, frustrations were bubbling, mainly lack of features, secondly lack of support for extensions & plugins which were required for even the most basic sites.

I agree completely that o/s systems are great if the user is a developer, but I’m not and therefore rely on what is available. And on that note, I’m happy to pay for quality and support. I know if I use Solspace Calendar, I’ve paid, its good quality and the support is there. In contrast, I now have several sites built a few years ago using Textpattern and its now orphaned zem_event extension which I cannot reliably upgrade to the latest version of the CMS. This is a major problem and one which my clients wont thank me for.

At $300 or to go with the argument, $600 with a few modules, EE is CHEAP if you are building sites in the $5k+ range and I suspect this is where most professional EE developers are. The are literally thousands of free o/s CMS’ available and I personally dont see any advantage to EE following the crowd.  Look on EE as an up-sell from o/s and communicate it to your clients in the same way.

I agree wholeheartedly that the installer is a pain and inconsistencies when moving from a local host to a live server have caused me many headaches - as has the default open member setup from install but you live and learn and the benefit of EE being a commercial product is that it is 100% in EllisLabs interest to fix, improve and get these things right. Choice is good folks…

Can someone explain how the reactor pattern used by codeigniter cannot be used by eecms?

People want to make the product better because they believe in the product.

Luke,

http://twitter.com/#!/knight777/status/110369617226117120

Brief EE Reactor update. Its going quite well, things moving forward. Crossing fingers for a formal announcement at EECI. #eecms

I’m a little late to this discussion, but I have a few relevant thoughts.

I’ve lost three big jobs to Open Source platforms in the past 15 months. The largest was a state government project that would have provided my shop with steady work for at least three years.

Our task would have been to convert their existing site and subsidiaries to EE from an enterprise CMS that was costing them a minimum of $250k per year in licensing costs alone.

We made it to the final round with the full support of the hiring committee and received glowing reviews for our presentation, solutions approach, and a technical resource whose specific database experience could not be matched by any other vendor.

Nonetheless, we lost the bid to Drupal after the executive committee weighed in with their decision.

The turning point came when the hiring committee attended a government technical convention and learned that there was a large network of government agencies who had all converted their existing sites to Drupal. It was the dedicated Drupal-government-support-network that swayed their decision to go with an open source platform.

All this argument about licensing costs being the deciding factor is bogus. No client with a $50k+ project is going to give a damn about a $300 license.

This fact is made all the more plain by this client’s decision to hire a full-time PHP developer to work with the company they selected to handle the Drupal conversion. They were willing to spend an additional $75,000 per year to hire a developer to work with the company handling the conversion and then maintain the entire system after the initial site was relaunched. Got that?

Based on my experience, our problem has nothing do with licensing costs and very little to do with being outpaced by open source competitors.

• None of the Open Source solutions are easy to work with in terms of code - You need to be highly proficient with PHP to make any of them work well
• None of the Open Source solutions allow designers to truly design
• None of the Open Source solutions allow for much CP customization, again, unless you are highly proficient with PHP.

EE’s primary issue is one of perception.

First, there is no such thing as sustainable “quick” growth in business. There is, however, such as thing as steady growth that focuses on something tangible like “quality” or “the ability to customize a site to each client’s individual needs”. We can continue to make a difference as a design and development community in this way without watering down the platform by allowing too many people to stir the pot.

But this is also where we need EllisLab to step up to the plate ...

EllisLab has always relied on its users to sell their products. Many of us have reached the plateau where growth is no longer possible because the perception of ExpressionEngine doesn’t match the expectations of our potential clients. That’s why they are so easily swayed by big open source competitors. The only way we will breach this threshold is to have a marketing machine backing up our efforts.

If we want to compete on the enterprise playing field, EE needs to become the enterprise leader for CMS platforms. Why is it a better option than open source? What are the selling points of Drupal, Joomla, Etc. that cause our potential clients to choose them over EE?

Market EE to these questions and we will be heading in the right direction, even if U.S. government projects are completely off the table.

I’m new to EE so I haven’t delved into all the code just yet, but I don’t see any closed-source code. Therefore wouldn’t there be a good opportunity for EllisLab to promote/support a community core-development team that could work on core enhancements. Naturally this would need to be well managed to reduce wasted dev time, but it seems to have potential.

Regarding the topic of negativity towards non-o/s - there’s not much that can be done where a potential customer refuses anything non-o/s, but one key point as a service provider (us, the web developer/designer) is to communicate our value. The tools should be seen as less important than the skill or qualifications of the person using the tools. If the customer believes in (trusts) the person providing the service, they’re much more likely to trust the choice of tools. So my first question would be - does your site, company, and personal manner communicate stability, longevity, and quality?

BTW, I’ve worked for local government here in the UK, so I know that some really stupid decisions are made, often because of viewing existing staff as free resources. That’s a tough nut to crack, so to speak. But with practice and research you can find various ways around things.

Paul

P.S: To above post: great points Paul, yes EE marketing is definitely needed. For example, how about highlighting - EE: The Right Choice Govt!