Being a cautious type (and having had some unpleasant surprises of this nature in the past), I need to ask before diving into EE:

If, at some point in the future, I need to migrate my EE content onto another software platform, what are the export options for blogs and for forum posts? Or does leaving EE mean leaving behind all my content?

Thanks.

Hi, Dan,

There are no built-in export options, but you can build your templates to output your data in whatever way you may need to.  See Export Entries.

Also bear in mind that all of the data is in a MySQL database, so the data can always be output using PHP and queries directly from the database if necessary.

EE uses a standard MySQL database. If you know a bit of SQL, you can export anything in whatever format you need; usually the question will be what your other app can work with. See this wiki article for some ideas.

Rest assured that EE does not lock you in in any way.