I’ve used both WordPress and ExpressionEngine. When I have built a little website needing no maintenance for a family member, I use WordPress - it’s quick to make it look decent enough knowing that they aren’t really updating the website, they just want a little web precense.
But for my own website that I want functionality - I want people to use it, I opt for ExpressionEngine. Complete control over templates, add ons for many things and good resources for when you’re stuck. Just needs a bit of planning before ploughing in.
Both have their pros and cons. WP is quick and easy. EE is great but requires more work.
In my experience anyway.
Obviously, I’m a little biased so I’ll just reference what the community has said. By the way, this has come up quite a bit in the EECMS Slack lately.
Hope those help.
I used WordPress for the blog section of my site years before buying EE. At first, I just moved the blog to EE, but later I started to move more things over and eventually everything. I did not even use channels for years…which was strange.
In my case, the main reason was because EE had no concept about how pages, structure or design had to work as opposed to WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.
Basically, you use clean normal standard HTML to build your website. This was the main reason I picked EE. I could use any HTML or code editor, and just create code like any regular HTML page, then upload it EE, and it worked! You can’t really do that with another CMS. You are constrained to including all their PHP includes, codes and have to remain fixed to designing the site in a particular way and structure, that gets messy very quickly.
With EE you can take regular HTML sites and put them into the template system, and it works out of the box, no changes required in the code at all. Then you can slowly add EE tags and make it more dynamic and the best is that you can use PHP as well like any regular PHP code, nothing the CMS is forcing you. Just normal standard HTML, JS, CSS and PHP code (if you ever need it). Try doing that with WordPress and see the errors it will trow unless you do it the WordPress type code style.
The other reason was security. I can’t even tell you how WordPress sites are hammered on servers, you will receive hundreds if not thousands of spambots and attacks on the login page, this can slow your server down very quickly and lately bots also like to constantly attack the xmlrpc.php file on WordPress sites. The nature of being that popular has its disadvantages and your site will be constantly attacked by spam and other malicious bots, it’s actually surprising how much bad traffic a WordPress site gets.
Again EE shined on this part, in the past, it was impossible to see what website was using EE. Sadly, in the latest releases they are injecting more EE code that makes bots recognize EE pages but in the past, it was really impossible to know if a site was using EE. I had even people wondering and curious what it was based on because they had no idea, some people trying to attack did not even knew where to start because they imagined it was just regular static HTML pages 😊
If they look at the code, its just normal HTML code. And the admin can of course also be renamed and hidden away. Security wise, EE is so much better because it’s clean and invisible on the public facing part. EE is in my opinion a CMS that does not get in your way, you can edit templates from the web or locally in your computer. You can decide to put content in channels or not, and just use content on your pages. You can decide to use or not use anything you want, or even mix all the approaches.
The other part that attracted me in the past was add-ons and plugins, all commercial but very good and supported as the train wreck WordPress is. The last thing was the great EE community, you were able to find help and answer for everything and I even remember buying the EE 3 book. The help, tutorials and documentation was excellent. For me, the ecosystem of high quality folks behind EE was a main reason to get a license.
I don’t think you can even compare WordPress to EE. WordPress is really a glorified blog system that people hacked in gazillion ways to make it do many things it’s not supposed to do. It gets so messy and ugly very, very fast. And hard to maintain. EE can be anything you want. You want a simple site? Done. A heavy ecommerce platform? No problem. You can build anything from simple to complex. I think the approach is a bit like Symfony in which you only use the parts you want and don’t have any extra bloat. Out of the box EE has nothing which is positive, it’s clean, secure and fast. Then you can start making it more complex as you see fit, or not depending on the site you are creating.
I don’t even consider EE an CMS per se, but more like a framework on which you can build things on top. I never liked CMS that force you to use their GUI for content. Every site is so different that one model just does not fit everything.
Benefits of using WordPress? None really because if what people like about WordPress is letting users log into a control panel to post content quickly to pages, you can also do that with EE, it might take a bit of time to customize the way you want but at least it will be completely personalized for your type of content and users instead of a boxed product that forces you to do things the way they expect you to post content.
I have been optimizing my WordPress site and came across a great wordpress appointment booking solution from MotoPress, the plugin has greatly simplified the process of booking clients for an appointment. The user interface is intuitive and the settings are flexible. I also liked that it perfectly integrates with my calendar, so I’m always up to date with all my scheduled appointments.
Packet Tide owns and develops ExpressionEngine. © Packet Tide, All Rights Reserved.