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Until late last year, I had a thriving business building and maintaining sites for a number of membership-driven organizations. I set these organizations up with a variety of open source content management systems—all the while, preaching the virtues of open source: It was flexible. They could easily teach web novices to update and maintain their sites. And they wouldn’t be “held hostage” to licensing fees or to developers who used indecipherable code.

I was sure that Worpress, Joomla, Drupal, and DNN were landmarks on the path to enlightenment.

Then Expression Engine shattered my world view. One of my customers casually asked me if I had heard of it—and if it was worth using to upgrade their Wordpress-built site. I had only heard that it was a blogging system—one where you string together a bunch of “weblogs.” But when I saw how enamored with it people seemed to be in the Forums, I was game for giving the Core version a try.

First, I went through tutorials groused about the “learning curve.” Then, I bumbled through building some test pages with the core—and wondered why particular tags worked or didn’t. Then came the moment…

I’m talking about the moment when I suddenly managed to make everything work in sync—and actually found myself saying “Cool” outloud!

... I soon realized that EE could do darned-near anything I wanted—and more than a few things I wasn’t smart enough to know I wanted. I realized just how limited my “prized” open source systems are. And most importantly, I realized that EE would enable me to build sites that would truly improve my customers’ ability to collaborate and communicate with their membership.

Now, I am trying to talk every darned one of them into letting me convert their sites to EE. I’m SO convinced that it’s the right move that I have offered to split the cost of the licenses with them: They’ll more than save it in updating costs and hassle factor.

In two short months, I have gone from open source zealot to drooling EE Fanboy. Has anybody else experienced this same phenomenon?

Glad your on the bandwagon.

I might add that open source is often confused for free.  Just because a project is open source doesn’t necessarily mean the license is free.

Open source is great for the reason that, yes, you can customize to your hearts content and get in and see what’s happening on the code end.

That is why I love ExpressionEngine and find it a smoking deal at a measly $250… which the client pays for anyway(Right?).

I use EE because it’s the right solution for most of my needs. Sometimes I might use Wordpress if just needing a simple blog. Both EE and WP are good software. They really serve different needs from my perspective.

That said, EE is also ‘open source’ even though it requires the purchase of a license for commercial projects. It may not be right for every project… but it certainly covers a whole range of possible development scenarios. That is why I use it and that is why I love it. It’s simple to learn, powerful, inexpensive, customizable, fun and open source. EE is supported by a passionate and knowledgeable community and a rock solid company. No wonder it’s the choice of so many talented and respected developers.

Welcome to the community!

Love this thread title! It’s a keeper. Welcome to EE!

Welcome AlohaShirt. I think you will find you are one of many here that have walked that path. I was a Joomla-head and saw the light. All praise EllisLab 😉

It seems like it was so long ago, but I myself was once a Joomla junkie. But eventually, as the shine wore off and I started to have to push it in some interesting directions, I realized that it just wouldn’t cut it. At that point, I was more or less heart-broken. Joomla, my friend, wouldn’t do it?

It was like opening a door and being faced with a never-ending desert (Judge Dredd, anyone?) sprawling out in front of you. With no choice but to move forward, move forward I did, eventually coming across EE. It was love at first sight.

Since then, just exploring its features and the sheer amount of flexibility behind it, new worlds have been opened. It sounds silly, but EE is probably the only CMS on the market that is truly flexible.