Thread

Hi!

I’m ready to take the EE plunge. I have a rich history in web and PHP development. I am the original author and developer of the smarty template engine. I have built several high-end websites on the Code Igniter MVC platform.

For 14 years I have worked for a company that does custom development and in-house application service hosting and management. A few months ago I took on a new job with a marketing and branding agency. 99% of the client solutions use Joomla. This is my first major exposure to this CMS. After three months of working with it, every time I open a component to peek at the code I throw up a little.

I’m looking for a better solution but I’m not familiar with any CMS, as I’ve always done my own development. If anyone here comes from a Joomla world that can give me some pointers on how to (fairly) compare Joomla and EE, I’m all ears. I watched all the EE tutorials and it looks like a great tool, but it is a completely different thought process than Joomla, so I have my work cut out to make my case. I need to make programming fun again.

Monte

mohrt - welcome to the forums!

I’m going to recommend you do not try to compare the two pieces of software.  You’ll find that frustrating and not a fair shake for either application.  A “feature” in either piece of software may have the same name and general idea but behave entirely differently.

Instead, do you have a particular project for which you’re looking for a CMS solution?  Perhaps you could describe the project and the major site features it needs and we can help you to ascertain how ExpressionEngine can help you with that site.

Of course you can always download EECore, work with it, look under the hood, and see what you think.

I have downloaded the core and played with it. I don’t have a particular project, it’s all the projects. Every new client gets Joomla, period.

They mainly use Joomla for the ease of installation and end-user use, and the plethora of available modules. The price is right too. But, the problems come when it’s time to do custom development for the platform, or edit existing features. The code structure underneath is just a big mess. 1.5 has improvements over 1.0, but you can’t polish a turd. Even after weeks of tinkering with it, I don’t completely get it. I read a book on building custom Joomla 1.5 components, modules and plugins. It basically lays out a code template to work from, which is only slightly better than reverse engineering existing code. Building anything new is a major pain to get started, and upgrading 1.0 to 1.5 is a daunting idea.

I turned to EE largely because of my experience with Code Igniter. I felt if EllisLabs can build a great MVC, the CMS must be equally good.

Hi, mohrt - well, what are some common components? You can build ExpressionEngine to give clients quite a lot of control over the site without needing to give them template access, and there’s also a large third-party developer community (check out and a robust Development API should you need to extend the software.

Check out Devot://ee for a fairly comprehensive listing of add-ons for ExpressionEngine, and of course the core software has both powerful and flexible including a large set of features.

Most clients need the ability to edit their own pages. No brainer. I needs to be intuitive for clients to understand. IMHO, Joomla’s idea of category/section/article is NOT intuitive. I have yet to see if EE works better in this respect. I also like the idea weblogs, I can use this and cut out a LOT of redundant component coding in Joomla.

The biggest hurdle will be available components, such as when a client needs a subscription system, or something pretty specific. Joomla has a lot too choose from, even though code may be iffy at best. I think I could quickly create new components in IE that I could reuse anyways, so I think my best bet is to give EE a shot with a client and see how it goes.

You can certainly give clients the ability to edit their own content, but ExpressionEngine is not page-based, so that may be your first hurdle to overcome.  Instead the rendered page can be built from one or many templates (check out embeds on this, they’re similar to PHP includes with the ability to pass variables to other templates).

EE works better for clients if the developer takes the time to set it up “correctly” for client editing: that is, making any content essentially a weblog entry, structuring it intuitively, and documenting the update process for their clients.

A subscription system?  Can you clarify what you mean by this?  I know I’m locking on to one thing when there are many, but if that is a common one then perhaps we can ease your concerns on at least one feature. =)

Such as, an organization has recurring subscriptions that gives members access to certain areas of the website, or access to downloads or other content. The subscription system would be tied into paypal or authorize.net, and handle yearly renewals, invoicing, email notifications and basic reporting. Members could sign up for a subscription and become a member by signing up on the website. Manual payments should be possible (such as check by mail.) There would be an administration area for all of this. There are a couple these types of components available for Joomla.

There is not a built-in subscription service of that sort with EE.  There is FoxEE which integrates FoxyCart with ExpressionEngine and I believes handles recurring subscriptions.

Others have used aMember with their favorite system to set up recurring subscriptions.

Looking at the fortune module example, I’m seeing things like this:

$query = $DB->query("SELECT fortune_text
  FROM exp_fortunes
  WHERE fortune_id = '".$IN->GBL('fortune_id')."'");

Is there not an active record way of handling database transactions, such as the way Code Igniter does?

EE 1.x does not have Active Record, no.  But CI was abstracted from EE 1.x - EE 1.x is not built on CI.

and EE 2.0 is?

Yep. Not quite out yet, though.

Yes it is.  You can read more about it in the Sneak Preview, and in our blog.

Yes I just saw the video preview. It looks great, and with CI underneath I’ll be very comfortable with it! Now comes the million dollar question… when can I get it? I see a lot of hype around EE 2.0 from March of 2008! Not here yet?

You can get it when it’s ready. =)  The blog has a lot of updates (every 2 weeks) and the next beta will be announced there, so I’d recommend subscribing to it via RSS so you get that announcement.

And of course we always recommend purchasing based on what is available now.