Thread

Good Day,

I do not agree Expression Engine 2.0b and WordPress 3.0b are Apples and Oranges.

I come from the World of Joomla/Drupal (as required by the company I’ve done work for, for several years). So in comparison WP and EE are both major steps up the later. But as I’m in a transitional stage, I contemplating which to move to, WordPress or EE. Yes, I understand the right product for the right job, and will not be shunning one over the other. But determining which one will be better for me and the client overall.

In the past, the biggest plus EE has had over WP has been Channels. That is if I want to add a new Featured Post, I as the user will only see questions (fields) that relate to process. In WordPress everything was considered a post, so to post something other than a blog was awkward. People started using custom fields to help this, but you would see custom field options that didn’t relate to what you were doing.

With WordPress 3.0 as noted in the first entry in this post, you can now natively do custom post types, just like channels. On the left hand side someone can choose Press Releases, Podcasts, etc, and receive a page with meta boxes (instead of custom fields) and get a tailored experience. So before that feature was released, I would have to say, EE was the winner. Now that they both have it I have to consider how else they compare.

The biggest WP feature is price. It’s free and always will be. I come from Joomla where Joomla is free but most plugins are not. With WP all plugins seem to be free. (yes, they vary in how good they are, but the ones I have used work perfectly, and support has been great since the people doing it are doing it for their passion not money. (you can always donate). EE on the other hand is not a lot for someone paying for a massive project but smaller projects, its a big chunk of change.

Interface wise WP wins. Yes you can customize the backend of either easily, (WP 3.0 has gotten much better at this). Out of the box WP is simply beautiful. EE looks good, just not in comparison.

Blogging natively WordPress supports better, but since EE can do most all the same through custom builds/code/add ons once you have a base EE site and reuse it, I wouldn’t say one wins over the other.

Staying up-to-date. At my company security is the top concern with Government work. Joomla like EE does not have built in functionality for updating the core with a single click or updating plugins with a single click. This is all possible with WP, and a big win for WP. Joomla at least can be updated the core with a single click through a plugin.

Community, WP wins. If you want a beautiful template, you can find one at ThemeForest in a second. If you have a problem building your own you have a massive community to help you out. EE is much smaller. With EE however you are paying for support. From reviewing support on here, I feel that though it is good, the mere volumes of support answers on WP forums end up with a faster response. Also I enjoy the codex better than the Wiki here, (but that is a bias preference)

Coding… I’m new to WP and their coding it light years better than Joomla, but from reviews here its seems coding in EE is better than WP. As I do not know first hand I will put this as an EE win unless someone proves otherwise.

So which is better? Since WP is free (compared to a simple month free here) I have had the opportunity of trying it out much more, which is why my comments at the moment lean much more towards WP. But if people know reasons why EE would be better please let me know. So far the comments above are ones where people say they haven’t tried WP3.0 so to those people yes I understand why you would say EE is better and I would agree. So this question goes out to people who use both WP 3.0 (an understand all its new features) and know all about EE2.0.

Thank you in advance!

Cheers,
Christopher Beckwith

These are my arguments against Wordpress.

Wordpress is very powerful indeed. But it comes inside a very rigid box, one that you have to hack away at to get the system to do what you want. I don’t feel that way about EE. Back when I worked exclusively with Wordpress and before I learned about EE, I frequently had to say to clients, “no, Wordpress can’t do that.” I don’t ever really say that with EE. And even if I went ahead using Wordpress, it would end up taking more time for me than with ExpressionEngine. It’s easy for me to justify the cost of ExpressionEngine because I can do things faster with it, and therefore cost my clients less.

I still think its apples and oranges. I think WP3 can finally be considered a CMS. But ExpressionEngine is a step beyond a CMS. It does not merely manage content. It is a web application framework, on top of which a CMS was built. I can build crazy web apps with EE. Are you making web sites or web apps?

Wordpress has the great open-source community. Which allows you to get a lot of add-ons for free. But the add-on support and continued development, IMO, pales in comparison to the third party support you get with most of the good EE devs, who are financially incentivized to maintain a good product.

Now, maybe this is naivete on my part, but I think the security-through-obscurity factor of ExpressionEngine vs. Wordpress weighs heavily in EE’s favor. Wordpress has such a giant target on their back. I don’t envy their developers.

And if you have clients that can’t afford the $500-600 bucks for an EE license + add-ons, get better clients 😊

Thank you for the valid response Rob.

I’m relatively knew to WordPress and have started really diving into it with WordPress 3.0, and since custom post types are now native as well as menus, I haven’t had to do much any hacking to get it do what I need. But I will take your word on it that, if I dove deep enough more hacking maybe involved than in EE.

I build websites but at the firm I work for, we build apps and websites. The apps are usually built through Ruby and Ruby on Rails, and Python and Django and such.

As for security, I come from the world of Joomla. And when searching the latest vulnerabilities Joomla usually has 10 fold more than EE or WP. Our company has been required to use Joomla as its the only approved CMS for our particular clientele. So moving to either WP or EE would be a major improvement. According to Secunia and the other security government resources I follow WP and EE are quite close security wise, but yes I would say if one had less security alerts it would be EE, due to less public awareness about the CMS.

In regards to clients not being able to afford $500-600, my apprehension to the price is that I would need to pay such an amount for myself simply to use it before I know it will work for me. And a month trial would not be enough time to determine that. Also, yes a client wont mind paying 500-600, but that is 500-600 less in my pocket compared to using WP, Joomla, or Drupal.

That all being said, from reading enough comments on the forums I believe even though the user base isn’t fully aware of all the WP 3.0 can now do, I do believe that EE2 may be a better solution because of security, out of the box customization, and a codeigniter codebase for larger projects. Come WordPress 4.0 however that may change. Thank you for your help everyone.