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Hi all,

I’d like to request some help from you, the ExpressionEngine community, for the ExpressionEngine community.

I want to write a series of posts on ExpressionEngine for Smashing Magazine, one of the most popular publishers of web design and development content. I’d like to ask you to help me come up with some compelling blog topics to help bring awareness of EE to a larger community. 

Currently, there are only a handful of references to EE on Smashing Magazine… most of which are pretty outdated. Here’s a great roundup, for example—http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/10/29/expressionengine-developers-toolbox/—but this is from 2008. There isn’t even a proper post on EE2 right now!

I, for one, would love to see more up to date resources out there, especially now that EE2 is alive and kickin’...

I believe EE is vastly, vastly underrated as a CMS. Our community here is a tight-knit group of professionals, who offer amazing work and insights into building better sites using EE and the add-ons we develop. Part of the true benefit of developing with EE is the expertise inherent in that community. EE is a rare example of a commercially-viable product based on an open source model. By extension, add-on developers can benefit from the same profitable model. I sincerely believe this sustainable model leads to higher quality software, better support, and happier developers (on both sides). So, bravo!

However, despite EE’s strength as a CMS and development platform, I have found the fly in the ointment in terms of selling clients on EE is the inevitable WP comparison. You know the arguments. I think most of us probably agree that few are actually valid. In fact, I put together a PDF that documents the differences between EE and WP for one client (http://www.grahamhuber.com/uploads/WP_EE.pdf)

I believe the solution is simple awareness.

I would like to get the word out there more on why EE is a great (possibly even superior) alternative to WP. Since Wordpress’ popularity is encouraged, in part, by the thousands (if not millions) of articles being published about it, on sites like Smashing Magazine, this is a great place to start to get more word out about EE.

More awareness leads to more active development within the community… More heads thinking, more hands tinkering…. And, ultimately, more money for EllisLabs, add-on developers and client-funded website developers, to keep us fed and able to keep doing what we do.

So, let’s hear it!

What should we write about EE for Smashing Magazine?

Hi Graham!

Excellent! I’ll gladly promote your post here and see if I can grab a few wonderful individuals that I know are already doing some great work in this area. As always, feel free to email me directly if you have any questions. I can help get this going for you. Thank you for the opportunity!

The horrors of Wordpress 3.0 ‘Custom Post Types’ made me go check out EE2. You might want to look into this and how it requires tons of hacking and how there’s a variety of Wordpress plugins, none of them ‘solving’ all the problems and having all the features you’d expect.

Actually I planned on blogging about this as well, so I’ll only scratch the surface right here! 😊

I hope this won’t look like I’m trying to blow my own horn but I find the URL shortener is a good example of the separation between templates and weblog/channel that is one the strenghts of EE.
Does that make it a worthwhile topic, don’t know.

EE is a rare example of a commercially-viable product based on an open source model.  By extension, add-on developers can benefit from the same profitable model. I sincerely believe this sustainable model leads to higher quality software, better support, and happier developers (on both sides). So, bravo!

So glad you’ve noticed this!  Thanks to the fact that EE is a commercial product, with a community that is 100% OK with paying for good software and support, a great little ecosystem really has formed around it.  I for one have been able to quit my day job and start my own company where I do nothing but write/sell/support add-ons for EE.  It’s been a ton of fun, and business is good!

Completely agree with all of the above - I think anything written should speak heavily to #eecms’s structured data approach.

For any website that’s more complex than a blog, “custom text fields” just don’t do it.. you want to have support for checkboxes, many-to-many relationships between content types, etc etc etc… None of this is easily available in EEs most-thought-of competitors.

Once a developer understands:
1) How much more easily a client will be able to have fine-grained control over their pages
and
2) How thinking in content types frees them from WYSIWYG editors and all the problems they bring with them when dealing with complex or conditional layouts.

POWAH! 😊

-matt

I believe EE is vastly, vastly underrated as a CMS.

I don’t believe that at all, what I do believe is that EE targets a completely different demographic than the Wordpress/Textpattern/Drupal crowd.

EE’s a commercial product and I’d wager the majority of its users are people who’ve committed to it as a tool for building professional websites/applications.

I really couldn’t care less about comparisons to WP/Txp etc… these are all fab cms systems each with their weaknesses and strengths.
I just think that Smashing’s audience is more the hobby crowd than the web professional and that’s probably the reason for the lack of EE articles on SmashingMagazine.

I just think that Smashing’s audience is more the hobby crowd than the web professional and that’s probably the reason for the lack of EE articles on SmashingMagazine.

I would disagree with *that*!  😊 As a web generalist, Smashing does a great job covering all the disparate subjects I find myself working on from day to day…

I think the audience of Smashing run into plenty of projects EE would be appropriate for, if we had the mind share.

But anyway, I think we can agree that all press is good press — that said, we might want to wait for 2.2 to drive a new batch of web pros here.  lol.. (I say that supportively!)

-matt

I just think that Smashing’s audience is more the hobby crowd than the web professional and that’s probably the reason for the lack of EE articles on SmashingMagazine.

Also disagree with this. I’ve found smashing an excellent resource covering all areas of web design with some superbly written, in depth articles, and would happily be involved in writing something for it.

What I have found is that WP is used by some of the more high profile and vocal designers, eg Elliot j stocks, o’nolan, grace smith.
I also feel there’s almost an elitist attitude to it, that using something not meant for being a full CMS, as a CMS shows how hardcore they are, that not only are they able to design sites, but also able to hack a free CMS into a usable mess of php, like the pissing contest boyink mentioned.
Not dissimilar to the trend for doing ridiculously complicated, contrived and impractical things with css3, just to show how godlike they are - the css icons, 3d transforms that only work in safari, and the css iPhone come to mind - they are indeed technically impressive, but why bother when there are easier, quicker and more usable alternatives?!

For me, the pure fact that as a designer I can build an entire site without knowing php is EEs star feature - I’m happy not getting into some macho one up manship to show off how broad my skill base is.

We chose ExpressionEngine for ourselves and iExpression for a few reasons, each of which I think are pertinent in this space and worthy of discussion:

1) Whilst free CMS systems are… well.. free, they are typically poorly thought out, a security disaster and dependant on the community to get answers. It’s great that the community do that, but with no official line or position on the right way to do something (or identification of the wrong ways) it’s easy to build sites that are difficult to upgrade. Also whilst the price is a barrier, it also ensures (in our experience) a better class of web-site designer that values the investment made in the CMS by software engineers. I think this is worthy of a proper analysis.

2) It’s trite, it’s been done, but listing the 10 most used modules (perhaps 10 free, 10 paid even) is worth while an always useful. Again, the existence of paid modules is a good thing, not a bad thing!

3) We use a channel (well Weblog, we are still 1.6) for our bug tracking system… what other “non-blog” uses are there that are interesting to examine. Anyone providing chat rooms with comments? Interesting tie-ins with Twitter or Facebook. I don’t think I’d be interested in “10 great sites designed with EE”, but “10 innovative uses of EE” would catch me. This came to mind when we were talking to the MacWorld reviewer for iExpression who was also trying to understand ExpressionEngine, it’s much more than a blogging system and that’s just not widely known.

4) Why not write about the design considerations and priorities when developing 2.0? One of the great things for us is that things like the Gallery module became a thing of the past. Why (we know the module was well loved)? From our perspective as an integrator we did not have to write code to deal with another thing. Just write code for the fields, and then how they are used is… well.. almost irrelevant to the designer. I’m certain that was key to EllisLab’s design, but what else was in there and why?

5) Structuring your site in EE would be another useful one. Forget add-ons, why not go through a simple description of the core use-cases? It’s something that kicks you in the googlies when you start working with EE and is the real penalty for flexibility. Providing a clear simple description of one or two methods would be very useful for new customers. 

Just our two cents worth. However, we’ve never been more certain we chose the right tool to build the App with and would be happy to do anything we can to promote the platform.

Alan
iExpression Team Lead - RED When Excited Ltd

For me, the pure fact that as a designer I can build an entire site without knowing php is EEs star feature

Amen to that. Though there are other CMS that do not require PHP expertise to build a web site.

Something to write about:

1) Custom fields. For me this is the most important feature of EE and the main reason I decided to offer it to my clients. All other CMS that I tested—Drupal, Joomla, Worpress, CMS Made Simple, and a few others—offer add-ons with blocked fields that cannot or are very difficult to customize.

2) A solution with a real customer support. For all the open-source CMS up-there you always depend on a community forum or the availability of the developers. EE is not free and most good add-ons are not, but the very reasonable licensing cost is well worth the customer support you get in return.

3) Debugging. With EE—and most paid add-ons—bugs are recognized and corrected within a reasonable deadline. Not always true for most open-source solutions where you always depend on the developer’s availability and professionalism—or lack-off.

I just think that Smashing’s audience is more the hobby crowd than the web professional and that’s probably the reason for the lack of EE articles on SmashingMagazine.

Also disagree with this. I’ve found smashing an excellent resource covering all areas of web design with some superbly written, in depth articles, and would happily be involved in writing something for it.

I kinda agree with Erwin. While I agree that the content on SM is not always aimed at hobbyists, and that there has been some excellent articles on there, it’s clear from the comments on articles, that that’s what most of SM’s readership are (either that or designers/developers with little experience).

What I have found is that WP is used by some of the more high profile and vocal designers, eg Elliot j stocks, o’nolan, grace smith.

There’s also plenty of high profile designers/blogs using EE too: Malarkey, Veerle Peeters, Simon Collison, Jason Santa Maria, A List Apart. Maybe they just don’t talk about EE as much.

For the original question, the thing that’s going to get people to seriously consider EE as an alternative is showing them how it can solve their problems so I think some case studies of particular problems that have been solved with EE would be useful (particularly if they’re problems which couldn’t have been solved using WP et al.)

A comparison of how to do different things using code would be pretty great I would think. I think EE tags are much easier to understand than the Wordpress “loop”. You could show the code for an EE blog post and a Wordpress blog post. Or go through the steps to pull information fro ma custom field to a static page in both EE and Wordpress. Then people could see that the EE code is a lot easier to understand for people who don’t know php.

A quick thought: The comparison way of doing things are never going to get us further, especially with that crowd. Forget WP. Focus on what EE does really good, like Content Management! Show off how EE can make it possible to build good solutions that actually are possible to manage easily by customers.

One story comes to mind: How EE allowed Blue State Digital to deliver Change.gov as rapidly as they did. If I remember correctly, they were talking about the way they simultaneously were developing the site while content was being entered. I think that’s an awesome point. EE allows for rapid and effective developement. Sometimes, that’s a real killer feature, maybe even all the time.

Well, for me atleast, that’s been one of the biggest things. I don’t have to waste my life looking through horrible mailing lists for answer or wonder if there will be any nasty surprises at the next site launch, with this horrible third party code I had to include. That’s almost a thing of the past. As a professional, that’s been a big issue for me with opensource solutions like WP and Typo3.

For me, the pure fact that as a designer I can build an entire site without knowing php is EEs star feature - I’m happy not getting into some macho one up manship to show off how broad my skill base is.

I coudn’t agree more: I can build very complex sites WITHOUT knowing ANY php.. but I feel like a developer…

maybe it would be best to make a comparision of all those CMS compared to the developper’s skills:

in fact: one can build a superb website without ANY knowledge of html/css/php with joomla and wordpress.
a php developer with little to no design knowledge could build a great site with drupal…
and one that only knows html/css and has design knowledge can build a bad ass sites with expression engine.
but I could never mod a wordpress site…

btw: in my opinion expression engine is the mac OS of cms’s… joomla is the PC (probably vista), drupal is linux and wordpress is the iOS 😉

cheers
stefan