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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.

Ah yes - some fine names up there (imo better webdesigners than my WP list too!) - we are in good company.
They probably dont talk about it… WP does seem to carry a certain pride with it, much like people like to drop into conversation they use an iPhone at every opportunity.
EE people prob just get on with it!

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 😉

thats interesting - i’d been thinking about similar comparisons - WP does certainly have the visibility, “cool factor”, large developer and locked down / limited customisation to be comparable with iOS… that said I’ve never been a fan of iOS or OSX and manage day to day very well using windows7 (hate to say it peeps, but 3 years and still no blue screens of death!), and am very happy with Android so dont so much get that part of the comparison.

conversely, if you get what you pay for, and WP is free, it kinda shows in the WP plugins and the attitude the community has at the thought of paying for plugins, which is not consistent with the App Store making big $$$.
And as brandon mentions above, the EE community value professionally created plugins and are prepared to pay for that quality.

Anyway… I digress!

The most important thing to mention in that article would be:

- EE makes no presumptions about your site, so no skinning a theme, no stripping out templates to get a basic page. The start EE page is a completely blank canvas, the starting point your data.

- custom fields + custom field types, not just text boxes but checkboxes, dropdowns, file uploads, relationship fields etc… and that’s not even mentioning Fieldframe or Playa.

- you’re totally free to design the url structure of your site as well: /template_group/template/whatever_url_segments_you_need

There’s lots more of course but these should be the starting point of any article.

I have offered to write articles for Smashing Magazine before and they were ignored. If they, or anyone familiar with them, are listening the offer still stands. I have an update to their previous dev list article 70% of the way done. Just need their specs and it’s theirs.

I have offered to write articles for Smashing Magazine before and they were ignored. If they, or anyone familiar with them, are listening the offer still stands. I have an update to their previous dev list article 70% of the way done. Just need their specs and it’s theirs.

I’d be very interested to see this go ahead and see Expression Engine get more positive press… a part of my is however sceptical.
The web design world can seem very cliquy at times with certain groups holding similar views and not always being very open to alternatives without someone significant vocally challenging it.
God knows anyone admitting to using Windows can become the object of ridicule easy enough with OSX being considered the only viable operating platform for webdesign!

Hi everyone,

Thank you for the fantastic replies and suggestions!

I’ve contacted Smashing Magazine with a reference to this thread and your ideas. Leslie Doherty has also offered her assistance to corral resources.

It seems the topic has started some discussion outside of this forum as well. My client presentation PDF on WP vs EE is apparently floating around on Twitter (http://twitter.com/#!/search/pdf #wp)

Aside from any unintentional antagonization, I think there’s actually some very productive dialogue coming out of this discussion.

For instance, here’s an open letter to EllisLabs by Kenny Meyers: http://thenerdary.net/articles/entry/a_plea_to_ellislab—A bit scathing, but… points taken, I hope.

Let’s keep the discussion going.

Well, for better or worse, my “WP vs EE” PDF seems to have gone viral.

Ryan Imel of WPCandy.com contacted me for details, and has published my response to him, explaining the PDF and my position on EE here:

http://wpcandy.com/thinks/about-the-wp-vs-ee-pdf

So, maybe that’s not quite Smashing Magazine, but it’s a start.

Special thanks to Brandon Kelly for his awesome article on Custom Fields (linked from this article), which requotes his quotes from EllisLabs on where EE is headed.