Thread

Respectively Hitch, it seems you have made this thread if anything about the selling points of EE against other CMS systems.  I am not a developer but have done this along time and I can personally bang out a full blown EE website in a 5 weeks.  Just did a membership site using Memberr in 6 weeks.  I am not patting myself on the back, I am just saying long hours and a lot of thinking how can I do this fast the next time makes me efficient in EE.  Spent a lot of time with EE, I like it a lot, the most of all of them.  I have worked in the others, they suck ok, they just suck and are complex, EE is not, anything but.  So somehow we the community have to come up with these awesome comparisons, since I don’t take clients anymore, I don’t need the comparison.  I see your join date, that’s a long time in tech years.  Me too, I have busted butt to learn EE and I learn something new all the time.

Ellis is growing and EE along with it.  Every time I would get a client to switch they were amazed at the system and flexibility of EE.  Say you give me a site and tell me the specs, tell me to compare and make a case for EE against any of the OS CMS.  So I approach it like this and it’s so simple, I would pick the best CMS for the job, not every job needs EE but if you want to expand and have security, then it’s going to be EE and it’s cheap in comparison to other paid CMS software.  The client always comes with their ideals, but always give them a better option.  If they still want say WP(not a CMS btw) then you cannot change their mind, but let them know the issues with WP, then give them the solutions EE brings, it’s per job and a blanket comparison will not work, because every clients wants and needs are different.

I have to admit I have yet to actually put together a complete site in EE, but have built a number in Codeigniter and sucking up the small change for EE is far more attractive to me than working with Wordpress or Joomla which are not products easy to work with. Seems every time I get a project and I’m forced to “suck it up” and work with WP I regret ever taking the job on because my time estimate is always blown to crap. I have started to play with core and immediately was impressed - no front end nightmares like with WP! I’m stoked!

I think owners need to take a step back and think about what they want out of their websites not only short term, but more importantly - long term. Wordpress is OK for getting a small site up with some functionality fast (unless you want custom this that and the other.. then forget it) but it will not be the right choice if your site growth and hit counts are significant. Nor will a custom CMS, which I usually build but not when there is a growth concern.

I recently took on my current project which growth is the main concern, and having a system built for pros by pros is the way to go. Lets face it.. WP was built for non-pros who wanted to blog, and as much as people want to pretend its a full CMS are kidding themselves (and their clients). The importance of having the site up and running for me is huge - and the company would be OK with paying EL for support to make sure it gets back together and live quickly if that was needed, and honestly that support option (regardless of price) is a good selling point I think. Not only do you have myself (and my employees if I had any), you also get access to support from people sitting at EL waiting to help. Nice. Ask them to contact WP for help and see how that goes. (I don’t even know if they have people there)

I think selling this is easy - it took 1 sentence to the owner here. “This will do all you need and more, plus its only a couple hundred bucks and support options are available as well.”
he said “Buy it.”
I actually had a harder time convincing myself to use it, and did the research before even bringing it up.

The hardest part is converting ASP with querystrings 301 redirects to EE which is why I came to the forum today haha! Off I go to check into that!

no front end nightmares like with WP!

YES!  Welcome to the secret club.

Have you ever tried the forum at wordpress.org, to see if you can find people like us, who find the WP front end a little bit confusing?  When I have asked about this experience there, the mods closed it down hard, taking the tact that since it’s easy for the WP yogis and divas, there is nothing to discuss about how or why it is confusing to some. 

EE definitely is a smart product.  WP, Joomla, and Drupal are all smart too, but not in the same way as EE.  EE has the smartest design for channels and templates. 

EE’s staying out of the FE is what sold me on the product.  One of the hardest programming challenges I ever tackled was figuring out how to make a blank page in WP.  Once I figured that out, I knew I could build a FE from there, but getting to the blank was hard to figure out.  Not hard to do, now that I know how, but trying to figure it out had me in the land of perpetual ‘wtf?’  The thing that made it the hardest was when I would ask people how to do it, I was always swimming against a cultural tide at WP. 

For laughs, imagine what happened at wordpress.org forums when I asked about the culture there.  That was really funny.

support option (regardless of price) is a good selling point

You make a great case here, and the support option is a critical element.  Overall, you have me thinking, re-reading… thanks for the great contribution to the thread.

I have to admit I have yet to actually put together a complete site in EE, but have built a number in Codeigniter and sucking up the small change for EE is far more attractive to me than working with Wordpress or Joomla which are not products easy to work with. Seems every time I get a project and I’m forced to “suck it up” and work with WP I regret ever taking the job on because my time estimate is always blown to crap. I have started to play with core and immediately was impressed - no front end nightmares like with WP! I’m stoked!

You know what a small business owner cares about?  Do you guys really think that s/he cares about whether the site is Joomla or EE or Wordpress? No.  What s/he cares about is ease of maintenance, total costs, maintenance costs, and ease of finding someone to provide assistance when the site is updated/maintained, altered, etc.  I could write an entire essay on the latter alone. 

However, I’m giving up on having that discussion here, because everyone who posts here IS an EE developer, making money from site owners—the people who pay for the work.  Trying to repeatedly explain, on this forum, that being a business owner with EE is like being held hostage, is equivalent to walking into the Baptist Church, informing them that they’re all worshiping the wrong God and that they should instantly drop to prayer rugs and pray to Allah 5x a day.  It’s an utter waste of my breath and time.  I only hope that occasionally, some poor other small business owner will see something I’ve posted here and elsewhere, and be aware of what using EE really means to them, in the “long term.” 

Thus, I’m done with this thread.  I’m sticking with EE at the moment, but as I’ve said before: I would have gladly—gladly—paid a boatload more for an actual CMS upfront, than to go through what I’ve gone through with it.  Everyone who ever reads anything negative I say about it instantly assumes it’s always about “the money,” but it’s not. Nonetheless…this is a silly discussion for me to ever try to have here, and I have to remind myself not to have it. 

Hitch

I would have gladly—gladly—paid a boatload more for an actual CMS upfront….

I am totally in the dark, then - what is an actual CMS?

I use WordPress with the HeadwayThemes product for customization ease and fast deployment of complex designs when I know it is a small business that is not going to have their site grow into 100 pages of content that aren’t blog posts, but rather are pages really dependent upon database-driven content. Still, it could likely handle it with some fiddling. But I’d hate to try to do http://www.ncwildflower.org/index.php/plants/browse_all_pics/ any other way other than using EE! (...let alone http://www.ncwildflower.org/index.php/plants/listings/ - be prepared to wait a moment for that readout!)

ExpressionEngine makes it easy to do amazing things with if/then conditionals on a site, and it likely makes better use of the mysql database in some ways - but since both WP and EE are dependent upon mysql, it is just about a moot point, I’d think.

EE makes great use of embeds and custom fields for the channels.

The relationship and reverse-relationship capabilities are worth the entire price of admission for projects benefiting from those!

I do admit that I’m a pro and charge a bunch - but I’m charging much less than my car mechanic now (which kinda pisses me off a little sometimes…)

Terry