Thread

I am looking for some blog software (ok, its called a “content management system”) and my latest try is expression engine. My goal is to find something that doesnt need developer level skills to build a site. One of the things I wanted was one that either has a forum built into it or has a plugin to access the phpbb forum I have. I have tried Nucleus and Wordpress so far. Neither one fit my needs. EE seems to have a lot going for it, I downloaded the trial version, installed it but I am having a time trying to figure out how I customize it to reflect the page layout and colors that I want. Other software like phpbb for example has what you would call skins, or styles, or themes which have colors and layouts built into it. I assume thats done with templates here but do I really have to build them all from scratch making my own XML (which I dont know) or are there downloadable packages of these?

Other than the themes you can choose during install, and a few by independant EE users scattered around, EE doesn’t really have themes in the sense of some blogging tools like WordPress. There’s no “one-click to switch” type functionality. But, you can pretty much download any template you find on the net and fairly easily replace the static content with dynamic EE tags. You can use the installed templates as reference. You need a basic understanding of html/css but you definitely don’t need to be a developer to pull it off.

My goal is to find something that doesnt need developer level skills to build a site.

I’d like to say “You’ve come to the right place”, but I am not entirely sure. I consider EE the most advanced and powerful, in short: the best (for me) CMS at the price point, but it does have a learning curve. If you need to setup a blog quickly, and don’t want to be bothered with the underlying engine, it might not be your tool of choice. If you like the flexibility it brings, the chance to tinker with your site, the knowledge that you can do virtually anything that you can think up, EE will be for you 😊

No, you don’t have to build themes with XML, “just” your regular XHTML-based templates.