Thread

Hi all,

I know it’s almost 2008 and I don’t have a blog, and being a developer that’s almost embarassing to admit. 😊

With that said, I’m most certainly going to use Expression Engine. I’m going to start with the free version and if I need the additional features, I will gladly purchase it.

My reason for posting is, can any of you folks who have experience with both provide your two cents with what EE has feature wise and what it handles better/worse than WP? I can only imagine there’s very few if any cons to going EE instead of WP. Security alone I can see being a lot more solid with EllisLabs behind the project.

Anyway, just babbling in an off-topic forum. Love to hear feedback from most of you. I love what Derek Allard has done with http://www.derekallard.com and wrote him a personal e-mail the other day thanking him for the motivation to start my own blog. 😊

Cheers!

- sf

I’ve been considering the question of EE vs. WP for an upcoming website as well.  WP is very tempting since it’s so easy to just drop it in, install it and choose from one of the million free themes available.  EE, although more powerful and flexible, definitely has a greater learning curve and will require more work to build a nice theme.  Once you get past the initial learning curve, the flexibility of EE along with the expansion and professional support options are very compelling.

I’d go for Wordpress every time - the themes and extensions easily outnumber EE a couple hundred to one. Wordpress is also pretty easy to develop for and you can turn it into anything you want for the most part. The community is so large, professional support is unnecessary - you can find the answer for free somewhere (although, I’m one of those people that doesn’t believe in professional support - no matter what).

I’ve had issues with Wordpress inserting or removing markup from my posts, causing pages to not validate.

I have developed quite alot in WP over the past year. And if I had a choice I would use it. Have never tried EE before but if there is a free version perhaps I would give it a spin.

@ricklee
I’ve never had an issue with that (although I don’t use the visual editor). I’ve been using Wordpress since about v2.0 and it’s always directly inserted exactly what I typed.

Although, if you weren’t the admin, and you were just a Contributor/Author - then I could see it happening. Those roles, by default, have filtered HTML only allowing certain tags (but this can be changed by the Admin).

Firstly, I like WP, and I like it a lot.  I think its the most appropriate choice for a large, large portion of the net.  But I intend here to make the argument that it isn’t best choice for CI’ers.  I’m obviously biased, so take everything I say in that context.

There is a free version of EE (“Download Free Core Version” on the homepage).

If you intend on using pre-created themes, then its hard to argue that there aren’t many more available for Wordpress.  Sure, many of the popular ones have been ported to EE, including Hemingway, Ocean Mist, Salmon and many, many more, but at the end of the day there is more choice in WP.  That said, I don’t see being able to use other people’s designs as a particular strength.  For me a blog is both a place to post writings and communicate, but also an expression of the developer.  I like what the WP guys do, but “Kubrick” is not how I want to express myself.  Neither is the pre-built EE theme though.  I suspect most Igniters want to do their own design, and if so, who has more themes is a non-issue.

So if you agree with that point (and I concede that some people aren’t interested in design, making this paragraph moot), it boils down (in a design sense) to which one is easier to customize.  For anyone on these forums, this is probably a draw.  Everyone here is highly technically skilled, and it might take a few extra minutes one was or the other.  That said, I’d argue EE is easier to design for (you can organize templates, page structure, etc, however you want), and I’d certainly argue its more flexible. 

Changing the design after the fact?  Big plus for WP.  It has 1 click theming, which EE eschews in favour of flexibility and power.

Community size - big plus WP.  But we could make the same argument of Zend over CI, yet we’re all still here 😉  The EE community is very similar to the CI community.

There are 2 compelling reasons that I can think of in favour of EE for anyone reading this. (1) Security (EE vs wordpress); (2) The fact that EE and CI are so tightly ingrained.  More and more EE code everyday is merging with CI, so as a CI developer you can leverage your skills to build with EE, and vice-versa.

Plus, EE is a full on CMS - if you ever want to grow out of a blog, or get hired for freelance and need a content management system, escalating up is very (trivially) easy.

Again, I like WP, and I like what those guys are doing.  I’m not trying to say WP is not as good as EE, but rather, that as a CI programmer EE offers you benefits that WP can’t.

Definitely valid points. I think the reason I chose WP over EE originally is because I wanted the functionality of all of the plugins out there without having to do the work myself. If I want forums, I have them up and running in 2-clicks (and without opening my wallet). But, if you want real forums, that work well, and are full-featured, EE is the way to go. I find WP great to toss up real quick sites where you really don’t mind if you can tweak every little feature available.

I gave EE Core a shot for a small period of time - I didn’t like all of the options it gave me. For some reason I found it confusing and I just didn’t want to take the time to learn how to use it. It’s not that I didn’t want to use it - I did - I just didn’t want to take the time to learn it.

Which brings me full-circle to my blog. Wordpress just simply isn’t working for me any longer - I’m not happy with my design and I don’t want to hack in all of the features I need. Plus, it doesn’t really show off my CodeIgniter talents and convince people to contract you when you are running a blog on Wordpress.

Needless to say, I’ve started working on a custom solution - lol.

The community is so large, professional support is unnecessary - you can find the answer for free somewhere (although, I’m one of those people that doesn’t believe in professional support - no matter what).

Huh?  Surely you must be saying this as a developer and not as a customer.  Of course you don’t have to ask for support for a PHP script because as a PHP developer you can simply view the source and read how the application works.

Tell Microsoft, Apple, Intuit, IBM or a long line of other software companies that they don’t need to provide professional support.  Tell Redhat that professional support is not needed, after all, that is only like their entire business model.

Wordpress gets by without support because the software is free and people are cheap.  If you don’t like it, don’t pay for it, oh wait!  However, you can bet that there is a ton of paid support going on in the Wordpress community.  If there is a need, someone will pay and someone else will provide.

Geez, if you are making money off your customers you need to have support.  I don’t want to provide support either though.  Support is a pain.  I guess that is why there are business people to keep the crazy developers away from the customers.

I’d go for Wordpress every time - the themes and extensions easily outnumber EE a couple hundred to one.

Thats great for people doing window shopping for extensions and themes but I don’t go looking for something until I actually need it.  The number of available extensions is irrelevant to me if I don’t need them.  How many extensions are needed for a simple blog?  Also, how many of those extensions are actually being maintained so that I don’t have to worry about introducing yet another possible exploit into my blog?

I do agree with WalesMD on one thing though.  You are here in CodeIgniter land, just build your own blog system.  Who knows, maybe a client will need one and then you will have something to work from.

I don’t have a blog cause I don’t have a life. I do pretty much the same freaking thing every day work eat sleep take the train,  work out it’s kinda boring

So I just develop games and cork boards I am thinking of making a speed reading program where you input a story and it gets stored in a DB then it flashes the words on the screen like a word a second then it quizes you to test how fast you read and comprehend

blogging is not for me

And P.S it’s not EllisLabs but just EllisLab you can leave off the S for savings

Wrote up a little note about this over at the EE forums:

ExpressioneEngine vs Wordpress