Thread

As I use and learn ExpressionEngine, I am finding myself in a love-hate relationship.  I am still developing my first EE site, and doing more advantaged things so it is a learning curve and I don’t have all that much time to devote to it.

But when I get back into the project I find myself frequently wondering if I should just go back to using flat files and dream weaver (mainly for syntax highlighting, visual guide, and synchronizing files, I don’t use it to automagically make pages. 

Other times, I really love EE and how it gives you complete flexibility of your output and no need to work around the limitations of a skin or a template system. 

I am picking up EE fairly quickly when I do spend time on it, but I keep running into brick walls.  Things like unable to find a WYSIWYG editor that works well for making posts easier and dummy proof to my biggest problem is always having to step out of EE and use another third party module to solve something I believe is an every day need.

For example, meta tags are difficult to work with, LG Better Meta is a big help, but that is another module.  Then you have all the truncating modules you need, so you can do previews and avoid Google sand boxing.  Complex menus are difficult to work with, and require something like navigator or manually doing menus (which I finally opted to do). 

I am finding myself having to figure out how to get myself out of a hole one way or another, and it is usually related to something quite simple in a typical website, but involves a bit of research to find the most efficient way to do it in EE.

On my site, the main advantage I am seeing with EE is the full site search, ability to reference blog posts on different pages of the site easily, rotating random testimonials throughout the site, ability to easily add a new partner to our list of partners.  These things are great, and I really love how EE handles this.  I don’t really use the forums or the membership module so this is a big feature I just don’t need right now.

Even taking off a lot of the time as a result of learning a new cms, I am struggling to find where I am saving time.

Hi Saxi,

I as read your post it reminds me of many discussions I have had with developers and friends over the years. Your questions and struggles are common to web developers new to EE.

The one thing that stands out from your thread is the use of the term CMS. Don’t get me wrong, EE is the ultimate CMS, but I believe it is better categorized as a “Frame Work”. The one thing I appreciate about EE is that it has just the right amount of bells and whistles without trying to adapt to the Joomla way of thinking. And to top it off, Rick and his team have done a great job of making the resources available for static users to be able to utilize familiar tools like dreamweaver (see flat template files ) to speed up development.

I say frame work because that is what it is, a frame work of easily configurable SQL tables. Even if you know PHP and MySQL like the back of your hand, it will take you 10X as long to put a base together to accomplish the foundation for a simple Blog or a static site with a news feed as it would to throw it into EE.

As with any pre-built solution you will run into limitations. The beauty that I have found with EE is that there is always a solution to resolve some unique feature that I am trying to implement, whether it be from third party modules or creative thinking. Thats the way it was designed. Not as a turn key solution, but as a 20 ton starting block with the ability to create anything you can think of.

You mentioned having a WYSIWYG editor available to enter posts. Nothing works better for this then the SAEF SAEF I have used it many of times to keep endusers out of the control panel and “hold” their hand to submit data. And if you want to use TinyMCE or the like, that is easy to implement as well.

When you wrap your way of thinking around the EE “Frame Work” I am sure you will be very delighted with how quickly you can produce results. I hope this helps and I am sure you will find many very resourceful people here to help you with your questions as you move along. I know I have.