Thread

I’ve been using EE for a few years now and I think it is an incredible platform. The one thing I don’t understand is why it doesn’t get more press or recognition? When you hear CMS’s mentioned, you always hear Drupal, Joomla, MovableType, etc. Rarely do you hear EE mentioned. I have tried several of these (including Drupal and Joomla) and I hated them. They were so difficult to use, and so difficult to customize. When I found EE, it was like a breath of fresh air. I suppose the one thing Drupal has that I wish EE has is the volume of add-ons by 3rd parties. I can’t exactly vouch for the quality of these…but there are tons. Not that EE doesn’t have some really great people who do some really amazing indispensable modules/extensions/plugins. It’s just a difference in the number of them.

So why is it that EE feels relatively unknown in the wider web world?

Hiya James,

This is just my personal take on it but because a lot of the other CMS systems out there are free to download the full version (even though EE does have a free core version) people just go for these first as they think they are getting value for their money, or rather lack of it!!

With EE it is slightly different. As you can pay for it I think a lot of people on the net see this first before the fact that there is a free version and think “Ah forget it!”.

ExpressionEngine in my mind has a fantastic following though. There are now nearly 54,000 users in the forum (sheesh! 😉 ) and everyone is so helpful that it just makes the place a lot more fun.

I sometimes think that people who use all those other CMS systems just love the anger in those kinds of forums and all the errors and problems that go along with them 😉

I think that given time ExpressionEngine will definitely get a much bigger exposure due to more designers using it and so some of the best designed sites I think will be designed in it. Having said that there are loads and loads of sites so far that are absolutely fantastically designed that use EE but due to the way they are set up you can’t always tell that they are indeed using ExpressionEngine unless the designer, web-site owner tells us this is so.

Just my thoughts though. Maybe EllisLab should fork out some dosh and get some TV adverts going!! 😉 If ever they want to do radio coverage then I can make those as I have made over 20,000 adverts for radio in the past 7-8 years in my day job 😉

Hope everything is going well for you with your projects.

Best wishes,

Mark

I think it’s largely down to the “I want it free” generation. Since the internet first became popular people have been used to using scripts free of charge, and over the years the more popular ones have just got more and more publicity by user recommendations. This has all led to a “why buy something when I can get it for free” attitude, and even now many people will baulk when they realise they have to pay for something!

Quite often on other forums when someone asks about a CMS for a site they’re building I will recommend EE if I think it fits their clients needs, but very rarely do people look any further when they realise they have to shell out few bucks for it. Even giving them a long list of advantages over ‘XYZ Opensource CMS’ won’t budge them! Obviously sometimes these are so-called web designers who don’t give a fig about giving their clients a quality site.

To my mind EE is more aimed at professional developers rather than the home user or amateur web designer. It is a fairly unique product, not in what it does, but how it’s done, and that sets it apart from every other CMS I’ve worked with.

I think the flexibility of EE is a big plus for developers, but it makes it somehow difficult to give people a clear understanding of what EE will deliver for them in a short article. Blogging tool? There are lots available, most free of course. CMS: The same. A tool as flexible as EE? I don’t know of any. But try to look at a site and tell on the spot if it is powered by EE - hard task, sometimes impossible without looking at cookies, ... In some of the best EE sites, EE itself it totally hidden even for authors. The CP is for developers only. Try using Wordpress without its CP 😉

Compared to EE, your examples have a clear scenario they offer out-of-the-box ... and if you want to go beyond the given scenario, you’ll get to the limits fast. EE doesn’t assume you’ll even use the demo site created during installation - its flexibility is key. But if some journalist wants to write about a complex construction set (think Lego or else), he will not have the time (and knowledge) to play with everything by himself, but merely take a given success story/model and write about that. To write about what makes EE special, you somehow have to be an insider. To write about MT or Wordpress? Just look at a site or two and - from the journalist standpoint - you’ll know them all.

In addition, pMachine Inc. was a mostly developer driven company, EllisLab as its successor has changed that somehow, but these changes are not immediate. There is no VC financing and so no money to burn for PR stunts. EE & EllisLab isn’t doing much advertising, Kurt was appointed Chief Technology Evangelist just recently, there are not many books mentioning EE and even lesser focussing on EE. (CI got its own publications by the way.) I don’t even remember a press section on the EllisLab pages (I might be wrong on this).

Alltogether, EllisLab is not only self-funded as a company, but the EE users/fans/community is growing naturally and by word-of-mouth as well.

.Markus

Just as another POV…one of the things I noted while talking with people at SXSW was that out of all the conversations I had that weren’t at EL events, very few people hadn’t heard of EE. 

So least the audience at that event seemed very EE aware.

Regarding the # of plug-ins, is that due to popularity or the core product having more shortcomings that people need to code around (and I mean this as honest question not being familiar with Drupal)?

Regarding the # of plug-ins, is that due to popularity or the core product having more shortcomings that people need to code around (and I mean this as honest question not being familiar with Drupal)?

I haven’t done a comprehensive survey of contributed Drupal modules, but those that I’ve seen don’t code around shortcomings. Rather, they do exactly what EE’s plugins, modules, and extensions do. The sheer volume results from the (presumably) larger user base and the concomitant locally needed features which are contributed back to the community. To put this another way, many contributed modules are probably not widely used, whereas a number of contributed modules are essential to almost all production sites.

I have wondered why EE doesn’t get a lot more exposure, but to a large degree it’s probably due to the relatively small target audience of EE. It’s a great tool for a professional developer or a hobbyist with a few bucks to spare, but unless EE Core includes the member module, it doesn’t compete with all the other free alternatives.

I think the cost factor plays into it a lot. When you charge for something, especially more than a token amount, non-serious folks get a little gunshy. After all, for most, putting out $250 for a commercial license or even $99 for a personal license is a lot of money. Especially one which (gasp!) is not “hard” to learn, but not one-touch “easy” to learn either.

Those pesky learning curves! 😛

Have no fear, though. EE survives primarily as a boutique application environment for serious, standardized web development. On it’s scale, I imagine it works for the developers and others who make a living working for or on EE; otherwise, I doubt the product would exist.

EE is more of a niche product. Not everyone wants to or needs to spend money on a website. I, after all, have a weblog out there somewhere with three entries after six months; if I had paid for the privilege, I might never again pay for another web product without thinking about it first: Does it make sense, in a business sense?

That’s when I think folks end up at EE. It works, from a business sense, and for those who need greater control without greater programming experience, it’s a godsend. It goes against my natural desire to think the world is fair, but that is a niche.

On the opposite end, I was so grateful that Joe Hewitt kept Firebug a free add-on, that I immediately supported his decision by donating $50 to Firebug development. Had he required a $50 payment, I might not have done so; in the end, Joe Hewitt and Firebug was so famous, I imagine he made a couple thousand dollars (or more) in donations. Most, with lesser recognition and cache, might not be so lucky.

On balance, it’s a scale issue. To go bigger would probably destroy some of the fabric of what makes EE a successful product, which is, primarily I believe, EE’s attention to detail and professional support. The human touch, in other words, always has a place in business. EE fills that niche very successfully.

😊

IMHO - I think comparing EE to Joomla or Wordpress is like Apples to Oranges. In my experience, by the time my clients have gotten to me, they have already “paid” for the pain and experience of the FREE solutions out there. Additionally, the freelance or college labor that they thought would provide them with a cheep product, proved to be more detrimental to their business then helpful.

I view EE as a “framework” to create solutions geared towards my clients specific needs. It is not a turn key, module driven “Big Mac”. I have done the numbers time and time again, it takes more time and money to strip Joomla down then it does to build EE up. Hence the divide in the development community. Anyone with a laptop and a internet connection can call themselves a developer and solicit business. It has to be one of the cheapest, and easiest industries to enter into. But the outcome is always based on experience, and experience has always pointed me towards EE. It is the product I promote the most and when the Full E-Commerce module is complete it will probably be the only product I promote.

A lot of talk has gone into the cost factor of EE. I know times are hard but $250 is a drop in the bucket when it comes business expenses. Especially for what you get. I can quote a job for about 40% less when I factor in the EE foundation.

If I was smart I would have taken the time to build my own CMS using Code Ignitor and not have had to deal with the Member module or any of the licensing restrictions that come with EE. But - I’m not as smart as Rick and company - Or maybe smart enough to work with what’s available.

Can’t wait for 2.0 😊

A lot of talk has gone into the cost factor of EE. I know times are hard but $250 is a drop in the bucket when it comes business expenses.

As pointed out previously by different users, for many commercial projects EE’s licensing costs are negligible, but it doesn’t follow that this is true for all—particularly for non-profit outfits. And as far as personal users are concerned, you can’t assume that the licensing costs for EE/MSM are a drop in the bucket, either.

I know a goodly number of folks running their personal sites on EE and most of them couldn’t have afforded EE if it hadn’t been for MT going $$$ way back when.

This isn’t to say that EE isn’t good value for the money, but the sad truth is that EE is priced out of range for some potential users. The free EE Core mitigates this to some extent, but the missing member module is a serious problem if EE Core competes with many open-source products.

If I was smart I would have taken the time to build my own CMS using Code Ignitor and not have had to deal with the Member module or any of the licensing restrictions that come with EE.

If I remember correctly, there are contributed member modules for CI. It’ll be interesting to see what will develop if there is a free EE Core 2.0.

I know a goodly number of folks running their personal sites on EE and most of them couldn’t have afforded EE if it hadn’t been for MT going $$$ way back when.

I wouldn’t have been able to go with EE when I did, had not pMachine offered a limited number of free licenses at about that time. I was trying to upgrade to the free one-blog MT3 only to discover my website host couldn’t support it.

I don’t know where I would have ended up without EE, but I will be forever grateful to the team for offering that chance to find out how great it can be to use something this powerful and flexible. I wouldn’t have known what I was missing, and that’s kind of a depressing thought.

Me, too, I am one of the “Free One Thousand” (or so). In the meantime, I think EE Core has considerably lowered the entry barrier, though.

I’m also one of the free “one thousand”. I used MT for a long time, beta tested 3 for them, then when they pulled a fast one with the licensing, EE was there and I jumped on board.

I’m no web developer, everything I’ve done in the subsequent years has started out as a default template from the EE Libray or EEDesigns.com or similar.

My first EE project was my personal blog, the members module did nothing more than bypass captchas in comments. Over the years I’ve done a few more projects, some more personal websites, and right now I’m in the finishing touches of building out a community site for a non profit with a couple of hundred members, using forums, about to try the Blab integrated chat application and a gallery.

I’m still no coder, but EE has given me the ability to build out some quite amazing looking sites and projects. I wouldn’t have a clue how to do anything like this without it.

I understand the business model of “getting what you pay for”. I work for a security company that few people out of the industry have heard of - in 25+ years we have never sold to consumers, only business and corporate, so our companies brand awareness can be quite a lot lower than our competitors, yet we’re the 4th biggest vendor in our industry. I’m happy to keep forking over renewal costs for my personal license, and renew licenses for the other projects, as without EE, they wouldn’t have half of the features they want.

None of my clients have ever really had an issue with the license fee. I don’t think it has even ever been brought up in meetings. Of course I don’t have any non-profit or personal clients. The majority of clients are overwhelmed (in a good way) with the capabilities and ease of use of the product…of course things can still be improved on!

I suppose I can see how the free alternatives can be appealing though. And really if someone just wants a blog, I tell them to use Wordpress and find a template they like. It’s not worth the time and effort to just do a blog. Of course in my work I rarely get requests for a blog only site.

Me, too, I am one of the “Free One Thousand” (or so).

Me too….
I’ve been very happy to renew my licenses each year and consider it a worthy investment.

I think EE will continue to steadily grow. People who use it love it and will spread the word. For folks who need a great system to build a business site, it is a fantastic solution. $250 is dinner and drinks for business people.