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But while that CMS offers theme switching, once you get off the reservation, so to speak, things got hard, fast.  I was restricted in lots of what I wanted to do.  Enter EE.

Precisely.
I spent an enormous amount of time over several years trying out various systems. All ended with limitations, though for a quick blog they seemed ideal…at first. Ideal for a simple site, ideal for plugins to do things… perhaps. Soon even those became limitations, one could do what the plugin allowed, nothing more, no flexibility.

With EE being so flexible as to be able to have unlimited potential, and so flexible that there are multiple methods to do what is wanted by nature, would make documentation difficult.

Yet I have always found the EE docs beyond good, they are excellent. After over three years with EE full time on a daily basis I am still learning, like it more all the time, and still find the docs invaluable, clear, and understandable.

One way to think of it as an interface to a database. Yet on a basic usability perspective it can be simple. Trying to understand it all at once just don’t happen though.

For me, learning how EE works hasn’t been that hard really. I think mostly it’s because I stumbled upon the video tutorials which are great: http://expressionengine.com/tutorials/
The EE Docs and video tutorials complement each other. First you watch the videos to get an overview of how EE works, then you can look around in the docs to find all the technical explanations you need for the tags, modules etc.

Then there is the community too ofcourse <3

The attached .pdf offers a drastically over-simplified peek at EE from thirty thousand feet. If this one flies, I have a somewhat more detailed snapshot of the cockpit. Sky-divers welcome.

May I suggest you use example.com? http://coolest-website.com seems not to be running EE 😊

Thank you all, EE posters. I do appreciate all your efforts to help and I will continue to try to ‘get it’.

Here are a few summary observations I’ve made from your feedback (and other posts elsewhere on the EE forums.

1 There really does seem to be a eureka moment for most users new to EE. This is highly significant and is surely indicative of the presence of some fundamental barrier to arriving at an understanding the EE way. I say this as a teacher myself.

2 For those of use who are primarily designers (with familiarity of html/css, rather than php and coding skills) the EE schema is particularly tricky to absorb.

3 A number among you are willing to accept the ergonomic efficiencies of the CP of other systems, like WP. (NOTE: I well understand the limits of systems like WP and that’s why I’m here with EE, having paid for it with my own money!) Why not see what lessons can be gleaned from the opposition?

4 A common piece of advice on these forums goes along the lines, ‘stick with it and eventually you’ll get it’. While I don’t doubt that this may be true, bear in mind that for many of us, we are trying to get to grips in a live environment (for a particular project, for example) in which time is money. Believe me, I put in the hours; I’ve got the panda eyes and tetchy temper to prove it! Simply dogging at a thing until the light dawns is simply not efficient or cost effective. Anything that can help the new user has to be good. I don’t really buy into the sack-cloth and ashes view that anything worth achieving has to be necessarily difficult. If I thought that then I would fail as a teacher.

5 And finally…
I am genuinely impressed at the level of help and advice I’ve found on these forums. Thank you all. Perhaps were it not thus then I’d probably walk away from EE.

My take on this if that’s okay? 😉

1 There really does seem to be a eureka moment for most users new to EE. This is highly significant and is surely indicative of the presence of some fundamental barrier to arriving at an understanding the EE way. I say this as a teacher myself.

This eureka moment for me was actually as soon as I saw ExpressionEngine. I had come from a background of using just about every other CMS out there such as all the Nuke off-shoots, YUUUKK!! I also had a good knowledge of hand-coding so that was not needed. As soon as I saw ExpressionEngine and realised that I could simply take a HTML template that I had coded and anywhere that I had any dummy text I could just replace these with ExpressionEngine tags that was it for me. I think it would be more difficult if people don’t know how to code and so are coming in thinking that there are loads of templates that you can use with the system or that the system is like some other CMS systems that allow you to work with ‘blocks’ of code in the templates much like the Nuke, YUUUUK branch did. That is not the way ExpressionEngine works and I am totally glad of that. I think that once you know how to code a template and have a dummy page looking great then as soon as you see that all you have to do is place one or two tags into a page where you have your dummy text and it just works then this should hopefully provide that eureka moment for most people. Myself as I said before though I had the eureka moment before even typing a single line of ExpressionEngine code as it just made absolute sense to me that my HTML template could be whatever I wanted. I love that fact.

2 For those of use who are primarily designers (with familiarity of html/css, rather than php and coding skills) the EE schema is particularly tricky to absorb.

Sorry to sound against you here but I would have to totally disagree with that I’m afraid. The without a doubt by far and above best thing about ExpressionEngine is that it allows you to work however you want. You can have templates and template group hierarchies that completely mirror for say if you were making a static HTML site. ExpressionEngine never ever gets in the way of that at all.

I think that the easiest way to look at this would be to compare say ExpressionEngine to say one of the Nuke (did I say YUUUUK yet 😉 ) variants. With ExpressionEngine I can just type my HTML template code into a template however I wish and I can have the whole of the template, header tags and all, all within that one template if I so desire. I can get it looking 100% exactly the same as if I had just typed the code into a WYSIWYG editor (personally I don’t use them any more as I code completely by hand). ExpressionEngine never ever gets in the way of your code unless you let it.

Yes as you get more advanced you will see that there are massive benefits to using ExpressionEngine with regards to templates as you can start splitting them up so that anything that gets repeated on every page, say your header can go into a separate template and then just gets embedded much like other CMS systems do. This saves you having to type it out every single time on every single template.

You don’t have to do this though. If you wanted you most definitely could type out the whole of every single template in their entirety and still get exactly the same end result. It’s entirely up to you.

3 A number among you are willing to accept the ergonomic efficiencies of the CP of other systems, like WP. (NOTE: I well understand the limits of systems like WP and that’s why I’m here with EE, having paid for it with my own money!) Why not see what lessons can be gleaned from the opposition?

I agree with this that there are always usability lessons that can be gleaned from other CMS systems, totally with you on that one 😉 however I would say that I personally believe that the CP in ExpressionEngine is pretty simple to use. Admittedly it can be a little overwhelming when you first start to use it but given time it comes quite natural. There’s always room for improvement in anything though, granted.

Continued in Part 2 😉

Mark

Part 2 as promised 😉

4 A common piece of advice on these forums goes along the lines, ‘stick with it and eventually you’ll get it’. While I don’t doubt that this may be true, bear in mind that for many of us, we are trying to get to grips in a live environment (for a particular project, for example) in which time is money. Believe me, I put in the hours; I’ve got the panda eyes and tetchy temper to prove it! Simply dogging at a thing until the light dawns is simply not efficient or cost effective. Anything that can help the new user has to be good. I don’t really buy into the sack-cloth and ashes view that anything worth achieving has to be necessarily difficult. If I thought that then I would fail as a teacher.

In this case I would never ever use a system that I wasn’t fully 100% conversant with for a site that I am being paid for. If I don’t understand something then I simply won’t use it. The client is paying for my expertise not for me to learn a new system. I fly helicopters and I would never ever get into a helicopter that I haven’t had differences training on as I would possibly crash and burn to the ground much like you will if you try to do what you are doing with software that you don’t understand for a paying client. They don’t care for you learning as you go along. They will just want you to know what you are doing from day one and no client that I have ever worked with would ever allow the “I didn’t know how to use it” excuse.

I would definitely say in this case to stick with what you know and then learn any new system on the side. For instance a doctor learning a new skill probably won’t put it into practice on their own until they not only fully understand it but also have had mentors watching them perform that skill numerous times. Could be very very messy if they did go in without full knowledge first 😉

5 And finally… 
I am genuinely impressed at the level of help and advice I’ve found on these forums. Thank you all. Perhaps were it not thus then I’d probably walk away from EE.

That is definitely a plus in here absolutely. I hope that my post above didn’t sound too negative but myself I never really came from a programming background and taught myself everything I know (not a lot in that case probably 😉 ) so I just hope that through my experiences I could possibly help others to get that eureka moment too.

I wish you the absolute best with everything and any time you need a hand then we are all here ready to lend one. 😊

Best wishes,

Mark

You may [or may not!] find this helpful: ‘an intro to EE’ [pdf]

It was written for v1.5, but since it’s about the EE fundamentals it should still be applicable.  I wrote it after my first EE site, while the learning curve was still fresh in my mind - I tried to illuminate the things that caused me problems - so it covers:
*  templates [including embeds]
*  weblogs & fields
*  EE tags & variables
*  categories

😊

The pdf doesn’t go into the control panel at all - it’s just trying to explain the basic concepts, rather then being a ‘how-to’.

Anyway - hope it may be of some use!

You may [or may not!] find this helpful: ‘an intro to EE’ [pdf]

Thank you, most helpful.

And thank you Mark for your detailed response.

I’ve said it on more than one occasion already, but lest it was missed, thank you all EE posters.

I’ll let you know how I progress.

No problem with the detail. I was probably a little too verbose though knowing me 😉

Anyway any help you ever need we are all here to lend a hand wherever we can, that’s one of the best things about ExpressionEngine - the community support. 😊

Best wishes,

Mark

Hey, Ingmar, this is series, no joking! Now, I’ll just have to attach the view from 20,000 feet as the plane’s engine, alas, begins to sputter.

(Series-ly, I would interpolate another graf between the first one and this one; adding some verbiage and annotating with a screencast. Sometimes, visualization helps. I could ‘map out’ thirty or forty EE illustrations almost without thinking after an insane amount of deep analysis.)

Don’t underestimate or overlook the value of what Jack says here. This is insightful.

From what information they’ve given us thus far, the building of an EE site in 2.0 is going to be pretty much the same, so almost anything you learn now will be able to be applied. The main difference is that it will be built on top of CodeIgniter, EllisLab’s PHP framework, which will allow greater access and capabilities for writing custom code/modules/plugins for your sites.

The key components of EE 2.0 appear to be 1) easier to use interface, 2) built on Codeigniter for more capability, 3) familiar features and benefits for those of us versed in EE 1.x, 4) some new stuff.

On top of that, the front-end control panel will be much slicker and client-friendly, with ajax and javascript goodness. Plus there will be a new File Manager that i’m looking forward to greatly.

And I so hope all those bubbly goodness pieces work fine in FF and Safari.

The reason it’s a bit difficult to explain initially is that it’s more of a CMS FRAMEWORK, rather than plug and play application (like wordpress) which allows you to do just about anything in a number of ways. There’s no “RIGHT” way to do anything (for the most part), for all the good and bad that brings.  I hope you stick around, once you get the hang of it—EE will be your best friend.

When compared to traditional blogging tools and other so-called CMS apps, EE is a bit difficult to explain, and it probably is likened more to a CMS framework than an application. Yes, Joomla, WordPress and others are a snap to set up, install, and use right away, provided you don’t mind the look-alike templates.

Then you want to change something beyond the parameters of widgets and CSS. That’s where the problems usually begin, and where EE begins to look like a bargain value of flexibility. For true customization, Joomla, WordPress, et al users go from ultra simple to the complexities of PHP, and the structure of each CMS. For EE, it’s a slightly steeper learning curve in the beginning that yields a bountiful harvest later. XHTML. CSS. EE’s templates. There’s no need to know PHP to get EE to become a complex, flexible, feature laden site with capabilities far beyond that of mere mortal (and free) CMS apps.

Looking forward to 2.0. It’s THIS summer, right?

I must contribute to this thread. There is no good documentation for newbies. I am fluent with programming, so I am not new with programming itself, and I modify Joomla without problem, but when I started to use EE, I expected to find some “for Dummies” documentation.
As someone said, there are detailed explanations, but it is like you buy a car, want to know how to change a lightbulb, and you must read for whole article about how lights work until you find how to change a lightbulb. Mostly, what happened is that from so much informations I didn’t see what I was looking for.

Example: when doing page with weblog, information about dynamic=“off” I tried forum and documentation ... and boyink told me about that ...

It is not a question if informations exists, but problem is in structure of informations. They should be categorized from newbie to pros ...

I think EE’s docs are really great and detailed once you “get it.” I’m not completely convinced the documentation alone shows the full potential. But once you know what you’re going for, it’s a GREAT resource.

Your car analogy was spot on. If you want information about an alternator bushing, it’s there, but in the end what you need is a vehicle and and all the information about bushings won’t do squat for you.

The documentation reads like a somewhat disjointed, but large, quick reference manual, not as a how-to. To be blunt, it seems like it was written by software geeks who’ve spent too much time with their product and don’t realize that, even for those well versed in other scripting languages, their methods and practices are far from obvious.

The fact that the sample templates/sites are crude, to be generous, doesn’t help.

The single best thing they could do, IMHO, is provide a few base sites that address the most common questions and complete explanations of how they’re built. Sample sites: e-commerce site, image blog site 1 (using photo gallery), image blog site 2 (using webblogs), news site, etc. You could then pull it apart and put it back together to understand what does what or, at the least, reskin and tweak these sites to have useable product quickly.

Considering that this is a purchased product, I don’t beleive these are unreasonable expectations.

Over all, I’m happy I’ve chosen EE, if only because Drupal is an evil time suck.

Lastly,
There is something quite ridiculous about telling someone else that this is all super easy after they’ve just told you that it wasn’t for them.

If people are saying that they’re struggling with the software, it means people are struggling with the software. Some are probably dense, but maybe, just maybe, the software or the documentation isn’t as obvious as some would like to believe.

Hell, it takes more than a minute to get your head around the notion that “Template Groups” and “Templates” are fundamental to the structure of an EE site. They look and sound more like a method for building and organizing snippets of code, not the actual site the end user navigates through.