the entire Ellislab crew at the same time? I had my heart set on wordpress, it was so popular and had so many plugins. The wordpress community is huge and I was looking forward to editing my site all up, css, javascrip, php, adding my plugins, it just gets me going.. building an entire website by myself - that is.
My website is going to be somewhat controversial, so I thought it would be a good idea to research security. As I begun digging through google for security tactics and measures, to use with wordpress… I stumbled upon two websites that basically talked about security, mostly they taught you how to hack a website in their forums, you could ask for help, for commands to use to sql inject, etc. etc. I figured I needed to learn how to do this stuff if I wanted to protect my site…. Then my heart broke.
I came upon article after article, topic after topic about how easy it was to hack wordpress. The author of one of the two sites had tons of articles where he would give advice about how to make wordpress more secure. Matt, one of the designers(or whatever) of Wordpress actually commented on his blog asking him if he would share what he did to his blog with the wordpress community. He said that he didn’t have the time to tell of all he edited, he said that it almost wasn’t wordpress anymore, he couldn’t update his blog because of all the direct source code editing he did to wordpress. He basically took away all functionality, had the basic wordpress layout, nothing fancy, degraded a good amount.
I searched google once again for Content Management Systems.. I got the same reoccuring links I always did, joomla and other systems I dug into at one point and ended up simply frustrated. The lack of features I actually needed, the way you made templates, the lack of documentation. (that was awhile ago, not sure if it’s changed much)... Nearly every update with most Content management Systems / blogs are all security updates it seems… that worries me, because updates can cause crazy things to happen with your plugins, etc. and if there’s always so many security fixes, then I know I’m constantly vulnerable.. I was so disappointed in the world, in all programmers, I couldn’t understand how there wasn’t one CMS who actually did it right… Hell, i’d even pay for a good system.. I don’t care if it’s free, I just want something of quality… the guy at roscripts.com is awesome, he’s helped me with so much code lately, just awesome.. so I decided to ask him what system he used, or if he coded by hand, which seemed doubtful to me… i didn’t think anyone did that anymore, unless you plan on having a huge site.. it just seems like so much word… I read some posts where he spoke about his never ending love for code igniter.. He spoke very highly of it.. I had heard something of this code igniter… and then I got a little excited… so I checked it out and watched the tutorial video about building a cms in 20 minutes… so then my heart filled with happiness and I thought God had sent me an early Christmas present… I looked around a bit, and realized i still needed a forum that wasn’t as vulnerable as vbulletin and phpbb… phpbb is just a straight up joke with security, the stories of all the blogs that get hacked is ridiculous, I guess making all those functions and features take the time that should be spent on security.. but I didn’t want something like bbpress, very few plugins, most of them are littered with comments by people who couldn’t get them to work, the lack of features meant much more work for me, work i wasn’t about to begin. So I stumbled onto this message board and loved the look, simple, yet wasn’t void of features.
To make a ridiculously long story shorter than it could have been,
I am absolutely so thankful for ellislab.. this looks like the one CMS that was ACTUALLY done right.. the one i’ve been searching for, for far too long..
so from a sincere person who had just a few drinks before typing this love letter to the ellislabs staff, you wonderful little angels you, thank you.
I probably would have paid a lot more for ExpressionEngine.. (well actually i can’t buy it till next payday.. lame.. oh and don’t meditate on what I just said too much, the mere $150 was exciting.. Most companies are really greedy though, try to charge outrageous amounts of money… and then they make you pay freakin $150-$280 to remove the freakin copyright!!!! ARGHHH!!! BURN BURN BURN!!!!)
ya know how people who are hosted by MediaTemple always want to put “in association with MT) or simple (MT) at the bottom of their website? It almost feels that way with ellis labs and ExpressionEngine… after seeing the quality sites using EE, and the sheer beauty of the admin area, not overcrowding everything, the ease of the template system, and the cute little videos, oh, I wanna stick a “proudly powered by Espression Engine” at the bottom of every page, though I absolutely love how you’ve given the option to remove it on the public pages if so desired.. without charging an extra $280!!!!! gaahhh!!
you guys/gals are just wonderful, just simply wonderful.
oh,and i MUST comment on how much I love the first party plugins…. It gives me a feeling of security knowing it was written by someone who throughly knows the system and wont leave me open to any kind of attack..
though, I know that no website is 100% secure against being attacked, EE just gives me peace, whereas the others made me worry and stay up till 9am trying to figure out how to protect them..
oh, one last thing… Other CMS/BLOG communities ARE TERRIBLE… I asked simple questions that I couldn’t find answers to, and no one would help.. they turned out to be so simple too.
though wordpress and other cms/blog systems may be good for some people, for me, it just didn’t cut it. I wonder if anyone read all of this?
I probably shouldn’t be writing posts right now, alcohol makes me want to tell people everything.