Expression Engine Review
For those who want to start a professionally looking site without any prior technical knowledge whatsoever, EllisLab’s Expression Engine is certainly a viable option. This CMS is in fact both powerful and extremely easy to use, maybe even more than some of its open source alternatives, and a comprehensive user guide, along with the professional technical support, will provide an answer to all of your questions on how to manage your site with this flexible tool.
Expression Engine Overview
In order to test this proprietary software, you can go to the EE website and either download and install the free “core version” on your own server or try the 30-days full trial, which includes installation on their servers and full customer support, for a price of just $10.
The first thing that Mac users will notice while using the admin interface are the subtle similarities between Mac OS X — particularly the Safari Web browser — and the design of the Expression Engine interface. Whether this has been made on purpose or not is not clear, but the result is certainly a very clean design that looks easy on the eyes and doesn’t overwhelm the user with a myriad of colorful (and sometimes distracting) pictures, focusing on productivity and functionality. As you can see in the screenshot, the admin interface features a simple but effective top navigational bar that allows you to quickly access the main sections.
A click on the “Publish” tab brings you to the usual wysiwyg editor from which you can write new content for your website. In addition to the most common features found in other content management systems, Expression Engine also enables you to do such things as postponing and programming the publication date of new content — very useful if you are going on vacation but still want to keep your site updated daily — and the ability to manage pings and trackbacks of your post, similarly to what you can do with other open source tools such as WordPress.
The “Communicate” tab is also something not commonly seen on other content management systems, although certainly useful. It allows you to send emails to all the members (admins, authors, editors) of the site, using the email each user provided at registration: you can even choose to send a message to a specific user group in a sort of “newsletter” fashion.
Finally, the last two sections, “My Account” and “Admin”, enable you to personalize both your personal user settings and the global site configuration.
Personalization: Skins and Plugins
The “Templates” tab allows you to preview and switch between previously uploaded themes, as well as edit their files and preview their changes on the fly, as long as the necessary file permissions have been set correctly on your Web server. Here too there are features unique to this CMS: for instance, you can easily create a new template on the fly, both from scratch and by duplicating a previous one. You can also export your themes to your desktop with a single mouse click.
As for downloadable site themes, you can find many free ones from the EE template library, which features themes, gallery and RSS feed templates as well as more specialized additions such as search and control panel themes. All the source code for these improvements is freely available, which means you can easily create your own template and personalize it by copying the code and modifying it as needed.
The “Modules” section is a repository of expansion and extension packs, which you can also activate with a single click. Such modules range from statistics, RSS feeds and comment management to advanced features such as a blogger API and blacklist/whitelist capabilities.
Flexibility is beign publicized as one of the prominent features of Expression Engine, and this CMS certainly lives up to the expectations thanks to its powerful add-on architecture which puts virtually no limit to what this tool can be used for. Some of the plugins include a discussion forum, image gallery, e-commerce site tools, mailing lists and even a wiki.
If you want to get a better idea of what the EE addons can do for you, you can visit the dedicated section of the Expression Engine website, the so-called “Add-On Library”. At the time of writing the available addons are 142: not many when compared to other open source projects, but it has to be said that each and every addon featured in this section includes a complete set of features instead of some isolated ones, which is what often happens with open source plugins and expansions.
Pros and Cons of Expression Engine
While having to pay a fee in order to use a content management system is not something all webmasters would do lightheartedly, the features of Expression Engine make it a great tool, even unique in many aspects. The license for a single website is currently priced at $99 for personal use (sites engaging in personal, non-commercial activities) and $249 for a commercial license.
Included in the price are free updates for a year, after which if you want to keep receiving updates you will have to pay a yearly fee of $19.95 (personal license) or $39.95 (commercial license). You can also upgrade from personal to commercial at any time by paying the difference between the two.
Although the fees are certainly not prohibitive, they do make this CMS worth buying only if you are to build a professional, potentially mid to high traffic website. For this reason, we strongly suggest you either download and install the core version on your server or, even better, make use of the $10 testing fee to try out the platform for a month and see for yourself if Expression Engine could be the right tool for your needs.
Quick and reliable customer support is another point of pride for Expression Engine, which compensates the lack of a vast user community which is typical of open source CMS.
A final note on the future: version 2.0 of the software, initially scheduled for summer 2008, has been slightly posticipated due to technical difficulties. Major changes are going to be reflected in this new version, as a testimony of the great work that is being done behing the scenes. Above, a preview of one of the themes the next admin interface will ship with.
Tags: CMS reviews, Expression Engine, Expression Engine review
Dario Borghino
Dario Borghino is a computer engineering student at Turin's
Polytechnic, Italy. He started writing science and technology related
articles in February 2008 and his articles have appeared on sites such
as ISEdb.COM, eHow and Suite101.com. You can visit his personal Web site here.
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