cmsXperts

In a blog post published just a few days ago Leslie Camacho, EllisLab VP, announced that thanks to the contribution of several sponsors the company will be able to offer three scholarships for its “Southern Fried ExpressionEngine” trainee class.

The class will take place from January 20-23 in San Antonio, Texas and will be lead by Mike Boyink, author of the first ExpressionEngine book and a veteran in the Expression Engine developer community, assisted by AJ Penninga, also a long time member of the EE team.

Further information on the classes is available from the “Train-ee.com” website. To apply for the scholarship, those who are interested only need to send an email to the team detailing in no more than 300 words the reasons why they want to participate. As noted on the website, the scholarship doesn’t cover the travel, and users are invited to choose responsibly whether to apply instead of paying the full price, in order to leave the bonus to those who couldn’t otherwise afford to attend the lessons:

“We encourage those of you who wish to attend the Class and can afford the costs to simply register for the Class. If you are deciding between a second iPhone, a widescreen HD TV, or a new car stereo the Class is still for you, but the Scholarship is not. Please help ensure that the Scholarship goes to someone with a genuine financial need.”

Scholarship applications must be received by 5pm Pacific Time, December 8th, while the recipients will be announced by December 12th. Although the scholarship does not cover transportation or lodging costs, breakfast and lunch are provided and optional evening activies might include food as well.

Interested webmasters and developers can access a page within the Train-ee.com website with many details, pictures, and directions for the hotel where the lessons will take place, along with the full schedule for the lessons that will be held during the four days.

One of the most interesting questions being addressed in the page is about which version of the EE content management system will be featured, since version 2.0 is about to come out and might probably get released before the class starts. The answer: should version 2.0 be released before January 20, the class will be geared on the new software as much as possible. From the Train-ee.com website:

“If EE 2.0 is out in beta form, I’ll work a preview/tour into the class. If EE 2.0 is through beta and has been released, I will try to gear as much of the class towards 2.0 as is humanly possible. Realize, however, that in order for all of the class materials to be ready on time I need to wrap them up roughly 2 weeks before the class, so depending on the birthdate of EE 2.0 there may or may not be time to work it into the course materials.”

Prerequisites for the class include a working knowledge of (X)HTML and CSS, a laptop with MAMP/WAMP configuration and Expression Engine already installed.

Those who won’t be needing the scholarship are invited to register early for the event from this page: the cost of the early registration ticket is $1499, while the price after December 8th will raise to $1895. General information on Expression Engine’s classes is available from here.

A lengthy post on ExpressionEngine’s official blog explains the reason why the much-awaited version 2.0 of the platform, which should bring relevant architectural changes and provide the foundation for several years of development, has been delayed for several months in a row and is currently quite far from being completed.

Derek Jones, Chief Technology Officer for EllisLab, the company behind the ExpressionEngine content management system, wrote a blog post on Friday detailing how the architectural changes required for the next software generation to work as expected are revealing a bit harder than previously thought:

Rewriting all of ExpressionEngine to a new architecture is a time consuming process, there’s just no way around it.  It’s not glamorous work, and we have a very small team of developers who carry many duties in addition to programming ExpressionEngine 2.0.

The development team, however, doesn’t regret taking the hard, but important architectural changes that need to be undertaken in order to provide the foundation for the future of the company’s most well-known software product, even though they admit having underestimated the time that such renovation process would have taken.

Jones then dives into the implementation details and PHP code to provide a better illustration for the migration code: a small, 30 lines long snippet in simple PHP is taken as an example, and we are taken through the migration process from the 1.x to the 2.x architectural changes and how the code needs to be modified in order for everything to conform to the new specifications.

As Jones readily points out, the process won’t add any functionality to the code, but simply migrate it to the new, better platform, the CodeIgniter open source PHP Web application framework. One of the main difficulties, said Jones, is separating models, views and controllers, which under CodeIgniter each solve a different problem and are used in quite an unusual way, forcing programmers to intersperse controllers within the program logic.

The migration process, however, will provide a key feature to the entire codebase: abstraction.

In a recent blog post Derek Jones, Chief Technology Officer for EllisLab, the company behind ExpressionEngine, announced the popular content management system has reached the version number 1.6.5:

With such new features as tighter control over your URLs, better Auto-XHTML typography, advanced control parameters for the weblog entries tag, and an included extension to enable jQuery in your control panel for third party add-ons that utilize it, 1.6.5 brings a lot of goodness to the table.

The latest update is said to be bring both bug fixes and new features, and follows a release cycle for minor updates that usually lasts two to three months: the next update is therefore expected to be released early next year, while the next major update, version 2.0, has been announced for the summer of 2008 and then delayed because of technical issues to an unspecified date.

The changelog contains a full list of new features and bug fixes that are featured into the update. Users are recommended to update to the latest version because of security issues.

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.

On a quick update, the ExpressionEngine Roadshow, the event with the purpose of bringing EE users and developers together in real life, offering training for the newcomers and advanced tips for expert users, is going to take place on Sept. 26th in Vancouver, Canada.

The six-hour event ticket is priced at $50 (with reportedly very few spots left) and will also feature talks from EE developers and project leader. Reported below is the complete event schedule:

This will be the first of such events in the history of this CMS, and hopefully the start of a series of educational encounters for webmasters and EE users/developers that seek to use this feature-rich content management system to its full potential.

As you can see from the schedule, the event is apt to inexperienced webmasters as well as Web developers that want to start creating their own EE extensions.

For those who are planning to stay in the city a bit longer after the meetup, it’s worth noting that the BarCamp Vancouver — an open discussion forum featuring talks by its attendees and intense hands on lab sessions — is happening the next day. The Vancouver International Film Festival is also taking place in that period (Sept 25 - Oct 10).