A week or so ago, I had the privilege to work on David Pache‘s website: [dache.ch]. I had to do a few CSS fixes here and because his website was not rendering properly in certain browsers (Internet Explorer) and he also wanted some additions done to his site. He wanted a blog section to be added in which he calls the dacheboard and some other categories for his portfolio.
All seemed pretty good and this was my first time working on Expression Engine [EE]. I had a hard time because I am so use to WordPress and all its glorious simplicity and I stumbled trying to perform the most simple tasks such as adding a new category or working with their own template language system.
While it was pretty interesting, they made everything too hard and I had to learn this new expression language in order to get posts from a certain category and so forth. On the other hand with WordPress; some PHP knowledge is necessary to do what you need to do but that isn’t a problem since that is what I have been using for the past 4 or 5 years.
Another thing that I found to be problematic with EE is that the template system was inside the administration panel and I couldn’t use FTP or dreamweaver in order to make direct edits to the website. There was an option to save the templates as files onto the server but that just gave problems and I ended up getting no where.
On a plus side, EE seems to have its own userbase which is probably as great or even greater than WordPress and they seem to know what they are doing to keep their clients coming back. I can’t complain because its just not my niche to work in and I don’t plan on doing that any time soon. The documentation of their web application seems to be pretty good and I can’t say that I didn’t learn something new.
Also, David has some very nice work in his portfolio and you should check it out some time. His work covers a lot of different areas such as logos and prints and I wish him the best of luck with the success of his career. In case you missed that, its @ dache.ch
– End Rant
I’m currently using EE for the first (and hopefully the last) time. It’s not exactly bad, just not intuitive and I hate, hate, hate having to do everything from inside a browser. It just feels *wrong* on so many levels.
The documentation is pretty good though, even though EE in itself is not intuitive it was well written and I was able to get up and running with a pretty quick learning curve.
I found it quite easy to pick up and found it more robust than wordpress. I use it for all my sites. Once you learn it, setting up a site takes minutes.
Really? I love expression engine, it was super powerful and really easy to use and customize. My only complaint I supposed would be the fact I have to copy and paste my code from dreamweaver into the browser, but that’s really minor.