Over the past few weeks I’ve been busy with - among other things - launching my very first website built with the powerful content management application Expression Engine. The site - Living Hope Church - is a fully functional site, providing the client with full access to all of the content on the site, the ability to upload images, blog posts, add pages to site sections, calendar events, and even a podcast. Expression Engine’s architecture makes it flexible to provide a user-intuitive experience on the back-end, easily providing markers for separate content areas.
From a programming perspective, EE is much easier to code than Wordpress, which requires you to code natively in php. That said, the learning curve for EE was pretty high, although no more than Wordpress. The upside is that the EE forums are par excellence and I was able to get quick information from the EE community.
The capabilities of the CMS make creating multiple content types, relationships, filters and more very easy. The ability to use mulitple “weblogs” - that is, database tables to store information - and to be able to add custom fields and categories to each, means that the publish page if fully customizable to the needs of the content, not the other way around. This for me, is a huge asset. Before, while using Wordpress, I was forced to bend content around the entry areas. Not so with EE.
That said, I’m not all rosey about EE. My major beef with it so far has to do with typography and the publish area. For client needs, unless they will simply be entering plain text, the textarea for data inputs provide no provision for the client to easily manipulate markup without using HTML tags, which provides for some pretty messy data entry areas, especially when creating unordered lists. Out of the box EE’s only option for clients is to learn bits and pieces of HTML, which in my world of clients isn’t a very good option.
There are extension options. However, the WYSIWYG extensions produce awful code and if a client copies and pastes from Word, they often ruin any consistency in design you might have pined for. I did find an extension which installs Markitup, an excellent jquery plugin which lets you use textile markup, making the process of marking up the content much easier. That said, it’s still a bit buggy and I can’t get it to work on another site I’m building in EE. Ugh.
All in all, I’m sold. At $99 for a non-commercial/personal/non-profit license and $249 for a commercial license it’s a no brainer for its ease of use and customization. As I look onto much more complex jobs, EE astounds me at its ability to perform. As a one-man-design-shop, I find it a very helpful tool in my arsenal.
If you’re interested in learning more about Expression Engine, I would suggest heading over to Michael Boyink’s site Train-EE. He provides some great tutorials for free and some nice screencasts and e-books for purchase.
I found out last week that joshclarkportfolio.com will be included in “The Web Designers Idea Book” by Patrick McNeil. I’m very excited about this, as it’s the first design book I’ve ever had the pleasure of having work included in. Patrick McNeil is the author of Design Meltdown, a website dedicated to web design trends. The books should be out in October and Patrick let me know that my site will be located on page 87! This is very exciting! 
