Tip from Chad Swaney on CMS

August 28, 2008 on 12:39 am | In Uncategorized |

Trying out Expression Engine

I have been thinking about, and wanting to experiment with, some different Content Management Systems, so I can see what is out there, and what I might want to use when I grow up and have my own firm. Based on recommendations from some of my Twitter peeps (@aprilholle and @chuckreynolds, that means you) I took a look at Expression Engine. It is a commercial product that offers a Core version that is free for personal use, and offers several other license options, ranging in price up to $249.95.

I used the tutorials created by Michael Boyink that are based on a typical, real-world scenario: creating an Expression Engine site based on a static HTML/CSS layout that someone else designed.

I will be dividing my review into sections as I progress through building my first test site.

Building the Site

Overall, when creating the site I liked the flexibility and relative modularity of the content, but the nomencature seems kindof stilted. When you slice up your code, you put the code snippets in template files, even though they aren’t templates, but are slices that go into a larger template. Maybe this is just one technique of many that are available, and maybe this is just a result of the fact that the CMS is so modular that there are a lot of approaches to solving the same CMS issues.

I will say that in comparison, EE offers a much cleaner process than creating sliced .php files for Wordpress by hand. I think it is just terminology that will take some getting used to.

Coming Soon
Part 2: Dynamic Content