Expression Engine: a CMS for designers.

I first met and start to play with Expression Engine 3 years ago. I was about to launch a great website and I was wondering whether I should build it with it. After some geek talking between me and my partner we decided to turn to WordPress. Just for the record that website was never released. I never regretted I dived into the sea of WordPress, a powerful blog engine which can be used as a CMS as well.

Through the years I ‘ve learned WordPress inside out. I designed my own themes, I even built my own plugins (just for personal use) and I am glad I spent so much time for such a worthy system. When I created this website there was no question about the way it would be fueled: WordPress was my only choice. Drupal, Movable Type, Textpattern and the rest were pretty solid engines but not quite well as WordPress. In the meanwhile I felt there was a debt to Expression Engine.

There came a moment where I said that the next version of this website would be powered by Expression Engine.

Pros and cons

Expression Engine in my mind has two disadvantages:

• It’s not free
• It has a quite steep learning curve

I never really cared about the first one since I knew that if there ‘s something which worths the money, who cares about it? The second thing is not so simple. It requires effort. Anyway.

What makes Expression Engine great is the fact it is made for designers. You can create anything in EE pretty the same way you do it in plain HTML. The famous template system of EE is unbeatable. At the same WordPress makes you feel you need to work all the time in two different modes: the design mode and the development mode. This bothers me. I need to keep my mind clean when I design.

Another attractive characteristic of EE is that it doesn’t focus to blogging. It can be a blog pretty easily but it is better when working for projects such as company websites, small e-shops or websites for conferences. At the same time, I do better SEO work, I can add or remove pages at once and I can have better support by the moment I buy it.

If I had to describe the main differences between Expression Engine and WordPress in a few words I would say that EE is a professional tool optimized for projects you do more often while Wordpress is an excellent blogging platform which can also do more if you need so.