The easiest CMS ever

Author: Dennison Uy

10 May

It’s official. Expression Engine is the easiest CMS ever. For me, at least. I have just implemented Expression Engine to be the backend that will drive the CODESIGN Studios website in under a day. The power and simplicity of EE trumps all other CMS that I have dealt with in the past, and which includes the following:

Expression Engine controlpanel screenshot

Probably the most interesting feature of EE is the combination of its templating and weblog system. Essentially, the template is your front-end HTML, while the weblog is your database back end. The low level setup is where the system derives its flexibility and power. One thing with EE though is its apparent lack of documentation. The online documentation is very minimal and user friendly which makes it advantageous to the end-user, but not so for high level developers. Something that the Drupal API easily overwhelms. But then again, there hardly isn’t any rival to Drupal when it comes to hard core development.

Of course, all of this comes at a price: $99 for personal use or $249.95 for commercial use. Of course, a stripped down, unsupported free version is also available for personal and non-profit users.

In conclusion, I now feel confident enough to be able to ditch Joomla and use Expression Engine as CMS of choice for rapidly developing and deploying small, 5-10 page brochure ware website with forums and a blog. This is assuming of course that the end-user is willing to pay the $250 price tag.

3 Responses for "The easiest CMS ever"

Elpie May 26th, 2008 at 11:03 pm 1
Unfortunately, the Mambo project sites ARE confusing - simply because they cannot be under just one intuitive domain name. By the time the Mambo Foundation was formed in 2005 just about all useful Mambo domains were long gone. When the project became independent of its former corporate sponsor and left mamboserver.com everything was set up under the mambo-foundation.org domain. And that just didn’t work for the project (who ever heard of looking for a CMS under a something-foundation.org site?).

So, the Mambo team embarked on an exercise to use some more descriptive domains and will shortly be pulling them altogether by using a unified template scheme and better navigation. They had to do *something* to increase Mambo’s visibility.

http://mambo-code.org/ is the Mambo code forge. It is the replacement for the old mamboxchange forge and contains the Mambo downloads plus any other Mambo-related open source projects (extensions, templates, etc) that people want to use a forge for.

The Mambo forums will be staying on http://forum.mambo-foundation.org because, after two years, people have got used to where they are. The forge has been up for almost a year now but other sites are soon to be launched under different Mambo domains in the hope that Mambo will become easier to find.

You are not the only one to have thought Mambo was still at mamboserver.com and unfortunately anyone going to that site just sees an out-of-date site and a forum that is almost dead. Not exactly a good recommendation for a CMS that is powering ahead and soon to reach its 8 millionth download!

Thanks for changing the link - I know the team will appreciate it.
Dennison Uy - Graphic Designer May 26th, 2008 at 1:44 pm 2
Link fixed. This is really confusing. What is http://mambo-code.org/ ?
Elpie May 25th, 2008 at 11:26 am 3
I also use EE where a site warrants it - its all about choosing the right tool for the job. The free version is just too limiting for most sites and I wouldn’t recommend that anyone use it (its a nice introduction to what EE can do though).

The only thing about your post I disagree with is the link you have given to Mambo. Mambo is at http://mambo-foundation.org. The link you have provided is to a fan site that has no affiliation at all to the Mambo CMS project.

Would you mind fixing that link please?