i could be brave

Friday, June 17, 2005

Testimonials

Categories: Technology

I’ve been using Expression Engine as the Content Management System (CMS) for this website since it was announced as a public beta in February of 2004.  Beta probably wasn’t the best word for the software since it worked flawlessly for me from the start.  The 1.0 release merely fleshed out the features a little more.

EE (Expression Engine) has a different way of dealing with site construction than anything I had dealt with before.  The flexibilty of the system allows you to put data anywhere you want however you want it.  The actual pages are built on the fly when someone visits your site and can be made up of any number of pages all spliced together.  Want to have a header, navigation menu and footer shared between all of the pages so that a change to one of them is instantly reflected on every page?  Piece of cake.  Want to display different pages text or information to different users?  No problem.  Want to have multiple sources of information (read multiple blogs) all called by the same page?  There are no hoops to jump through you just do it.

EE is not without faults.  But for the price I haven’t found anything that even remotely compares.  The user community is equally great.

I was asked by Rick Ellis, the owner of pMachine, to write a little testimonial for their site.  This is what I sent him.

ExpressionEngine has completely changed how I approach design projects for myself and for my clients that require an affordable CMS.  With EE I am able to run all of my personal sites (even with separate domains) from the same server with multiple data sections all pulling from the same database.  The performance has been great.  As a web designer the flexibility given by the template system, the wealth of tags (with conditional statements), and custom fields allows me to focus on how I want things to look rather than spending time figuring out the compromises I will have to make in order for the design to work with the CMS (a problem I had with previous systems).  All of this power and flexibility does come with a small learning curve.  However, the incredible support and user community makes up for that in spades.  EE is the best investment in CMS software (or any server based software for that matter) I have ever made.

Hopefully that will be please the guys at pMachine.

Posted by Jamie at 04:03 PM