ExpressionEngine and I

I had needed to redesign my site and get a blog going for sometime. I have made several sites using Wordpress so this time I wanted to try another CMS. Textpattern was an option but in the end I went with ExpressionEngine which recently seemed to be getting a fair bit of exposure.

By ‘exposure’, I of course mean Twitter.

A couple of years ago when I started looking around for a CMS, I didn’t come across ExpressionEngine (that’s one word by the way), it was Wordpress, MoveableType or Textpattern.

And Wordpress won. I love Wordpress and have used it on several sites. There is always more to learn in Wordpress but with all the buzz around EE, I thought I would jump on the bandwagon and give it a whirl.

Initial thoughts

$100.  A reasonable price and the downloading and installation were easy enough.

"Ugh, what a horrible default page"

The Wordpress default isn’t fantastic but the EE is terrible.  Still, I don’t judge a book by its cover.

The control panel

Again, not promising. I couldn’t help but compare it the Wordpress control panel which is lovely to look at but more importantly,  appears structured and easy to use.

The Admin tab in EE for example, I just find it so unhelpful and I was constantly changing something and forgetting how to get back to it. I still don’t find it particularly friendly.

Publishing

From a client point of view, this is the most important aspect of a CMS. Clients have had no problems using Wordpress. Again, EE doesn’t come close. Yet. There are no heading tags, or list tags to insert or other ‘standard’  formatting buttons. The option to add these is hidden deep within the Admin tab somewhere and is not very friendly.

Tagging

This had me scratching my head. There was/is no built-in function for tagging posts. I couldn’t believe that a CMS that I had paid for didn’t have this out of the box. And to rub it in, I had to then buy the extension!

Don’t get me wrong, this extension does the job very well but I was wondering if I had made a mistake with EE. How could it not have tagging?

Index.php

I completely mucked up my installation a couple of times trying to remove index.php from the url. But this is down to my localhost. I used this extension when I installed EE on a web server.

The only issue this caused was with my stylesheets. This is the code I originally had:

<link  rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen"  href="http://www.tomleadbetter.co.uk/?css=styles/layout" />

<link  rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen"  href="http://www.tomleadbetter.co.uk/?css=styles/typography" />

But after removing the index.php, the links rendered incorrectly, with a question mark in the URL throwing the whole thing goofy.  But this wasn’t and isn’t a huge concern of mine as I can just upload the CSS files in the usual way, which I actually prefer.

One thing I want

In the address for this page and all my blog pages, I have the word ‘entry’. I don’t want this. This is a template issue I’m having because I’ve seen some EE sites that don’t have that issue. Here’s my code on the blog index page in case any kind soul out there wants to help (I’ve had to change the bracket types because otherwise the page fails to load…):

<div  id="entry">

  <h1>Blog(exp:weblog:category_heading  weblog="(my_weblog)"):  (category_name)(/exp:weblog:category_heading)</h1>

  (exp:weblog:entries  weblog="(my_weblog)" orderby="date" sort="desc"  limit="15" disable="member_data|trackbacks")

  <h2  class="title"><a  href="(title_permalink=(my_template_group)/entry)">(title)</a></h2>

  (summary)

  <p  class="post-info">Posted by (author) on (entry_date  format="%D, %F %d, %Y") (if comment_total == 1)<span><a  href="(url_title_path="blog/entry/")#comments">1  comment</a></span>(/if)(if comment_total > 1)<span><a  href="(url_title_path="blog/entry/")#comments">(comment_total)  comments</a></span>(/if)</p>

  (/exp:weblog:entries)

I suppose I need an if statement? Or rewrite the URL to remove ‘entry’ ?

Anyway…..

I just need one plugin

Wordpress has an endless amount of plugins and whilst there is a good amount of plugins/extensions for EE, the one that isn’t available is one for Flickr. There is one that pulls in images from Flickr groups but that is no good. So I am using javascript to pull the images in. Little things like that annoy me.

Negative?

Well that all sounded rather negative didn’t it? Well it isn’t all bad, there are plenty of things I do like about EE, which I’ll blog about soon.

I’m sure most of the negative things will be cancelled out when ExpressionEngine 2 comes out, which will be very soon hopefully!

• Category
  • Coding