Ex­pres­sion­En­gine - The CMS for Designers

Since its release in 2002, content man­age­ment system Ex­pres­sion­En­gine (EE) has built a repu­ta­tion as a powerful and flexible tool for website de­vel­op­ment. As the central product of EllisLab, a software de­vel­op­ment en­ter­prise operating out of Oregon, Ex­pres­sion­En­gine has undergone a number of different versions and de­vel­op­ments. It’s currently in its third edition, with version 3.4.2 the latest available for download. So what makes the Ex­pres­sion­En­gine CMS a popular choice among expert de­velopers?

According to its slogan, there’s no content man­age­ment system more flexible and powerful than Ex­pres­sion­En­gine. And the creators at EllisLab might just be right. Their flagship CMS makes use of the PHP scripting language and a MySQL database, licensed under a ‘propriety software license’. This means that the software is available to download, install, and manage on your own server. This software comes in two versions: the full one, known simply as ‘Ex­pres­sion­En­gine’, and a lite one, known as ‘Ex­pres­sion­En­gine Core’. The Core version is free but comes with con­sid­er­ably less features than the full version, and it may only be used for personal use or as the content man­age­ment system for not-for-profit projects. EllisLab also offer a support service that has to be purchased sep­ar­ately from the main software as a monthly sub­scrip­tion, which means that the price can soon rack up. So is Ex­pres­sion­En­gine worth the extra cost? Let’s take a look at some of its features.

One of the main features that EllisLab offers with their Ex­pres­sion­En­gine CMS is a large community and extensive plugins and add-ons. The best source for locating these ex­ten­sions is devot:ee, which has a search function to help you find the plugin you need. Here are a few of our favorite ex­ten­sions available:

• Expresso: since many users complain about the lack of a useable WYSIWYG editor, developer Ben Croker has designed a popular plugin that solves this issue: Expresso. Its focus is on sim­pli­city, as a light­weight editor that won’t break your site. Expresso can be down­loaded for a one-off price of ap­prox­im­ately £15.

• Channel Images: this extension enables you to create stunning photo galleries and add effects or cropping to multiple images at once (unlike on the default in­stall­a­tion, where images must be uploaded, edited, and embedded one at a time). But this add-on comes at a price of ap­prox­im­ately £54.

• Safe Harbor: the most popular tool on Ex­pres­sion­En­gine when it comes to backing up is Safe Harbor. This free-to-download plugin can create backups easily and quickly, to store to either Amazon S3 or FTP.

• FireMail: although there is a built-in email tool for use in the Ex­pres­sion­En­gine standard in­stall­a­tion, FireMail extends your pos­sib­il­it­ies and offers flex­ib­il­ity with its optional cus­tom­iz­a­tion of email libraries. Users can compose emails on a WYSIWYG editor and can also receive in-depth stat­ist­ics about general opening figures, unique opens, clicks, sub­scrip­tions, and more. This extensive email tool isn’t cheap, though; costing a princely sum of ap­prox­im­ately £116.

• Mailing­list Importer: this ad­di­tion­al tool allows you to import mailing lists into your Ex­pres­sion­En­gine site quickly and easily. Mailing­list Importer is free to download and has a restore function in case you change your mind or your import goes wrong.

• Gmaps: this creative plugin solves the problem of embedding Google Maps into your Ex­pres­sion­En­gine CMS site. With Gmaps, you can create map snippets, add location markers, include routes, and more, with all the func­tion­al­ity of the Google Maps APIs. The price for all this is about £30.

• Facebook Tools: the same developer who brought you Gmaps offers another exciting option for any modern website: a Facebook-focused plugin. This extension allows you to add all of the common Facebook plugins to your website, including the famous ‘Like’ button, ‘Comments’, ‘Activity’, and many more. This is a little cheaper than Gmaps, costing ap­prox­im­ately £12.

The community of de­velopers for Ex­pres­sion­En­gine have added a number of useful tools to help you make your EE website fit for search engines. Here’s are three of our fa­vour­ites:

• SEO Lite: this handy tool is by far the most popular SEO extension on Ex­pres­sion­En­gine, receiving an average score of 4.89 stars out of 5. It’s a simple but effective plugin, which adds an SEO tab to your back end pub­lish­ing section and gives you options for meta keywords and a meta de­scrip­tion. It’s free to download and the developer offers remote support to anyone strug­gling with it free of charge.

• SurgeEO: like SEO Lite, SurgeEO handles the usual meta data for any entry. But it offers an extra feature, which allows you to define pages and so add SEO meta data to any ‘page’ on your site, rather than just pre­de­ter­mined entries. This increases your flex­ib­il­ity when im­ple­ment­ing SEO, but it comes at a price: around £15.

• Sitemap Module: this add-on creates an XML sitemap of your EE site auto­mat­ic­ally, and then informs search engine crawlers like GoogleBot whenever you make changes to your site. This means that ad­min­is­trat­ors can always keep Google up to date with changes they make. Sitemap Module is a very useful but quite pricey extension, costing a one-time fee of ap­prox­im­ately £38.

By now, you’ve probably realised that EE doesn’t come par­tic­u­larly cheaply. While the ‘Core’ package is free (you simply have to create an account), it’s also limited. Serious de­velopers will want to invest in the regular package, which costs around £232. If you’re already an Ex­pres­sion­En­gine user and want to upgrade from your current version to version 3, this is cheaper, at a cost of ap­prox­im­ately £116. If you want to add an e-commerce solution to your package, EllisLab offers one developed by the Vector Media Group. It’s called CartThrob and costs an ad­di­tion­al £193 ap­prox­im­ately, but features a real-time payment system, ordering functions, product listing, a donations function, and much more. EllisLab support comes sep­ar­ately and is offered as one of three packages: Silver Support, Gold Support, and Platinum Support. Support aid is offered through the exchange of ‘support tickets’ and ‘urgent tickets’, for immediate, in-depth support. All three packages offer you unlimited support tickets and number of sites covered, with the dif­fer­ence between them demon­strated by the number of urgent tickets per month (1 for Silver, 2 for Gold, unlimited for Platinum), the response time (1 business day for Silver, 4 business hours for Gold, 1 business hour for Platinum), and of course the price: Silver costs around £38 per month, Gold is ap­prox­im­ately £232 per month, and Platinum is around £1550 per month. You can find out more about these packages and purchase your EE + EllisLab Support here. Some examples of sites that use EllisLab’s Ex­pres­sion­En­gine can be found on Siftery’s com­par­is­on site. These include Nike, Apple, and the BBC online site.

As content man­age­ment systems go, Ex­pres­sion­En­gine is certainly on the expensive side. When compared to rivals like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla, the price may seem steep. But EllisLab describe EE as ‘the most powerful and flexible content man­age­ment system’, and with good reason too. The excellent range of add-ons give you scope to kit our your EE website with all the features you need, while the intuitive back end and channel functions make pro­gram­ming easy for first-time users. Ex­pres­sion­En­gine, a support package, and several key add-ons may rack your initial bill up past the 1,000 pound mark and leave you with a monthly support sub­scrip­tion too, but when you look at the results achieved by top brands like Nike, Apple, BBC, and more, it’s tempting to make the in­vest­ment. It’s worth noting too that Ex­pres­sion­En­gine is also ex­cep­tion­ally secure: it’s never had a major security breach in its life. We recommend that you try Ex­pres­sion­En­gine Core to see if it feels right for you, before investing in the full program.