Splash of Style...Macs, Photography, Design, and other Passions

The Content Management Decision

October 2, 2004 by debbie T | Expression Engine

My camping web site is in need of new organization (again!) and the decision for a content management system has been made. This was a process that started with choices of Mamboserver, Typo3, Webgui, Textpattern, and WordPress. It ended with a choice of Expression Engine.

I almost adopted Mamboserver, but it appeared to be a large undertaking to convert to a tableless design. WordPress was almost a contender but it is very new and still buggy. Their help pages and articles are disorganized, and I really need a blog that allows multiples from the same control panel. I already use pMachine to organize the campground reviews, so Expression Engine seemed to be a natural choice.

Expression Engine Pros:

* Date Expiration for commenting (manual setting or by default.) This was a huge plus! Comment spam is a problem and this will be a great help on minimizing the problem.
* Category Management: content groups, individual categories and subcategories. Ability to re-use category groups in other weblogs.
* Fairly easy migration from pMachine and Movable Type, which are the two blogging systems I am running for the site.
* Optional image display for each category.
* User comment notification: system will email comment author when reply is posted. I found it frustrating to reply to a comment posted on my site knowing that the visitor might not be back to view it.
* Search engine friendly urls, and a great safe-guard for duplicate titles. The system will add a # to the url for diversity.
* Yeah, this one sounds silly, but I love the smiley feature. Easy to use too.

There are also many plans to impliment a photo gallery, message forum, and e-commerce modules. These were big selling points in almost choosing Mamboserver.

I still am learning the in’s and out’s of Expression Engine, but so far, I like what I see.

Note: I found lots of help at the CMS Matrix website before making my final decision.

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