Posted by TJ on 8/22/2012Tags: ExpressionEngine, LinkedGreenline Creative Uses ExpressionEngine

So what happened? Well, the biggest problem we found with WordPress is that we are designers first, so we NEED to design our clients a website solution that is custom to them. We need to easily be able to make changes without checking to see if our CMS will allow it first. In short, it was driving our solutions, and wasn’t very flexible for us. Our only options seamed to be taking someone else’s theme and hacking it to make it mine, and we’re not about that.

Anyone who has ever heard me complain about WordPress, this is why. I design websites with HTML and CSS. I don’t want to be shoehorned into the WordPress construct, it’s very limiting. And there’s really no concept of separating content. Content in WordPress is all in one big bucket, whereas in ExpressionEngine, you can have as many Channels (buckets) as you want. And the biggest advantage of ExpressionEngine for us designers is there is no concept of themes. At all. This makes it bad for the average Joe who wants to find a theme, install it and start blogging. In that case, yeah, WordPress is the one for Joe. But if you want a CMS that gives you, the designer, complete and total control, ExpressionEngine is the way to go.

In just a few short hours I was building a CMS to apply to my custom design. It was the complete opposite to any of these other CMS’s that I have learned to use previously. It changed what a CMS meant to me, because now I have complete control over the design, how the client will update it, what shows up and when, etc. They like to describe ExpressionEngine as a software to build your own CMS.

One of the things that frustrates me about the paradigm most other CMSes have created can be illustrated by a question I get asked by clients sometimes. It’s something like this: “Will ExpressionEngine do X?” or, “How does ExpressionEngine handle Y?” That paradigm doesn’t really exist in ExpressionEngine. For the most part, ExpressionEngine does what the designer designs it to do.