ExpressionEngine, Affordable Comercial CMS
Rating: 10 out of 10
IncentivizedUse Cases and Deployment Scope
We use ExpressionEngine as our enterprise CMS solution for the entire university. We host over 10,000 pages, support over 75 departments, train and manage over 200 editors, and serve over 4 million page views per week. After evaluating many commercial CMS solutions, ExpressionEngine was selected for several reasons. First, it was far more affordable than other choices presented to us. Second, our in house skill set was in php development in a LAMP stack environment. Third, it is easily extensible, allowing us to develop custom solutions in house and not be reliant on only solutions provided by the vendor. Out of the box, ExpressionEngine is extremely flexible in regards of how you decide to display cont in the presentation layer.
ExpressionEngine's affordability and flexibility have allowed us to continually enhance our web presence and use the system to build several stand alone web applications.
ExpressionEngine's affordability and flexibility have allowed us to continually enhance our web presence and use the system to build several stand alone web applications.
Pros
- Extremely flexible and extensible
- Fabulous user and developer community on Twitter, Facebook and Slack Chat.
- Wide range of third party add-ons that solve many challenges. Ranging from calendars to special field types.
- Cost of entry is extremely affordable compared to other commercial solutions.
- Runs on any LAMP server setup. Though, larger installations will require something with more horsepower. We run on a load balanced, 3 server setup.
Cons
- Running Local, Staging, and Production environments takes a bit of work.
- The Control Panel set up and theme are not great. We usually swap out the theme. Though once you become familiar and set up quick links, it becomes much easier to use.
- It can be a little resource heavy on large, high traffic sites without some additional caching.
Likelihood to Recommend
It functions well for a small blog, a catalog site, or a large high traffic site. Some notable sites are Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Garmin, and Pizza Hut.
