ExpressionEngine is a content management system from EllisLab in 2002, a successor to pMachine Pro, a blogging system, which is written in object-oriented PHP and uses MySQL for data storage. ExpressionEngine is their flagship Content Delivery Platform.
$299
One Time Fee
Image Relay
Score 9.5 out of 10
N/A
Image Relay Marketing Delivery keeps digital assets and product information in one place with the goal of supporting fast, seamless creation and delivery.
ExpressionEngine is a very powerful and flexible content management system. It can handle a simple small business website all the way to a large corporation's website. If you are a business with multiple websites ExpresionEngine can handle that as well with it's Multiple Site Manager. I think ExpressionEngine would be less appropriate for a global large scale business with a magnitude of sites with different regions and languages.
Image Relay is intelligently designed for any marketer, especially if your products require a library of images and video and especially if you feel like your team could use some quality onboarding to make sure everything is set up right and to make sure your team is equipped to use the software effectively. Specifically speaking, since we have so many products and we're building a bigger direct relationship with customers, it was important that we have an easy way to store and access assets that can represent those products and resonate with potential customers. Image Relay also made it really easy to group assets for sharing with influencers and other marketing partners. Dropbox and Google Drive may have their place and their functionalities that set them apart, so it's important to not look at Image Relay like one of those older document services storage spaces — though those companies could learn a lot from how Image Relay helps marketers enrich their assets and store them smartly.
Content structuring. You can set up channels and fields to hold just about any kind of information imaginable; text, images, videos, numbers, code, etc. You can structure this information any way you want and in any order. You literally create your own information database just the way you want it using a clear, easy online interface.
Template system. Utter freedom. Need I say more?
Exensible. There are a lot of add-ons, extensions, and other external modules that extend the core functionality of ExpressionEngine. Need a user management system? Check out the User module at http://solspace.com.
Enables us to organize a large number of files in an easy-to-use format
Keeps our files safe. Much of the work we do is private until our partners approve of our marketing going public so file security is critical to our operation.
Image Relay makes it easy for our team to track and access a wide range of files - especially photos and contracts.
For me, one of the greatest strengths of ExpressionEngine is also one of their weaknesses. There are so many add-ons available (some free, some not) for ExpressionEngine to allow you to do just about anything you want. However, the more add-ons that you use the more you have to deal with when performing updates. For instance, is the add-on compatible with the new version of ExpressionEngine - or even another add-on? What if that add-on gets abandoned by the developer - is there another that can perform the same functionality?
I think that ExpressionEngine needs to offer more out of the box than it does. Yes, you can get add-ons for just about anything but this adds to the cost. I have a list of add-ons that I use on almost every site which can raise the cost of getting started with a new site by $100-300. So add that to the cost of a license and you're at $400-600 and you haven't even started working on it yet. For instance, I shouldn't have to buy an add-on to allow me to customize the menu for my end-users.
The membership management feature is seriously lacking. Fortunately, there are add-ons (for an additional cost) to allow you to manage things better.
The AI tagging terms are too generic to really be helpful to us.
When we did our initial upload the system couldn't pull in old dates, so everything has a date of the day it was uploaded. It will be a while before searching by "most recent" works properly.
I'm satisfied with the way that my site runs on EE. My primary concern is that support is now a profit center for EE's publisher and so they've consequently gutted their community support boards. However, a good EE community is developing at StackExchange. At this stage, I don't think that EE is a good choice for an individual site owner. WordPress or SquareSpace would be a better choice unless you have a budget for support.
I believe once all of our staff see how efficient Image Relay is in managing our digital assets, there will be no question that the cost vs. value will mandate continued use moving forward. It literally will pay for itself in saved staff time, I believe.
ExpressionEngine is very powerful and flexible. With this flexibility comes a bit of a learning curve. There are some great online resources for getting up to speed with EE, but the control panel can be a bit daunting. A lot of EE's installation process involves settings, configurations and flipping of switches. It is tedious, but well worth it as you ultimately have a very robust, secure and scalable CMS. Also, as of version 2.9.2, the control panel isn't responsive natively. You'll want to have a big enough screen to see the full control panel UI. Personally, I think the control panel would benefit from a major overhaul. It would be nice to see the colors and UI controls "modernized" and be able to more effectively customize the layout. Yes, some of this is built-in, and there are third-party add-ons to help, but maybe we'll see more refinement in future versions.
Image Relay is very straightforward. The experience and interface mimic things were all used to using so it makes it very easy to learn and use. They didn't try to reinvent the wheel by making a fancy tool, they just made something that works and does exactly what you need it to do. They also have an awesome team that is quick to help and answer any questions along the way.
The admin section would slow to a crawl the larger the tag section grew. There were many areas where better pagination would've helped improve performance. Nothing complicated, which made the lag so frustrating
I have personally never found any complications when trying to receive support from EllisLab in regards to ExpressionEngine when using the support plans they offer. I have always been responded to promptly and received satisfactory help with whatever my needs were in an extremely timely manner. This makes rating the support offered an easy job for me
Amazing. We are having a quick call once a week to be sure we are right on track. They answer all our questions right away and if they are missing something they will just find the answer and get back to us as fast as possible. There is no need to look elsewhere!
After installing the system a few times, you can see a pattern of things that have to be done to work the way you want them (settings, paths, etc.). By knowing what you want, you can put together some scripts that prepare the file system for installation, adjust post installation configuration settings, and install initial templates.
ExpressionEngine is vastly more flexible than any other content management system I have used to date and the quality of the add-ons are significantly higher than what you find in other directories. The ExpressionEngine community is also very willing and helpful with if you have any questions or run into any issues.
We were using our in-house storage NAS system and Backup on DVD and hard drive. The issue is that we lost a lot of data by it either crashing or becoming unreadable. And it's very difficult to organize and share data. To share data we were using WeTransfer, but the issue is that the link expired in 7 days.
Maybe it's scale-able from the content user perspective, but it was very limited from the programmers perspective. So many custom hacks were necessary that it reached a point it would be impossible to upgrade to a newer version
Being able to be recognized as a leader within the ExpressionEngine development community has led to us being sought out by those customers seeking expert guidance.
We tend to specialize in using ExpressionEngine for our customers, so it has been easier to ramp new resources up on our development process, as well as be able to seek out independent experts to use as sub contractors or freelancers.
As we have been using ExpressionEngine almost exclusively for a number of years, we have built a reusable repository of proprietary code that makes our development process much more efficient and decreases the effort required for our projects.
Image Relay has only offered positive impacts for me. The search function is great when used properly — our photographers can input tons of metadata that is later used to find certain teams or players within the website.
I don't mind having duplicates in the system as long as they are in places they need to be, but Image Relay does tell you when you've uploaded something multiple times which could be helpful to others.
