ExpressionEngine vs. Plone

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.

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The larger your organization, the more appropriate Plone will be. This is not to say that Plone is a worse choice for small websites, only that the minimum investment for a Plone site is certainly higher than for other platforms. If you already use Plone for your site and are looking for a redesign or an overhaul, I would only advise switching to a different platform such as WordPress or Drupal if your organization is downsizing. For any other situation, Plone is the natural choice for your growth.

• 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.

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• Plone is a folder-based system, organising content in a similar way desktop-users are doing for the last two decades. No need to teach non-tech customers some relational-database like paradigm for content management.
• Plone is secure. It is the most secure CMS you can get your hands on.
• Plone is flexible, and makes fast development easy.

• 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.

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• Not everything is configurable or editable by Plone, and when you need to adjust or add custom pieces in, you need to deal with Zope. Zope has an ugly, confusing and difficult UI and structure as a backend.
• Using 3rd party products is difficult to do - there are a few different ways to get them installed, all of which take a bit of luck to get right.
• Building custom products for Plone is not fun. You've got to deal with an archaic framework to tie in that is not well documented (there is documentation about many things, but not great documentation and there are a lot of holes in the documentation).

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.

We have critical systems running on Plone so will need it in the future.

Free to use since its Open source, so we don't have to worry about licence costs.

We know how to use and develop Plone and it has no limits.

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.

Compared to the amount of Plone sites, users and customizations we have in our organization, the amount of support requests and training needed is really small.

The new user interface in Plone 6 is even better, it is super fast, has lots of different blocks for enhancing the page, has flexible layout system and is easy to extend with more features.

Never experienced an issue like this with it

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Our Plone sites are very robust. We have critical systems on Plone and we have been running sites on Plone for over 20 years with very little unexpected downtime.

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

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Plone is very intensive in its operations, and if not configured well it can be slow. However it is designed and built with speed in mind and with proper use of coding, templates and caching can perform extremely well under high loads. It is capable of scaling to very high load availability environments with no specific coding requirements.

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

There are not too many Plone companies in the world. But the ones who are, are high level professionals

I have been participating Plone training and the trainers have always been professional. Materials were good and the instructions clear

Well organized, professional training with good materials and instructions

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.

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Drupal: Plone is cheaper, so with Drupal is more complex to reach the required ROI. However, Drupal has a lower learning curve WordPress: For our necessities it has a more expensive learning curve than plone. Joomla, is easier to use. However, it have some issues on security and web content where Plone is much better

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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

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Plone has no limits. We have massive sites and can run them just fine

• 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.

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• The impact Plone has had at the University of Oshkosh is as follows: this software allows student workers to learn about IT departments and CMS's in a user-friendly way. It gives many students great jobs that look great on their resumes.
• Since there are great training manuals for Plone, there is increased employee efficient in the workplace. Training doesn't take long, and if there's ever a question, the Plone manual is a great tool to refer to.
• If an employee using Plone quits, its easy to find someone to replace them with quick training and great resources.