ExpressionEngine, Affordable Comercial CMS
February 19, 2016

ExpressionEngine, Affordable Comercial CMS

Jim Wyse | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with ExpressionEngine

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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Has allowed us to spend money on people, conferences, and education rather than software licenses.
  • Allows quick turn arounds due to its flexibility when requests from marketing roll in at the last minute.
  • There is now a solid, flexible web management system that we can manage, extend, and will continue to serve us for many years to come.
Systems presented to us by our integration partner were comparatively quite expensive, required a different infrastructure than currently in place, as well as different technology skills that were not currently present in house. With ExpressionEngine we were able to have a development platform up and running with in a matter of hours, that was not a demo site presented and managed by the CMS vendor. This allowed us to take a deep dive, quickly, into what we could do with the system and what it could do for us for a very low cost of entry.
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.

ExpressionEngine Feature Ratings

WYSIWYG editor
8
Code quality / cleanliness
10
Admin section
8
Page templates
9
Publishing workflow
8
Form generator
8
Content taxonomy
8
SEO support
8
Bulk management
7
Availability / breadth of extensions
10
Community / comment management
9
API
9
Internationalization / multi-language
8
Role-based user permissions
10

Using ExpressionEngine

Developers, Designers, Content Editors, and Department Managers.
7 - Designers, Developers, SysAdmin, content specialists
  • Marketing
  • Event Promotion
  • Research
  • News
  • Used as a frame work for one off web applications
  • IntraNet
  • 3rd party data integration via API (not really innovative)
  • Extend and incorporate our Identity Manage system for SSO
Aside from being invested in its use, it has not held us back in any way.