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Great For Novices
Updated February 19, 2016

Great For Novices

Lauren Merka | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

2.5.2

Modules Used

  • Member, Channel, File, Solr

Overall Satisfaction with ExpressionEngine

We used ExpressionEngine to manage the CMS of one of our smaller sites. It was to be used by a team of writers to collaborate on various topics. They needed to be able to upload images and edit in an efficient manner. We needed a quick way to get a site up that had a built in blog tool and user management.
  • The blog tool was decent.
  • Managing users was easy.
  • It was difficult to alter functionality in the admin section. For example, we needed multiple-file uploading and in order to do this the templates had to be directly altered. This direct manipulation of templates makes it hard to upgrade the version without losing custom changes. Same goes for implementing custom file storage.
  • It allowed us to launch a new site very quickly.
  • It was tedious to make changes to functionality that wasn't module/plugin based.
I wasn't in charge of selecting this product. On our other site we have a very robust custom built CMS that's much easier to make changes to.
ExpressionEngine is better for a company that doesn't have a huge user base or any previously existing database/file storage in place. It's better suited for a company more novice than we are.

ExpressionEngine Feature Ratings

6.5
WYSIWYG editor
6
Code quality / cleanliness
5
Admin section
8
Page templates
7
3.0
Content taxonomy
3
SEO support
2
Bulk management
4
Availability / breadth of extensions
1
Community / comment management
5
Platform & Infrastructure ()
Not Rated
10.0
Role-based user permissions
10
CMS programming language or framework ()
Not Rated

Using ExpressionEngine

6 - Content producers.
1 - Must be competent in PHP and reading other people's code.
  • Uploading/creating new articles.
  • Managing existing content.
  • Adding new users to create content.
  • The ability to create your own plugins has been helpful.
  • At this time, there aren't any.
The site we used it for has been put on the back burner and is no longer being updated due to resource constraints and difficulty found using the product.

Evaluating ExpressionEngine and Competitors

  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
Something that we could get up and running fast and had good security for user access.
I wouldn't use this product for another site we wanted to create. Our team is used to being able to request new features and get things exactly how they want. This product was too cumbersome to customize.

ExpressionEngine Support

Not sure what is meant by support. I mainly searched for documentation to attempt to sort any issues out. Mainly trying to figure out how the hell the plug ins and caching worked. I was able to find most things I needed because they were so surface. Other things were more difficult.
ProsCons
None
None
No - I'm a software engineer so I'm used to being able to resolve issues on my own. There should be sufficient documentation that exists to help me troubleshoot any issues we encounter. Premium support is for people without any technical abilities or are too scared to touch a computer. It didn't apply for us.
I don't think I ever turned to EllisLab for support. We needed things to move quickly so usually it's faster for me to try to figure it out myself than submit a ticket and hope that they get around quickly. If it turned out they didn't then I would have wasted time waiting.

Using ExpressionEngine

I'm not sure how to answer this since I'm coming from the perspective of a programmer, and not a content editor. The content team complained about how cumbersome it was to have to upload images one at a time instead of being able to upload multiple images into a blog at once.
ProsCons
Well integrated
Do not like to use
Unnecessarily complex
Difficult to use
Inconsistent
Cumbersome
Lots to learn
  • Adding or removing users.
  • Tag management became a huge issue. The more tags that were added the slower the dashboard ran b/c it was trying to load in EVERYTHING instead of a paginated approach.
  • Modifying the system was next to impossible. It was so cumbersome to use our file management system.

ExpressionEngine Reliability

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.
Never experienced an issue like this with it.
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.