I recently got the itch to renew a never-ending project that will keep me up nights and threaten to steal my focus from money-making endeavors; therefore there is a somewhat updated look here at DTH as well as a completely different publishing platform… Don’t get me wrong, I love Expression Engine. I just couldn’t get over the numerous blogging features and addons that WordPress has over EE. For certain projects I would definitely pick EE over WordPress just as I would even choose Joomla over both for many applications. Anyway, recently I’ve developed a few web sites professionally using WP and I think that as far as blogging software is concerned, it is pretty hard to beat.
Seriously though, I have been working on DTH for two reasons: I wanted to fine-tune my recently perfected WordPress expertise, and I’ve been wanting to start writing again, creating personally, etc… I will however admit that a big part of the reason I want to write a blog is so I can rank it in search engines and convert some of you readers to paying customers… There, I said it.
The layout / design is still a work in progress… It has not been fully tested for browser compatibility yet. If you happen to find a bug, or even just want to criticize my poor taste, feel free to contact me. (or leave a comment)
Fri
Sep 18, 2009
4:30 pm
Comment
lebisol:Hi Joshua,
Interesting decision especially that EE 2.0 is getting close to release date. Not looking for “vs” discussion but rather if you would not mind sharing some of Your frustrations that made the WP better suitable.
Personally I always feared security & 3-rd party plug-ins for WP and their longevity. WP is great for writers but somewhat clunky for full blow websites and post-launch development.
Oh, and don’t sweat your layout it is quite nice and refreshing to see something straight forward compared to all over-designed layouts out there. :)
Good luck with this project!
Fri
Sep 18, 2009
8:43 pm
Comment
Joshua Wood:Glad you like it! I am definitely not knocking EE, I’m actually a big fan of EE and looking forward to seeing what’s been done in version 2.0. I haven’t really kept up on its progress as well as I should, I’ll have to stop over there and take a look.
I think WP is a really solid publishing system. The open source community is generally pretty good at keeping things safe and secure in my experience, as long as you use mature extensions from developers that you trust. The way I see it is the more people using it, the bigger the fuss (and effort to fix it) when it breaks.
That being said, I am looking forward to developing my next Expression Engine project. I agree with you completely that EE is the better system when it comes to full featured web sites that need the extra flexibility that EE offers. My biggest complaint with WordPress is that it doesn’t have the CCK that EE has (if there’s something comparable out there, someone please enlighten me).
Really in the case of DTH, I was just in the mood for a change and I wanted to learn WordPress more thoroughly — which I feel I’ve accomplished.
Sun
Nov 1, 2009
2:57 am
Comment
Douglas:I’m considering switching to WordPress too, mainly because (as you mentioned) the blogging features outrun ExpressionEngine completely. I love ExpressionEngine too, I love everything about it – the templates system and overall the simplicity and the closeness to how one would develop a site completely in PHP…
Is WordPress easy to skin? Is the template engine as straight-forward as ExpressionEngine’s?
Oh and I read you were talking about EE2.0 and its release coming up soon. With all due respect, EE2.0 has had a scheduled release the past 1.5 years (although it seems to have a final release-date set now, actually), and I think a lot of people (including me) have waited way too long for it and are getting tired.
Hopefully EE2.0 brings some blogger-friendly features along – otherwise I doubt EE can keep attracting customers other than purely developers and/or consultants. What are your ideas?
Mon
Nov 16, 2009
8:34 pm
Comment
Joshua Wood:Sorry for the late response Douglas, it’s been a busy month. Personally I think WordPress is pretty easy to theme. There is a lot you can do with the template system – they left it pretty open in that regard. The templates are straight PHP which I personally prefer; of course I am a heavy PHP programmer, so it’s possible some of the more non-technical users would prefer a template system that offers its own documented tags.
I think EE can still easily compete with WP, it just may be a slightly more expensive solution (but then again, you get what you pay for).
Sat
Nov 28, 2009
10:10 pm
Comment
Daniel Payne:I have one client using Expression Engine and I cannot wait to replace it. There’s no WYSIWYG editor in EE and the learning curve is steep to customize it and access it’s arcane system of database tables. Previewing pages is not WYSIWYG either.
Direct PHP and MySQL code is much simpler and easier for me to get a job done than what EE offers.