Rebuild with Expression Engine

Back in tha' day

Aenonfire magazine has undergone a good amount of structural changes since its conception. Having used Wordpress for years and prior to the building of the magazine, I thought that would be the first logical path to take given my experience with it. At the time however, I did take a look at a good number of content management systems out there.

Moveable Type was the first CMS that I used before Wordpress (which is not a CMS, IMHO), and while it did have some nice features, my days with the CMS were largely involved with keeping track of hundreds of templates and rebuilding every single time I made a change. Even though MT has since taken care of the rebuild issue(and is now free to boot), I wasn't very interested in embracing it again.

This is the one! Doh! I guess not...

I did a lot of investigation into different CMS platforms from PHP to Perl to Ruby on Rails. Just when I thought that I might have found something that would work better, it would inevitably not have something that I needed, or on the flip side, have way more than was needed, which seems to be the plague of many systems. Then I came across a book Weblog Solutions co-authored by a friend of mine: Chris J Davis, who oddly enough co-authored the Wordpress chapter and has since moved on to Habari. That book has a chapter about Expression Engine, written by the talented Simon Collison.

Keeping coffee stains off of the book

I had read about Expression Engine before from some of the other great designers like Mark Boulton and Andy Clarke but prior to this I hadn't taken it for a spin, in part because I was looking for open source solutions. Well, Simon does an excellent job in his EE chapter and I ended up reading the whole thing and taking copious notes while in a Starbucks/Barnes & Nobel and couldn't wait to get back home to try it out.

Proceed to check-out

While extremely excited to embrace Expression Engine from what I had just learned about it, I wasn't exactly excited about rebuilding the entire magazine all over again. Thankfully, once I get amped about something I tend to take the bull by the horns (for better or worse) and dig in. There were a lot of eureka moments while reading Simons' chapter and a wealth of inspiration and possibilities that opened up to me because of how powerful Expression Engine is, armed with that I took out the debit card and purchased a commercial license and never looked back.

The Benefits

In short, I am elated to report it only took me 1 month to build the mag back up from scratch using Expression Engine. Expression Engine does so many things that require plugins with Wordpress. But one of the greatest strengths that EE has in my opinion is that it lets you accomplish what you set out to do and does not make a profuse amount of decisions about how you will display your content. EE gives you the info and you decide what you want to do with it. Which, I can see why we as designers eat it up, its flexible enough for us and extensible for programmers.