Making the switch: Textpattern to ExpressionEngine

Textpattern has served us well at nclud for the last two years; it’s a fantastic CMS with some killer features, but it’s got a couple of frustrations as well—commenting on blog posts is a bit convoluted. Extra, unnecessary markup gets added to the database as a result of the baked-in textile formatting. A hard limit of 10 custom fields out of the box is not only incredibly limiting, it makes me question how well the concept of custom fields has been optimized in the system in general. We decided that as a part of our re-align this year we’d look into a new CMS option.

Part 1: Deciding on a CMS

Martin wrote a great post on how to choose the right CMS for clients, and his criteria apply just as well to us as to any client:

1. What kinds of content do you have, and what do you plan to have in the future?
2. Who will be managing the content, and what is their technical experience?
3. How will the CMS be maintained, updated and fixed?

Content

We know what kinds of content we deal with—primarily blog posts, portfolio pieces, team members and everything else, and each one requires its own set of data points.

Management

We’re all at least somewhat tech-savvy here (I hope!) so we don’t need something that is overly simple; but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the simplest solution isn’t the best one. We don’t want to be required to spend a ton of time updating content, and we certainly don’t want to have to test each change before pushing it live to make sure something isn’t going to break or not pick up the proper styling. This ought to be a given, especially when working with clients, but so many CMS products don’t seem to solve for it very well in the way they handle page content.

Maintenance

If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone ask Alex to make a change to the old site because they were afraid to break something, I’d probably retire early. It’s cute when you’re just feeling too lazy to push an update yourself, but what if something went really wrong and the person who built the site wasn’t around to fix it? Do me a favor: go to http://textpattern.com real quick (I’ll wait) and Apple+F for ‘documentation.’ Don’t get me wrong here, textbook is top-notch; among the best CMS documentation sites out there. But it’s hard to find. There’s no link to docs from within the control panel, and while it does come back on page 1 of a search for “textpattern documentation” there’s no description whatsoever of what it is. Wikipedia is doing a better job of directing users to it than the site itself.

So, we’re starting to get a clearer picture here: We can all fill out a form on the web; awesome. We need multiple content types, and updating/adding content shouldn’t require writing a bunch of markup. Decent Excellent documentation is a must. Let’s keep configuration up-front to a minimum, and scalability should be at least a little bit of a consideration, though it will likely never be a huge issue.

What fits that description, Wordpress? While the new interface is BEAUTIFUL (and fast with gears goodness), custom fields are weak at best, and the page module can get unruly. Great for a blog, but not enough for what we want to do. Drupal? way more open-ended of a system than we need, and doesn’t handle custom fields the way we want out of the box. ModX? This actually looks real promising, but their ‘template variables’ implementation--while incredibly cool--doesn’t seem to really account for cases where custom fields *are* the main page content, and sadly I can’t get over the way their site looks. Joomla? Again, not bad, but in this case we need sections to be more granular--I need a CMS to help me build a real website, not a sitemap.

All things considered, ExpressionEngine from EllisLab turned out to be the perfect fit. EE expects that you’ll be using custom fields. It has phenomenal documentation. It has a simple, (ahem) expressive template language, that evokes familiarity with other clean templating systems like smarty or django templates. There’s a plugin/module/extension to do just about everything from site tree management, to customized forms, to actually making your own choice of wysiwyg editors, and everything is granular. The only downside is the cost: $250 for a commercial install. However, in the grand scheme, that’s negligible given the extra time we would have spent making another CMS do what EE does by default.

So, that’s how we arrived at our decision, and likewise much of the reasoning behind why we suggest EE to many of our clients with similar needs. We realize there are thousands of open-source PHP products out there, many of which are quite awesome, but for us, the source-available, commercial EE was the right one. In addition to the three main points above, we also love EllisLab’s approach to problem-solving, their involvement with the community (they’ve got all kinds of fun stuff lined up for SXSW this year), and their commitment to supporting the products they create (though we wish 2.0 would come out already!).

Next: Creating the Site Structure

We’ll take a look into defining sections, determining field groups and some general configuration stuff in EE.