I am very exciting to start some work with the commercial CMS ExpressionEngine. This has been a product I have been interested in for some time now mainly because it is built on the open source PHP framework CodeIgniter. I have had learning CI on my to-do list for sometime now and was planning to get around to it in a couple of weeks but seems I will be forced into it sooner then later—thankfully!

ExpressionEngine is a commercial content management system that is built on an open source platform. They claim it is the best of both worlds. They may just be on to something. Having the power of an open source core which will constantly be improving over time combined with a commercial team of developers behind the CMS almost seems like it would be 2x as good as an open source CMS which has one team behind it.

One nice benefit of this commercial CMS is support. Although you pay for a license which will run you between $99.95 -> $299.95 (depending on your needs) you will have the support of the developers who built it. You can’t say this much for something like WordPress. When you have an issue with some custom code wouldn’t it be nice to just contact the person who built it? Well we may just have that opportunity now.

The reason that I am now diving into ExpressionEngine is that I have a client project that is requesting the use of this product. It was one of the proposed options as they desired a commercial product. Now I am getting my hands on a license to do some intensive R & D testing it out and see what it is capable of.

Check out ExpressionEngine.

Please check back soon for a follow up of my experience with ExpressionEngine.