If you would like to read the previous posts in the series:

Start your ExpressionEngines!
ExpressionEngine Day 1
ExpressionEngine Day 2
ExpressionEngine Day 3 – Add-ons

After 4 solid days of working with ExpressionEngine I have switched back to ol’ faithful—ModX. Note this is for the particular project at hand and that I will definitely dive back into EE in the future.

There were a few drawbacks I came across while developing with EE, primarily how pages (entries) are created. Now all of this has the ability to be made better with add-ons but under the time constraints of having to have a full functioning demo in 4 days I was not able to evaluate the add-ons with enough time to have a backup plan. The outcome was switching gears entirely to run with ModX for the project.

The way pages and templates are created and rendered is a little different in EE compared to other systems. With the default install to browse to a page you go to: www.domain.com/template_group/template/. So if you want a page to be  www.domain.com/about-us/biography/ you need to create a template group called “About Us” and a template in it called “biography”. In the biography template you then call the data from the biography channel.

This confused me because if I were to hand this off to the client and say “When you want to create a new page on the site you will need to create a new template and template group then insert the template code and call the Channel that contains that data.” They would fire me. There should not be that much work involved in creating a new page.

This can be fixed with the “Pages” module that comes with EE which gives you the ability to create multiple pages based off of one template which is more along the lines of other systems and is much more usable. There is also an add-on called “Structure” that aids in this fix as well.

One of the other concerns I had was there was no way to generate the navigation dynamically (without use of an add-on). So in development as pages were added, I had to update the nav embedded template.

Now there are add-ons to get around all of the issues I experienced but under the time constraints at hand, there was not time to purchase these and evaluate them to see if they could fix my problems. So I switched to ModX which I new could handle my requirements and is an extremely powerful system.

I am sure they may be ways to get around all of my issues even without add-ons but there is always a learning curve with a new system. I still give props to the ExpressionEngine team as I find what they have done great and believe their community is just going to continue to flourish.

I will revisit ExpressionEngine in the future and I am sure once I build a few sites with it I will see its true full potential.