Alfresco as a company seems to be convinced of the value of the open source (free) business model for enterprise-class document management and content management. The result of this is that you and I can download Alfresco’s CMS for free, right from their web site. But when you do, you will soon discover the Alfresco CMS is so complicated to install and maintain, you’d better have a dedicated programmer / IT staff in the house who can spend some time with setting up the system and keep it running.

True: Alfresco’s CMS is based on a robust document management system, and therefore it is not often used by small businesses. The Alfresco marketing director shared with me his thoughts on his market: the Fortune 1000, and that says enough. Everything below that is not really Alfresco’s target. But what should the companies below use, then? All too often they are using “solutions” bolted together using Adobe Creative Suite and some custom programming. It can be much more efficient and much less expensive. Enter ExpressionEngine 2.0.

I asked the people at EllisLab, the developers of ExpressionEngine, if they would mind answering ten questions that I had. They didn’t. EllisLab started out as “Rick Ellis”. Before starting EllisLab, Rick Ellis was a musician, audio engineer and sound designer in Los Angeles, working on feature films, television, and interactive projects. Rick’s specialty was computer-based audio, which would later serve as natural segue into computer programming.

When the web emerged in the mid 90’s he fell in love with the new medium and immediately immersed himself in it. Soon he was building sites for himself, then for others, as his hobby grew into a web development business. In 2001, while in Japan mixing some shows for Disney, he began developing a blogging application for his client’s use. When he returned from Japan he had a working prototype, which he installed at Nancy Sinatra’s (daughter of Frank Sinatra) website, one of his web clients at the time. She loved it, and Rick decided to call his program “pMachine” (Publishing Machine) and make it available to the public.

In 2002 pMachine was released. Within a few months it was featured in major magazines like Mac World and Mac Addict, and in a book about Blogging published by McGraw/Hill. Excited by the success his program was enjoying, Rick took a leap a faith and quit his audio career to focus on software full-time. Within six month he would hire his first employee.

In 2004 the small company released their next-generation publishing system, ExpressionEngine. In 2006 CodeIgniter was released. CI is a web application development platform for PHP developers. And now, in or before the summer of 2008, ExpressionEngine 2 will see the light of day. ExpressionEngine 2 is a full-scale CMS, it’s not free, but it is easy to maintain and to obtain support you don’t have to buy yourself a ticket into the Fortune 1000 club first. Support is almost instantaneous and always to-the-point.

And while ExpressionEngine 1.x was still a hybrid between a blogging application and a CMS, ExpressionEngine 2 really is a CMS that can be integrated with other publishing channel solutions.

ExpressionEngine’s Kurt Deutscher answered my questions. The first one that I asked was whether ExpressionEngine 2 could compete with Aflresco, but Kurt declined to answer that one. “We never compare EE to other systems. Instead we help people evaluate whether EE is right for a specific project. We simply do not engage in “feature wars” or discussions of this system versus that system because that’s a really bad way to decide on a CMS. Its always best to understand why you need a CMS in the first place and then take a look at solutions that have the top features you need,” he said.

My second question got a more elaborate answer. Most small to medium-sized publishers will want to have a system that integrates --for example through XML-- with QuarkXPress or InDesign.

ExpressionEngine Has XML Support

According to Deutscher, most people use a CMS so that they can enter content directly through a web browser. That may well be true for bloggers and individual web publishers like myself, but most publishing companies will want the integration with whatever program their editors use before the content gets poured first into their layout application. Nevertheless, ExpressionEngine 2 will support direct content entering as its primary method.

“We do our best to make other options viable such as the various “blog editors” and supporting popular APIs like the MetaweblogAPI that make other forms of content entry possible,” said Deutscher. “None of us are experts in QuarkXPress or InDesign so we’re not qualified to speak specifically about those products.”

Nevertheless, he passed this question on to ExpressionEngine’s CTO Derek Jones and he had these insights: “ExpressionEngine 1.5.0, released in August of 2006, added tools to help facilitate the migration of XML-based data into EE, but requires good understanding of EE’s database schema. EE 2.0 will continue to improve on those tools to simplify third party developer’s work in this regard.”

Jones adds that supporting specific XML formats output by any application will still require developmental knowledge, as ExpressionEngine cannot possibly natively support every application’s proprietary XML formats, nor make assumptions about how each data point would translate to ExpressionEngine’s metadata and custom fields.

Derek Jones not Kurt Deutscher may be aware of this, but this places ExpressionEngine 2 on exactly the same level (in terms of XML support) as Alfresco and other XML capable CMS’s that are way more expensive and dedicated to enterprise-class publishing. Perhaps it’s good to also note that the primary method of entering content into ExpressionEngine 2 --the direct editing in the web browser-- is what most cross-media publishers want these days. It offers them the capability to have freelancers or travelling journalists enter their articles into the CMS directly.