By: Erik Vlietinck
Wed, March 10, 2004 - 12:29:00

ExpressionEngine’s developer is Rick Ellis, the brains behind the excellent PHP-based blog tool pMachine. Still in a beta version, Ellis’ ExpressionEngine is a more powerful addition to pMachine. ExpressionEngine is positioned as a weblog system, but in reality it is a powerful Content Management System. It could very well do duty as an enterprise CMS, just as it fits the small company or one-man show.

When I covered CMS for Computable a few months ago, I wrote that pMachine could be all even an enterprise could desire. At that time, pMachine had just gained TrackBack functionality, and that by itself was reason enough for me to call it a CMS, albeit one for small organizations.

I didn’t just call it a CMS out of sympathy, but because I followed the definitions given by market analysts such as Gartner Group and Giga Information Group. And so, pMachine got its rightful place among articles on enterprise solutions. There was only one problem with pMachine that I saw at the time: scalability because of the “only” 6 entry fields available.

Scalability certainly is not a problem with ExpressionEngine. ExpressionEngine allows the publisher to create as many entry fields as desired. The only limit is server capacity.
ExpressionEngine is based on PHP and MySQL, just as pMachine, but the system allows for far greater flexibility. For example, ExpressionEngine uses templates that really are just HTML pages. If you can set up a page in DreamWeaver, you can set one up for use in ExpressionEngine. Just replace the text that you anticipate to go in certain areas by the code snippets, parameters, and variables used by ExpressionEngine.

I anticipated a steep migration path from my static webzine to ExpressionEngine’s dynamics. But even the CSS that Tanfa in Scotland developed for me, and which is fairly complicated to enable the site to be read in all known browsers, is used without a glitch.

ExpressionEngine is also far more powerful and flexible in terms of syndication, category management and plain old editing. To me, ExpressionEngine is the Web publisher’s Framemaker: it’s robust, even in this beta version, highly scalable, easy to use, and it supports great design and even greater gimmicks that are mainstream on most sites today.

ExpressionEngine is still in an early beta stage, and so it’s hard to say anything definitive about the system. Rick Ellis has released a list of modules that will be added to the core of ExpressionEngine as it becomes final. The list is pretty impressive to say the least. ExpressionEngine promises to be the CMS tool of choice for the serious web developer and e-commerce user.

Already, as ExpressionEngine’s core modules are in place, the capabilities of the system are simply unique to weblog systems and on par with much more expensive CMSs. For example, the entry fields can be formatted either as input fields, text areas or pop-up menu lists. This allows a publisher to set up a system where extra information about the entry being written can be created using pop-up lists.

Some of the modules that are already available enable publishers to send e-mail announcements to readers or members. One of the promised modules is said to support subscriptions as well as regular e-commerce. A “Mail-a-Friend” module is in its final stage of development, or so it says on the support forums. It will be more powerful and feature-rich than pMachine’s.

The only feature that’s currently lacking in ExpressionEngine, and which could make it a second choice for enterprise CMS usage, is support for check-in/check-out of documents. That is something that could be handled by interaction with the MySQL database that is used for ExpressionEngine’s current versioning system. Versioning is a feature that is common to all professional-use CMSs.

Modules isn’t the only thing that sets ExpressionEngine apart. It is also an open system. Programmed in PHP, it allows people to use PHP code inside tags that hold the dynamically generated content. If you can code in PHP, you can also write plug-ins to further expand and enhance ExpressionEngine’s capabilities. One of the plug-ins already available allows you to use easy to remember characters and shortcuts that later expand into HTML tags, instead of having to manually write the HTML-code.

Not that you absolutely must enter content using HTML-tags. The system can be set to convert carriage returns into HTML breaks, into XHTML paragraphs, or into nothing. The latter allows you to write a page or an article with HTML tags. The choice is available per entry field, meaning you can have one field set to use nothing, while the next one will use XHTML paragraphs. This makes ot possible to have meta tag descriptions for an article (you can check that by opening the Source view in your browser for this article---as soon as you read further on a “more” or “extended” page, I’ve arranged the system to show the description tag).