ExpressionEngine: Powerful Content Management System

Many open source Content Management Systems are available in market to download and integrate in your website or blog. The main benefit for using open source application is that they are free of cost. Some of the popular open source CMS available in market are Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal & Mambo. They are quite known to the people. But today you will come to know about ExpressionEngine.

ExpressionEngine is a flexible, feature-rich open source content management system used by thousands of individuals, organizations, and companies to easily manage their websites. It is written in the world’s most popular web scripting language, PHP, and built on the MySQL database server.

ExpressionEngine is intended to be simpler to use than other content management systems. It requires knowledge of PHP, and has extensive online documentation. It is available free as “Core Version” and also available in “Personal” and “Commercial” version. One have to pay only one time fee for Both “Personal” and “Commercial” version. The current Version is 2.0 which was announced for release in “last summer of 2008″. EllisLab (Developer of ExpressionEngine) has stated the new version of Expression Engine, built on the CodeIgniter (an open source web application framework for use in building dynamic web sites with PHP) framework.

Pros of ExpressionEngine :

1. It Provides Excellent security track record and offers other security  features like IP Banning, Email banning and Throttling.
2. It is easily extensible, if one has knowledge of PHP. Also, one can  easily extend ExpressionEngine through Extensions, Plugins and Modules.
3. ExpressionEngine allows you to cache individual templates, queries and optimize your site down to to the EE tag level.
4. Because it’s commercial software, real resources are dedicated to writing quality documentation for ExpressionEngine.
5. It provides Customizable Control Panel in which one can add tabs, remove tabs, add links and write an extension that completely changes functionality. You can also theme it the way you’d like. Tailor the control panel to the project or client. The best part is that in the coming new version of EE, all the customization is supposed to be even easier.
6. In the new version of EE, all add-ons will be written using the PHP framework CodeIgniter. For anyone that has written add-ons using the current API, using CodeIgniter will be a welcome change.
7. Custom form field.
8. It is easy-to-deploy website in EE.
9. Has active forum with a small technical support staff employed by Ellis Lab and a wikipedia that contains useful ExpressionEngine tips and tricks.

Cons of ExpressionEngine:

1. Image upload / organization could definitely have been solved more elegantly.
2. Automatic thumbnails or scaling of images only available using a third party (non-certified) plugin.
3. Some default settings are for bloggers, not professional sites. Most professional users may want to turn off    these functions.
4. There got to be an easier way to loose the index.php in the URLs