Decisions decisions Thursday October 13, 2005

Posted in: Web development

1. Peter J Lambert

   Oct 13, 09:51 AM

   I share your pain, Nathan. I recently started using Textpattern for projects at work (having used it as a blogging tool for a while and really getting to grips with it). We knocked out our first couple of sites using it very successfully, but now we’re on a project that is just on the limit of what I think Textpattern is appropriate for.
   
   I’ve been looking round for other solutions but I really don’t know if I want to introduce yet another CMS into the business, and if I do, which one.

2. Nathan Pitman

   Oct 13, 10:02 AM

   I spent a little more time looking at ExpressionEngine this morning and it really does look very impressive. It has bags of features that come installed by default; Version control, spell checking, image cropping and resizing… the list goes on.
   
   There’s a live demo of the control panel available to play with, it’s certainly worth a look.

3. Drew McLellan

   Oct 13, 10:41 AM

   Colly uses ExpressionEngine for lots of commercial projects and is constantly singing its praises. I’ve never used it myself, but I value Colly’s recommendation.

4. Nathan Pitman

   Oct 13, 10:44 AM

   Perhaps I’ll drop him a line and quiz hime some.
   
   The other option was to resurect ‘gubbins’ in some form but that gives me the shudders. ;)
   
   Boy I really need to format my comment form so that this dialog is a little easier to write in!

5. Ian Brown

   Oct 13, 02:43 PM

   I’ve used Mambo a lot, and it takes a lot of time and effort. It’s very resource heavey also.

6. Nathan Pitman

   Oct 13, 03:53 PM

   Thanks Ian. :)
   
   BTW as of 16:52 GMT looks like your site is down… :?

7. Anton

   Oct 13, 09:21 PM

   I’ve used Mambo before. Although it was powerful, it had some marks that hit me wrong.
   
   * dirty URLs
   * not very web-standards friendly
   * templates are difficult
   * menu system is very cluttered
   
   Drupal solves a couple of these, but still doesn’t make it easy for whoever you expect to take over management of content.

8. Ian Brown

   Oct 13, 09:23 PM

   Thanks for telling me. I have no idea why. I just checked it and it’s fine. I’ve contacted my host.
   
   On topic side, Mambo itself is easy to use, once you get used to the fact that everything is in categories and sections. The organisation is incredibly odd.
   
   There are some rather annoying features as well, for instance, when you’ve created your Section (which is the container for your content) you’ve got to be put a category within the section, then once you’ve done that you can create your content; however, you aren’t able to have a link to an external site within the area of the category. It’s a rather odd, and incredibly annoying feature.
   
   I found Drupal to lack the features that Mambo had, but it was easier to use for someone who was new to that package. Although, I’ve not played with Drupal for a long time.

9. Nathan Pitman

   Oct 13, 09:37 PM

   Now I’m even more convinced that ExpressionEngine is the right option. I just popped back and had another look over the features list, if you haven’t already, try the online demo.

10. Ben Lancaster

    Oct 14, 10:31 AM

    You could give http://drupal.org/ a try, I’ve heard good things but not had any experience myself.

11. Ian Brown

    Oct 14, 03:47 PM

    ExpressionEngine looks really good actually. It wouldn’t work for what my Mambo does, as I use it for a content based website, not as a blogish website. However, for a large blog, small website it looks great.

12. Nathan Pitman

    Oct 14, 03:49 PM

    One of my concerns with EE was that it refers to ‘sections’ as ‘blogs’ but this apparently just the default and changable via admin to ‘sections’. Neat. Apparently there’s also a ‘tagging’ module in the works, Flickr inspired. Mmm… I think I’m in love…

13. Ian Brown

    Oct 14, 05:06 PM

    You’re lucky you can go for it. In Mambo there are limited options with the RSS and even putting in a good newsfeed onto a selected page is more work than it should be.
    
    The way that you can change it from blogs to sections is helpful though. It can be used for two things, the duplicity of it seems great!

14. Andy Beeching

    Oct 17, 12:13 PM

    Don’t go with the current version of Mambo.. there’s been a big split in the community lately, and the entire development team moved away to http://www.joomla.com, which is a better, repackaged version of mambo

15. Nathan Pitman

    Oct 17, 12:29 PM

    Joomla does look pretty interesting, the admin interface isn’t as clean and easy to understand as EE but it does seem to offer a ton of features.