ExpressionEngine in 15 Minutes

Emily Lewis

NMTC Tech Thursday: CMS Case Studies

Thursday, May 14, 2009

About Me

• Web Designer/Front-end Developer for Pitney Bowes Business Insight
• Develop and maintain public sites, intranet, electronic newsletters and emails for marketing campaigns

Me & ExpressionEngine

• PBBI's main public site, six of our international sites, our user conference site, a client download portal and dozens of micro-sites (single EE installation and control panel)
• A Blog Not Limited
• Freelance sites

What Is ExpressionEngine?

• Commercial CMS tool built on PHP and mySQL by EllisLab
• Free Core version for personal use
• Paid personal ($99) and commercial ($249) licenses
• Hosted 30-day trial version

Why Pay?

• Core CMS (RSS, search, statistics, trackbacks) + more features, including:
  • Basic e-commerce
  • Photo gallery
  • Membership
  • Wiki
  • Tons more
• Professional and responsive technical support
• Comprehensive and solid security (including IP banning, email banning and throttling)
• Thorough documentation

Is $250 Really So Much?

• At PBBI, EE replaced a $5 million custom Vignette CMS with massive maintenance fees
  • Vignette also required IT department for template changes.
  • Web team can now develop more, faster and with fewer costs
  • Our maintenance fees are just $40/month
• For freelancers and small business owners, $99 or $250 is a relatively small amount if a client is spending $1500 upwards on a website
  • With the Multiple Site Manager module ($80), can manage 3 sites from single license and control panel
  • Volume discounts that you can build up over time

What I Love About EE

• A full-featured, flexible CMS, not a blogging tool that you have to tweak to function as a CMS
• Template system offers complete design control (standards & semantics FTW!)
• Large, active community of extension developers: 22 add-on modules and over 100 plugins (steadily increasing)
• Clean, semantic URLs
• Custom fields and you can extend EE's code with PHP (not usually necessary)
• Built-in caching
• Customizable Control Panel

EE In Action: The Control Panel

• User-based home page customization
• Publish, Edit, Templates, Admin, Account Management, Modules

EE In Action: Templates

• Completely customizable
• Group related templates into Template Groups
• Editable directly from Control Panel

EE In Action: Tags

• Generate dynamic content in templates
• Simple syntax: {exp:weblog:entries}content{/exp:weblog:entries}
• Use parameters to further define the dynamic content generated by tags

EE In Action: Custom Fields

• Use the default fields or make your own

EE 2.0

• Built on CodeIgniter Open Source PHP-based framework
• More user-friendly Control Panel design and organization
  • Supports client branding
  • "Accessories" panel for custom client resources
• Improved workflow thanks to AJAX and jQuery
• Create custom fields within the content entry/edit pages
• Dynamic sorting/organization of fields
• Much, much more

Great Resources

• Devot:ee
• EE Insider
• Train-EE
• ExpressionEngine Screencasts
• ExpressionEngine Blog
• ExpressionEngine Showcase

Questions? Comments?

• Email me: emily@ablognotlimited.com
• Follow me on Twitter: @emilylewis
• See me at Webuquerque the first Wednesday of every month (6:30pm) at Uptown Sports Bar and Grill