Which Web CMS suits you best: ExpressionEngine 2.0, Joomla, Drupal, or WordPress?

ExpressionEngine’s developer EllisLab has released the public beta of ExpressionEngine 2.0 after one and a half years of development. The result is proof of this developer’s capabilities on the PHP scripting front. But is the resulting CMS any better than Drupal, Joomla, or WordPress — or ExpressionEngine 1.6.x for that matter? And when are Drupal and Joomla better than WordPress?

ExpressionEngine 1.6.x has several strengths that make it a Web CMS of choice for a large group of users:

It’s modular – Modules make it possible to turn on or off specific functionality to enable more smooth operation.
It has a plug-in architecture – Third parties can add features to the system.
It has an Image Gallery – The Image Gallery may be used as a (very light-weight) DAM system.
It is based on templates – ExpressionEngine’s templating system is the most flexible, powerful, and easy-to-use in the market.
Its content code is easy to understand – After a short (and not too steep) learning curve, the content code is almost self-explanatory.

ExpressionEngine 1.6.x also has several disadvantages:

It’s not free – Personally, I don’t believe this really is a disadvantage, but combined with the second item it may prove a show stopper to many potential users.
There’s no organised (paid) support available – Basically, there are a half a dozen support engineers and a very active, large forum community whose members help each other. When a support question is deemed answered, it becomes an item in a knowledge base. Beyond that, you’re on your own.
If you need to integrate ExpressionEngine with anything outside ExpressionEngine, you’re on your own – This includes Javascript, Flash, video, etc.
Weak search technology – ExpressionEngine’s search engine is not up to standards, and it is almost impossible to improve it without serious programming.
A File Manager that is almost useless – ExpressionEngine’s File Manager is also not up to standards, and it is impossible to improve it.

About a week ago, ExpressionEngine 2.0 public beta was released. Everything that I said about version 1.6.x remains true except for the Gallery, which has been removed. A new module to integrate with jQuery Javascript has been added.

The main reason to upgrade to ExpressionEngine 2.0 would be:

The nicely designed Control Panel.
The code foundation that has been changed from vanilla PHP to CodeIgniter.
A File Manager that is up to the task.
Easier integration of jQuery scripts.

Lacking are ways to manage video, audio and images easily. Personally, I have been a fan of ExpressionEngine because from the first day it saw light the developers promised to upgrade the system with new features such as a full-scale e-commerce module, more powerful search technologies, etc. Few of these promises have made it into any version. After over a year waiting for the new major version, I cannot see any advance except in the area of programming or scripting PHP.

That’s my main criticism with regards to ExpressionEngine 2.0: it’s thrilling for programmers, but offers nothing to end-users who want to effortlessly run a weblog or an online magazine.

Everything, of course, boils down to the question which Web CMS you prefer. Do you want one that is flexible, powerful and extensible by end-users? If that is the case, WordPress may be all you need. Over the course of the one and a half years EllisLab took to migrate ExpressionEngine’s code base to its beloved CodeIgniter, WordPress has evolved from a free, open source blogging software to a free full-scale Web CMS.

WordPress has had a nicely designed Control Panel and a good File Manager for about a year and now also a multi-site management system (WordPress Mu), but in essence the system has remained faithful to its original concept: to be an easy-to-use CMS. WordPress has a very large community of open source developers who program plug-ins that extend the basic functionality to incorporate much anything you can think of.

Is Twitter integration of importance to you? Soon after Twitter’s API became available, the WordPress users already had a choice of plug-ins to use, while ExpressionEngine, Drupal and Joomla users were debating how to put the Twitter API to best use. That’s an approach that can result in a better solution, but it can also result in endless debate with little developing going on.

WordPress’ template design may not be as easy to customise as ExpressionEngine’s, but if you make an effort and go through their documentation, it’s almost as easy –and it certainly beats customising design with Drupal or Joomla.

For large corporate users, neither ExpressionEngine nor WordPress may scale enough to accommodate corporate environments. For these users, Drupal and Joomla are good Web CMSes. Both have won awards for coding excellence and for usability. And both are open source and free.

For Drupal even more than for Joomla, you must have good programming skills to get something out of the system and be able to customise it. Joomla is a tad easier with regards to template design, but in reality you’ll have to really study the (huge set of) documentation of both systems to get to grasps with them. If you just want to add some textual content on a regular basis, you’ll be off in no time, but even styling images flowing with text may prove to be challenging.

Drupal and Joomla are also the free open source Web CMSes of choice for publishing system vendors to integrate with. It allows them to quickly develop Web content workflows off an initial print workflow, and call the whole thing a crossmedia publishing solution.

For end-users Drupal and Joomla are less suitable because of their steep learning curve.