Adam DiCarlo's Blog

Not too long after my recent unease when trying Expression Engine, I got called on to code a redesign of an Expression Engine site for a client.

The original site was very well-coded; good markup, good uses of CSS. While I still don’t find EE to be much of a user’s CMS (and nowhere near as general-purpose as Drupal), making CSS and HTML changes was very straightforward. (I used FTP to upload the new images and to update one CSS file which, oddly, wasn’t controlled by EE…)

I thought of EE as an HTML/CSS management system before; I can see it really is. It’s a good way to be able to edit all the HTML that goes into each section of your pages without having to write PHP. So it’s probably great for designers used to making HTML-based sites who hate having duplicated HTML in every file.

There is a trade-off, though. You’ve got to use EE’s templating syntax to do any logic necessary in your HTML partials. It might be worth learning, though, for those wanting to avoid PHP at all costs.