ExpressionEngine Redux 2011 Edition
A new year, a new look at ExpressionEngine.
A reader of ours left a great comment on a previous article about ExpressionEngine. Here is the full text from the commentor:
So more than a year down the line, does anyone feel we are in a significantly better place with EE? I know you posted a “Thanks” after the initial plea but did the plea to Ellislab have any tangible benefit? Forecast came and went. There was a load of chat on the EL blog about this and that. Lately - ghost town - everywhere.
Reactor? Sure? Free labour though and initially focused on hooks. Hooks equally more add ons and sketchy upgrade paths. Feature Request forum is full to bursting again and I laugh when I see a cheery “No, EE can’t do that, but shall I move it over to the Feature Request forum? That will be a GREAT feature request? Oh yes please. Done :D (sucker).”.
The product is still the same product. We have a better file manager. Not bad for a year.
I feel the EE team are running around patting themselves on the back. People are being promoted from Support Exec, to Manager to Director to VP in a year but nothing is actually happening with the core product. Do I really pay $300+ a license for a small team of people to support everyone else?
Sorry to come across a bit snarky - but damn it annoys me to see something with so much potential driven in the ground from a product point of view even if some politician is using a 5 entry EE site and EE’s userbase is growing. Are they in Hawaii with suitcases of money?
I agree with many of his/her points for appropriate attribution), but this is from outsider observation. I stopped using ExpressionEngine quite some time ago. When they let Leslie Flinger leave, they really lost some of their great visibility/personality they had been building.
I have no stakes in this game anymore. I believe there are better systems/tools these days. Plus, Greg Aker is gone. I do think there are some great lessons to learn here about community and leadership.
What do you think? I’ll ask a fellow Nerdary compatriot, Mark Huot, to chime in as I know he still uses EE.
UPDATE: Greg Aker has written an excellent follow-up.
January, 9th 2012
Comments
Hey Kenny,
I’d love to know which systems/tools you are leaning towards these days.
Michael
Posted at 12:42 PM on January 09, 2012
While I agree with some of the points raised (sorry, Flinger never did it for me) I’d love to hear what the “better systems/tools” you’re referring too.
I do agree that in 2012, with 2 new designers hired, I’m expecting quite a bit more from Ellislab than what they pulled last year.
Posted at 12:48 PM on January 09, 2012
In regards to the tools that I use, I’ll respond to that in a follow-up article. I’ve also asked Jenn and Mark to write one too, so expect those near the end of January.
Posted at 12:52 PM on January 09, 2012
The bulk of my day-to-day work is no longer EE centric and I still think it’s a solid tool but has lagged behind in general core features and general polish.
The product itself has become less stand-alone and many devs require key add-ons such as Matrix, Playa or even Structure before starting a project. Add-ons are nice but feeling that some are required as base is not.
EE has fallen behind in some key areas such as internationalization. EE isn’t a particularly friendly platform to use for multi-lingual sites, which is frustrating given that the EE community is so global.
Little things such as having a solid draft/preview mechanism would go a long way. Making things behave more like editors expect them to, catering to how a site editor things and structuring interactions accordingly.
It feels like the direction of EE has gone in a more technical direction and focuses less on the usability and core purpose of the product which is to manage content. The primary goal of a CMS should be to make it easy for a content manager to create and edit their content. Second should be the technical needs of the developer.
All of this is of course based on my experience with EE and the web in general. I have no knowledge of what EllisLab is planning for EE either in the short or long term. EllisLab likely has many plans and strategies in motion that we have no idea about. I can only say that these things, at least for me, are impacting when I can use or recommend EE.
Posted at 01:45 PM on January 09, 2012
While it’s true there haven’t been any major changes to EE in the last year, enough of the annoying little bugs that kept most of my projects on 1.x have been resolved that I’m finally, slowly, painfully migrating dozens of old clients into 2.x. And in the process wiping out years of wonky workarounds, long complicated bits of PHP rendered unnecessary.
It’s the small details that make this possible. The better file manager, abandoned accordion menus, stable publish layouts, SafeCracker integration. That last 20% that really matters to everyday users. And the quality of commercial add-ons continues to blow me away. Mountee, Membrr, Assets, Better Workflow, CE Cache, Friends, and on and on.
That said, there are too many menus, too many add-ons that correct UI flaws, too much color, far too low information density, poor typography. EE2 is not perfect by any means.
I owe my career to the amazing vision of Rick and Paul. What they’ve unleashed has changed the world, and my world in no small way. It’s time for a new vision and the current leadership knows it. Or hopefully they do. Hiring James Mathias was a really smart move. And the little they’ve shared about future improvements gives me hope for a bright future.
Posted at 01:51 PM on January 09, 2012
Sigh, I really wish these posts would a.) stop or b.) direct the questions and/or ire where they should.
My response is way too long for a comment, so I have posted it here:
http://gregi.am/DBxh
Posted at 02:47 PM on January 09, 2012
I’ve heard this argument over and over from ex-EE users. Many times from developers moving towards Rails or Django.
<flame war>
This reasoning feels like bullshit though. EE isn’t CodeIgniter, it isn’t Rails, it’s never going to be. If you cut your teeth on EE, great. If you learned the MVC paradigm writing EE add-ons, great. If you’ve outgrown EE, great. But don’t put down a publishing system because it’s not a framework.
</flame war>
Too many times people have lumped EllisLab’s community issues in with their development issues and I see those things as two very different problems. Recently I built an EE project 90% out-of-the-box and it was a joy. I didn’t run into any awkward routing issues. I didn’t have any problems with asset URLs. I didn’t encounter any memory issues. If you’re having technical troubles with EE, well then, maybe EE isn’t the right choice for you. Technically, the core of EE has been nothing but solid for me.
From a community side EL is struggling, sure. They lack a clear vision and it shows. From the outside you get the feeling that it’s management by committee over there. One day EE is aimed at developers and profiling is enabled during the install process. The next day the business leads take over and profiling is disabled. If EL wants to fix their community then they need to stop trying to cater to every person (read: stakeholder) and focus on what drives sales.
That’s my 2¢, at least. I’m no business owner and don’t claim to know what goes on at EL day-to-day. Maybe I’m wrong, but this is my impression sitting on this side of the fence.
True. The end is nigh! (No, seriously, where’s Greg!? That dude’s awesome.)
Posted at 03:07 PM on January 09, 2012
tl;dr… just read Greg’s post:
* http://www.gregaker.net/2012/jan/09/dramasigh/
He posted everything I should have said while I was writing my response.
Posted at 03:12 PM on January 09, 2012
Sorry, but i’m with Greg Aker on this.
Posted at 03:19 PM on January 09, 2012
For what it’s worth, I don’t think Santander’s comments are criticizing the developers, and as a developer on a developer blog I certainly wouldn’t make such assumptions. In other words, I don’t think it’s GREG’S POST VS. THIS POST (although that’s lovely). I think they rather compliment each other to point out where the real problem lies.
Posted at 03:21 PM on January 09, 2012
For me, EE is a tool I use to help me grow my business. I save a lot of time (both for me and my clients) by not having to develop custom CMS solutions for each project. Is it what I wish it were? No. Could it be better? Yes. Do I get a vote on this every time I buy a license? Absolutely.
Like it or not, being a customer does not make us shareholders in EL’s business. In my opinion, it has been a bit frustrating for EL to constantly ask people for feedback and *seem* to prioritize it however they want. At the end of the day, though, it is their company. If I went to Apple and told them the iphone screen should be bigger, they’d rather risk losing me as a customer than compromising their process and product to make me happy.
I don’t have anything else to say that hasn’t been said before so I’ll leave it at that.
Posted at 04:21 PM on January 09, 2012
Greg Aker is entitled to feel put upon, I guess, but looking over the changelogs he posted, I noticed 300+ usages of “Fixed a bug” and only 34 usages of “Added…”
So over 300 bugs got fixed. That’s the bare minimum EllisLab’s customers deserve—a stable, usable product without a zillion bugs. In law this is known as the implied warranty of merchantability. You don’t get a cookie or applause for fixing the quality of the defective code you originally shipped.
Posted at 06:04 AM on January 10, 2012
Woah! I think the original comment was designed to emote but agree that it doesn’t seem like it’s targeting the developers as opposed to the ones running the show and telling said developers what to do. With respect the only “drama” appears to be the way Greg has reacted.
I also agree with Brendon that EL cannot hide behind bug fixes or the integration of SafeCracker as meaningful progress. This is not about how hard people work, this seems to be a question of why are there not more developers working on the product. People are just saying what they see and in the absence of any evidence to the contrary I am not sure that’s a bad thing.
While I am disagreeing, I also disagree with the comment about the place the commenter was choosing to voice his or her opinion. Nobody can accuse the EE community, or what’s left of it (cheap shot, I know) of not voicing their concerns directly to EL. There are countless examples in public and in private. But Kenny’s original post on TN got EL’s attention in a way that direct emails to EL or posting on the forum doesn’t. Everyone’s been there, contributed to countless threads on EE.com and done so in a transparent way. Nobody is (or few people are) being that “dick” on the Internet by posting under their real name.
I agree that a lot of people like to second guess EL, or voice their opinions like EL exist purely to appease every niche group, but this latest uprising (if we can call it that) is simply a result of increasing frustration with what is perceived to be a lack of progress on tangible benefits to the product. It’s not a developer witch hunt.
Take [Greg] the frustration that you felt and that motivated you to write a riposte strewn with expletives (which I think reflects badly on EL as a past employee), and compare that with what (I believe) is a genuine desire to see EE and EL succeed and to be frustrated with the leadership at EL. People do not post messages like we’ve seen because they hate a company, but because they believe it can do better and frankly, sending such a note to Les won’t change anything. Sometimes you need to air your dirty laundry to get a response. Like yours. It’s fascinating to read if a little misguided and protective in my opinion. To be fair EL have been preaching about this and that for ages now but nothing really happens. You could take Kenny’s original post, change the examples and it would still hold weight today.
I LOVE EE. I frickin’ love it. But I am not going to stage any EE “love ins” and I’ll call a spade a spade. Nobody’s perfect. A lot of what’s great about EE is the stuff you take for granted but are frequently reminded it’s there but I DO feel that the last 2 years have yielded very little of anything that could cause some (clearly not all) to be confident in choosing it as a platform to move forward on. You’ve not really compared apples to apples in leading with Rails or Django in scoping alternatives - neither are CMS or comparable to EE and nobody is talking about CI from what I can see. EE is great for project x or y especially if you know the limitations and understand it’s many (many) awesome features, but it can be so much better if EL, as you agree, sort out the company direction.
And nobody seems to be attacking any of the EE team for friendliness/being nice guys etc - it’s clear they are but when we are talking about what a business produces how nice a guy might be is irrelevant.
I’m certainly not naive enough to think anything other than the fact that EL are a company who are as concerned with making money as they are about putting out a great product, but as end users dealing with the product day in day out it’s hard see past some of the obvious limitations or lack of innovation or the reliance on third party code. As is always the case in life - celebrating what something can do is never going to be done with as much enthusiasm as voicing frustrations about what something cannot do and continues not to do.
I have to admit I snickered at the reference to the Feature Requests too. The support guys at EE are some of EL’s greatesst assets. It cannot be an easy job, but I know exactly where the frustration is in seeing yet another low hanging fruit sent to die with a smile and a cheer.
Again, this is not about how hard people work, this seems to be a question of why are there not more developers working on the product. EE is massively successful in their own words - where is the money going if not on a dev team to strengthen the core asset? We want a better product and we want EL to be a better company.
Lastly - when EL deliver the “whinging” will stop. But don’t deny a group the freedom to voice their frustrations or attack Kenny for reporting the news. I agree that EE is underpriced if anything - but I’d be happy to pay double for 1.5 x the product,
Posted at 12:31 PM on January 12, 2012
It feels good that there is room for criticism and discussion, and that the EE-web is not only a feel-good-pretend-show. IMO 2011 did a lot for stability from 2.1 to 2.3. That being said, i had higher hopes for UI issues being addressed (James?). Like, in 2011, still only clickety-arrows for sorting categories, (have you ever tried nesting them?) and lacking sorting of fields or even basic sorting entries? (devot-ee add-ons: draggable, disposition). When such basic functionality is offered by add-ins, free from charge, from the community, should ring a bell at Ellislab (dashEE?).
(again) we need some ellislab blogposts, get a feeling where things are going. What’s on the radar. What can we expect?
Posted at 06:28 PM on January 18, 2012
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