PDX Web Innovators

There was really no way to manage the coolness at our April meeting. About 40 people, mostly developers, packed into the ISITE conference room to see three content management systems explained and demoed back-to-back.

All the speakers were well prepared and did a great job representing their platforms. My thanks to them:

• Will Moore and Paul Farning (Wordpress as a CMS)
• Lev Tsypin (Drupal)
• Josh Pyles (Expression Engine)

As PHP user group founder Sam Keen said:

"great turnout at pdxwi and all three demos were solid"

Wordpress

Paul and Will put together a neat example site in lieu of slides that shows some of the ways a non-blog can be made from Wordpress. It was also my first extended look inside WP 2.5. I'm not sure if I was blinded by that new version, or enamoured by the things they did with it, but I was really taken with the possibilities. It always seemed to me that using Wordpress as a CMS was a hack, but Paul and Will pulled off a clean example of it.

For a quick view of their main points, be sure to check out their pros and cons.

At the end, I asked what Wordpress skeptics had been converted by this demo. Not many hands, though someone pointed out that most people in the audience already use Wordpress.

Drupal

Lev started with some great stats about Drupal usage and adoption. In summary: it's growing crazily and is here to stay. Then he gave us some sips from the firehose of options. It seems the best and worst thing about Drupal are all the choices. I know from my experience with this site has been being overwhelmed by all the things that can be administered. On the other hand, all those options mean that just about anything is possible.

Whatever is not possible with the core of Drupal can probably be done with a module that is already available. Lev gave a couple tips for evaluating modules:

1. If it hasn't been updated in a year (you can see most recent changes on the module page on drupal.org), you should probably move on.
2. If there is only a development release, be very skeptical. Sometimes dev versions can be good, but usually it's a sign that the module isn't ready for primetime.

When I asked for Drupal converts, there were a healthy number of hands. I even recognized several as being non-developer types, which surprised me. Maybe because it was the only one that didn't require code of any sort?

Expression Engine

Josh had about a day to prepare his presentation and you wouldn't know it. He gave a nice overview of what is possible with EE and even built a projects section of his website live.

Expression Engine uses template tags, such as {exp:weblog:entries}, to tell which items from the database to output. Josh mentioned that he is a designer and found EE helped him to be able to easily able to create sites.

The only downside, it seems, is that EE costs money: $99 for personal and $249 for commercial licenses. But this comes with a year of updates and phone/email/web support. Plus, they're based in Bend, so that dough stays pretty close to home.

Expression Engine had a number of hands when I asked about converts. Even master-programmer Igal Koshevoy seemed taken with it--especially the part where power is put in the hands of designers, who can do their part without having to know the nitty gritty.

Conclusion

Alas, we didn't name a winner in this platform war, but we did witness an overwhelming amount of coolness. I know I now have three more tools to add to that long list of "stuff to check out more."