I explored the system a little, and was sufficiently impressed to hire a guy to replicate a site of mine in MODx, which he was able to do for a very modest fee – reinforcing the view that transforming a static site into a cms site was easily done. But I haven’t spend any time on the mechanics of the system since then. Until now.

The things that seems to distinguish MODx from other systems are that (like ExpressionEngine) it is extremely flexible – you could say it is more of a framework than a CMS – and that it starts from the notion of a tree structure of pages. Most commercial sites work in this way, rather than assuming that most pages form part of many-paged blogs. MODx seems to have built a solid reputation among people who make their living building commercial sites, and there are quite a few development agencies who advertise their use of MODx.

It’s disconcerting that MODx is (start of 2009) at version 0.9.6.3, but this seems to be a curious affectation of those steering the project rather than an indication that the system is not ready for use. Real Soon Now they plan to release (apparently at much the same time) v1 of the original system and a completely rewritten v2.

I now plan to get to grips with the MODx site that I had built in 2007, and to develop another in a more magazine-style layout, and see how I get on.

I’m particularly interested by the concept touched on here at sottwell.com, the site of a MODx user and supporter:

“You simply use the HTML code for the look you want, as in any flat HTML file, then replace content text and dynamic data (such as menus) with simple tags. Each document is processed to replace those tags within the HTML template with material relevant to that page as the page is requested. The advantage to the PHP programmer who wants to develop custom dynamic content is the separation of the presentation from the layout using simple tags to include the final return value of your code”

This would seem to mean that a PHP system to generate output from my ski resorts database could inject that output into a MODx page without difficulty.

Most of the content on a WP site takes the form of short “articles” called posts. Unless you organise things differently, the site displays the most recent post first, and the rest in reverse chrono order. But you can display sets of posts by making use of categories and tags.

Categories provide a hierarchical system for filing your posts – that is, a category can be a sub-division of a parent category. In this site, at first, I do not have a hierarchy – just a category for each CMS I am reviewing. A post can be in multiple categories – as indeed many of my posts are. Tags seem to be very similar to categories, except that they do not have a hierarchy – they are all on the same level.

Smooth install, elegant initial result. Good to find that you automatically get a simple nav system based on site sections.

In the course of visiting the txp site I came upon a link to the review now included in the margin, and it’s worth briefly summarizing the views of Mike@Capsize, when choosing a CMS for a client small business site:

Drupal: overkill for many sites; theming system difficult to get to grips with.

ExpressionEngine: great, but the client didn’t want to pay.

SilverStripe: promising – abandoned tests because of problems originating in host company’s PHP configuration.

WordPress: blogging orientation means it was not a natural choice.

Textpattern: the perfect solution, combining simplicity with flexibility. In a bit more detail:

Installation is a breeze, the admin section is laid out well, it had everything we need and nothing we didn’t.  The templating system just makes sense, and the page building section includes a little tag builder so you don’t have to remember what the tag for the header of a blog entry is (or whatever it is you’re trying to output).

As in ExpressionEngine, all content can be stored in the form of blog-style articles whether destined for publication in a blog-style page or a static page - so clients can be kept away from html pages.

It has a cool little visitor log that keeps track of who visits, when they came, and where they were referred from. This apart,  txp is a basic CMS. There’s no forum, no photo gallery, no ecommerce solution, none of that. But there are plenty of plugins. A minor irritant is that you have to deal with one confusing concept: “forms” in Textpattern are little bits of code to use wherever you want. Forms could definitely use a new name (Snippets, perhaps?).

Installable

Elgg is big in the UK.

Hosted

Ning looks like the main player, with Marc “Netscape” Andreessen (sp?) behind it. I’ve created a site for sailors to play with.

The feature’s findings can be summarised thus:

• Wordpress 2.2: easy to install, manage and update; considerable flexibility if you use add-ons from vibrant community
• CMS Made Simple 1.1: easy to manage, easily understood data tag system; good docs; small community
• Quick.CMS: flat-file, no database; structured site approach rather than blog-based; no “theme” concept; several versions, one free
• ExpressionEngine 1.6: thorough docs and good support; multiple custom fields and “weblogs” (data tables); almost limitless flexibility; versioning system for templates; built-in image gallery and ecommerce; add-ons include powerful forum and multisite manager; good security; small community because of non-trivial price
• Drupal 5.2: reputed to be powerful but challenging; content housed in “nodes” - not an easy concept; multisite capable; six themes built-in (I get the impression that the author didn’t become very familiar with this system); from feature conclusions: the most powerful and extensible, but the most complicated to use
• Joomla 1.0.11: huge install bundle (11MB); smooth install; good-looking control panel; many modules, including add-on user-created one; few users will stretch its capabilities
• e107 0.7.8: poor docs but good wiki; rough control panel; extra modules few but powerful, eg forums, basic ecommerce, banner management; page development requires fair understanding of PHP
• Movable Type 4: works with several databases, including Oracle; very user-friendly control panel; unlimited blogs; neat file manager; highly customisable; “doesn’t offer the same powerful custom fields as some systems”; easy to create static pages.

Conclusions

“If you want a CMS up and running over a weekend, it’s hard to see beyond WordPress.”

“If we were to pick the ideal CMS for commercial use, we’d have to plump for ExpressionEngine.” Two critical advantages: excellent support and near-limitless flexibility.

Interestingly, these seem likely to be my own conclusions, too.

1. Get over the term “weblog.” In EE, a weblog is a container used to store information and organize your data. Don’t be afraid to make lots of weblogs for a single site. You can change your preferences to call it something else (like “section”), but the template tags will still call them weblogs, so you may find it easier to just adjust your thinking. (Note: Rumor has it this term is being dropped in the upgrade to 2.0, so in a few months you won’t have to worry about this!)
2. Start thinking in smaller chunks. In ExpressionEngine, it’s much easier to break your pages up into structured pieces of content (title, thumbnail image, summary, body content, etc) using custom fields. You can create custom fields in WordPress, but it ain’t easy and it often feels like you’re doing backflips to cobble together complex pages. In EE, you can make as many custom fields (bundled into “field groups”) as you want. The level of control you have is amazing, and it doesn’t require extra downloads or add-ons. Which leads me to #3…
3. Say goodbye to crappy plugins. If you want to do anything fancy with WordPress, it requires a plugin. Which is no big deal; downloading and installing one takes all of a minute or two. BUT, you have to sort through a lot of garbage to find a plugin that works and is not in perpetual “beta.” Because WordPress is open source, programmers everywhere are writing their own plugins for it. Some of them are awesome. Lots of them aren’t. EE has much more out-of-the-box functionality.
4. Finalize your design before moving it into the system. My original xHTML/CSS templates and the templates I ended up with in WordPress usually weren’t all that different, so modifying them outside of the editor and then copying/pasting them in wasn’t a big deal. In EE, my original templates got chopped up into small chunks right off the bat. This made big design changes overly confusing. Next time around I’ll spend more time working out design details before I move the display templates into EE.
5. Expect to spend a while finding things in the control panel. It seems unnecessarily convoluted. It took me a while to find things and memorize the patterns. Create a weblog, then create a field group with custom fields, then assign that field group to a weblog, then make a post in the weblog…. yikes. It felt like a lot of steps. I know it’s partially because you have such fine grain control over things, but I’m sure the interface could be simplified so everything wasn’t five clicks away. Saving graces: you can use the back button, and you can open multiple tabs to work on things. I often keep my stylesheet template in one tab and another template (like a page template) in a separate tab so I don’t have to navigate back and forth quite so much. It appears the upcoming ExpressionEngine 2.0 upgrade will be a huge improvement, so I can muddle through until then.
6. Say goodbye to PHP tag soup. My EE templates look so pretty and streamlined compared to my WordPress templates!  With so many built-in functions, there’s just a lot less code to look at. All I have to say is, HOORAY. I’m obsessive compulsive by nature, so a few lines of clean code makes me much less anxious.

Shifting my thinking (and learning a CMS new system) was well worth the effort. I have found EE to be much more powerful than WordPress, and not nearly as hacky.

A few sites I found especially helpful:

• Veerle’s EE Posts
• How to make a “cheat sheet” listing your various element names
• The official Expression Engine wiki
• Boyink!’s “Building an ExpressionEngine Site” series
• Doug’s posts on Building Viget.com in EE - Part 1 and Part 2

What EE Can Do That MT Can’t

EE has built-in mailing lists, a full wiki module, direct database query capability, and a photo gallery that’s able to do some really nice batch processing, rotating, cropping, and organizing. It has user-notifications of comments, email-a-friend tools and a much more sophisticated search tool than MT.

I love EE’s entry and template versioning — try something and roll back when it (inevitably) blows up. There are built-in statistics that let you track user views of entries, index pages and more.

EE has a forums module that’s a separate purchase for US$50 personal / US$100 commercial that integrates directly with blog entries and your site’s member database. Commerce: EE has a built-in PayPal integration component that lets you handle basic sales of virtual and real goods. Integration: EE has an XML parsing plugin that can pull in feeds from other sites and reformat them for your own page — be the next Google News!

What MT Can Do That EE Can’t

EE’s search mechanism caches search results, so you can’t bookmark a search result page. In MT you can. Automatic saving of post drafts. The native ratings framework currently supports rating posts and comments, and the list will grow. A file manager for uploading and reusing media assets. Open-ID support and Typekey authentication. WYSIWYG blog entry.

Final Analysis

There are lots of reasons to go with Movable Type, especially now that release 4.0 has demonstrated that Six Apart is again committed to the platform. Not the least of these reasons is that your boss might just demand that you do. MT has explicitly chosen to focus on business and enterprise blogging, and has been successful with that strategy. If you need LDAP integration, support for an Oracle database, or you want to give a blog to everyone in your school or company, MT, actually the MT Enterprise Solution is the way to go.

For most small operations who are price sensitive, it’s not a slam dunk either way — the price points and the products are similar enough that a decision really will depend on your specific needs. If you are price sensitive and your organization is growing then in the long run EE will become the price leader. That’s something to keep in mind.

When it comes to functionality, EE clearly stands out. If you look at EE’s feature list, it seems almost overwhelmingly flexible. Conversely, if you look at the list of 47 new features of MT 4.0, more than half are things that EE already does, and roughly 20% are marketing speak, such as “Completely reinvented user interface!”, which while meaningful, have a rather subjective element to the net impact. MT is still a more specialized product.

For me and my clients, with the exception of the blog entry WYSIWYG editor, there’s not many areas where this latest version of MT surpasses the current incarnation of EE, just areas where it offers a functionality down a path EE hasn’t yet gone. If one of those might be the deal breaker (like static output files or LDAP support, for instance), go with MT. But if you don’t have a unique feature driving your decision, I’d click over to EllisLab and take a serious look at ExpressionEngine.

EEtemplates has a couple of free basic templates, posted late 08.

SimplyGold has half a dozen templates created in late 06.

Novacron has some templates dating from early 07.

EEdesign has quite a few templates but they seem to date from 04.

Pro EE:

• The key thing: more fine grain control over everything (with some exceptions!).
• Other key thing: members and member management.
• Custom Fields – the level of control and ability to associate the fields with a certain section.
• Categories: these are a weak area in TXP, only allowing a maximum of 2, without clean URLs.
• The Multiple Site Manager is genius.
• You can edit the templates in a text editor, rather than via control panel. (You still have to create the template in EE first.)

Anti EE:

• The admin panel seems needlessly complicated, with options hidden behind many overly-wordy, illogical links and dropdowns.
• /index.php/ shouldn’t be in URLs by default, and it’s right pain to get rid of (but you can do it). Likewise, getting simple /section/title/ urls requires a lot of work.
• EE seems obsessed with statistics - time taken to render page etc.
• Tags: some require exp: at the start, some don’t.
• File management is behind Textpattern.There is a good file manager plugin for EE, but this review is looking at built-in functionality. (To the plugin.)

JH concludes that he prefers to work with TP except for sites that need members, forums and all that jazz. Having explored parts of the Control Panel, I have to agree that it is seriously convoluted. The preferences for a weblog are four layers down in the Control Panel, in Admin > Weblog Administration > Weblog Management. I’m thinking of compiling an offline manual from the online docs so that I can get my head around this multi-layered monster. BUT …

v2 of EE seems set to deal with the admin and file management issues, with a completely new Control Panel as explained in the recent sneak preview incorporating a new file manager as explained in another sneak preview.

The other key point from comments is that it is simple enough to remove index.php from the URL structure - “The resulting URLs are clean and human-readable and very intuitive on multiple levels,” says the commenter. I don’t dispute that observation, but I don’t rate the three available techniques “simple”, judging by the relevant wiki entry.

That said, when v2 of EE arrives it would seem that TP will no longer offer serious competition.