WordPress vs ExpressionEngine: is EE worth the price? [closed]

For developing a commercial website that needs to run "in the real world", $300+/- is a very compelling price. This isn't to do with Expression Engine specifically, but any good commercial CMS. Nearly anything can do the job - including WordPress - it's just a matter of how easily and quickly it lets you do your job. Nothing is free - it's just a matter of whether you - or your users - pay for it in time, or in dollars (or Euros. Or Crowns... whatever). Amortize $300 over the life of the product - from the first big setup to every time you need to make a tweak - and think about how much effort EllisLab developers have spent themselves, and thus saved you. Then think about how little they're actually charging for that value.

Or, if WP happens to align perfectly with your needs, just use that.

But I strongly support commercial software products (partly because I work with them and make them) and IMO 4 times out of 5, the ROI is better than a free alternative.

EE is perhaps worth the price if it is the solution that meets all of your requirements. You need to use the right tool for the job. It will not do you well to learn just one CMS and then try to shape all your problems to fit that solution. I suggest you learn the features and downsides of several CMSs and apply whichever one is the best for the particular site you are working on. Or even use a combination. Limiting yourself to learning just one CMS as if it is the be-all-and-end-all of CMSs will only hurt you, and it might make your customers miserable when they're forced to use a product that wasn't even designed with their needs in mind.

You say that wordpress.org doesn't use WordPress, but I suggest you look more closely. The wordpress.org site is quite complex, therefore it might not make sense to use WP as the main CMS for that site. But did you look at the Blog (aka News) section? That's running on WP. Look at the Showcase section. That's WP too!

My guess is that they use WP where it's appropriate, and perhaps something else where WP isn't appropriate. Which brings me back to my original point: You need to use the right tool for the job.

Edit #1 - Oh, and as for your interest in making fast-loading sites: The CMS has some influence on that because some have more overhead than others, but the CMS is not the only thing that affects a site's performance. Sproutcore loads fast because it's a tiny page, it's got only one small image and a tiny stylesheet. So of course it's going to load fast! You can make a complex site load fast, too, if you use things like caching, small graphics, code/database optimizations, content delivery networks, throw more hardware at it, etc etc etc.

Edit #2 - If you're interested in creating static sites for performance, but you want to have some templating control, take a look at Jekyll. It's a script that combines your templates with plain text files that are formatted using Textile or Markdown, and spits out complete HTML pages. You might also be interested in Movable Type, which is a platform that can generate static HTML. Once again, the right tool for the job... there are so many choices out there.

I used ExpressionEngine professionally for about two years, compared to other "content management systems" out there I think it gets the job done well. In order to make Wordpress or Drupal do the same out of the box features ExpressionEngine has takes a bit of tweaking or php knowledge. ExpressionEngine was a great tool for me while I used it. The templating language and admin aren't too hard to get into with only html and css knowledge. Using third-party addons such as Structure and most from Pixel & Tonic will make your sites easy to develop and most of all easy for clients to manage.

Wordpress is a blogging platform, not a CMS. I find the admin too bare bones and confusing for clients to properly separate and manage their different kinds of structured content. It works great for blogging, but try to make a staff page or anything more structured and it falls apart.

If price is an issue I would recommend looking into Symphony CMS, which follows a similar concept to organization of content as ExpressionEngine. Though you have to learn XSLT, which can be a bigger learning curve than EE's own tag language. But, it's free.

I primarily work with projects now using Django, which is a python framework and will have a bigger learning curve than Wordpress, ExpressionEngine or Symphony. But it gets the job done for small and large projects alike. If you're looking to take the plunge so to speak, might as well go straight for the jugular.