The Belgian Trotter

Well I’m getting tired of having to use either different open source applications for one website (eg. news, community (phpbb, invision), gallery (gallery, coppermine)) or either having to develop each of them myself in order to get an integrated evenly looking site.
So I’m now searching for a real solution (free or paid) which offers all of the above as a package…

The package must of course comply to certain criteria:
- It must be payable (no hundred of dollars)
- it must be easy to learn and customizable (I’ve already taken so much time learning languages that at the end I seldom use)
- one membership module which manages all the rights throughout the website.
- preferably opensource (LAMP based). I have and have developed in Asp.net but I wish to use LAMP for a change

After all considerations, I’ve ended up with 2-3 applications I could use: Wordpress, MoveableType (MT), Expression Engine (EE).
Both have their pro’s and cons, obviously…

>>Please bear in mind I’ve only started looking at these applications so If I say anything completly wrong, please comment and I’ll be happy to rectify my post.

- The Price
Both Wordpress and MT are open source and free to use anyway I please. EE is not. There’s a free CORE version but let’s just say it isn’t! (there’s even a difference for private & commercial use by the way...)

WP & MT both score here....

- How about ease of use
To be honest, though I’m comparing 3 here, I’ve only tried 2: Wordpress & EE.
For what I’ve seen, EE get’s my vote here.

Why? EE uses tags inside xhtml pages (like {tags}) which is easy to see inside the code.
It reminds me a bit of Javabeans inside the presentation layer.

Wordpress uses more standard php tags which are embedded inside the template pages (the xhtml pages). First of all I do not like code residing inside my presentation layer.

Although this is also possible in EE as an option. (you can allow php parsing inside a specific template page)

MT is made in perl and also uses the tag system but the tags are less userfriendly than EE. (IMHO of course)
I can’t say much more about MT because I’ve not looked at it in details.

Wordpress, on the other hand is very popular and loads and loads of templates are available freely on the internet. So if you are looking for something with a nice design without customizing it, Wordpress could be your choice.
It is never mine, I don’t like to use templates as they are. I prefer to make my own or at least be inspired by an existing template.

- Completeness of the package

Here I think EE is the big winner! If you buy a licence, you can get integrated support for a wiki, a discussion board, a gallery and other nice features. A lot of other addon’s are made by users and fans and as mostly free.

Wordpress, again due to its popularity, has a lot of modules and plugins made by users. (I’ve seen a plugin to integrate Gallery (a kick ass gallery system) inside Wordpress). But again that’s what I don’t want anymore. I don’t want to use different applications. 

MT has addon’s as well although I haven’t seen any built in (gallery & discussion board)

So currently my preference goes to EE… Maybe I’ll try MT and see how different it is…

update:
Well I finally decided to also install MT and try it out. Since MT is a perl based script, you’ll have to use your cgi-bin folder. MT recommends to only put the script files in there and put the static content (html pages & images and so on) outside the cgi-bin.
Also you’ll have to check your perl path and check all required modules by going to a mt-check-cgi file.
As my host uses the standard settings for all paths, the installation went quite smoothly (though if you never have installed anything, chances are you’ll have more difficulties)
Everything was installed quite right, but when I wanted to view my site (not the admin panel) I got a 404 page not found. MT didn’t suggest the right paths for my blog. I had to change the settings (path) in the configuration page.

I now have a blog but the manner on how to use the templates is still a bit unclear. (note that I had the same feeling when trying EE but I learned quickly)