Last week, I had the privilege of speaking to the Cape Cod Technology Council about ExpressionEngine (EE). The 40-member audience was a mix of designers, developers, marketing professionals and business people. My task was to hold their interest for 15 minutes. I was given only one guideline --> “Don’t Make it a Sales Pitch!”
In the weeks leading up to the talk I struggled with my topic. I worked on the outline, throwing away ideas as quickly as they came. It wasn’t that I was worried about the length of the talk, or the fact that this gathering would serve as 20Mile’s Coming Out Party to the local community.
No, the cause for my concern was the diversity of the audience - how can I hold the interest of 4 unique groups of people (including a number of WordPress users) while talking about a (relatively - at least locally) unknown Content Management System?
In the end, I decided to focus on the group that is usually the hardest to please. I tailored my discussion to the designers in the audience. In my experience, if you’re keeping the designers happy, interested and entertained, than you’re doing something right (or impossible - depending on your most recent experience with designers).
Overall, I believe the presentation went well. Even though it wasn’t a sales pitch I handed out a few business cards and have arranged some follow-up meetings with audience members. One of the WordPress developers in the audience has followed up with a few questions. It’s also possible that I converted a Drupal Developer .. we’ll see.
Anyway, the opportunity to give the talk allowed me to take a step back and think about some of the reasons why we love ExpressionEngine and use it in nearly all of our CMS projects.
This was the group that our presentation was intended for. We work with so many great designers and we need a tool that won’t box them in to a particular theme or template. This is not the case when we’re asked to work with another CMS. With those other CMSs, our clients will send along their design and ask us to find a theme that most closely resembles the creative look they’re trying to achieve. We then spend hours hacking away at the template to meet their goals. It’s not a fun exercise, and it’s not a good use of anyone’s time or project budget (especially when you’re paying our hourly rate).
With EE our designers have the freedom to create without the constraints of a template.
Out of the box, EE offers a solution for content management, blogging, membership management and a discussion forum. This is enough power for most of our projects, but when we need a little more, the developer community that has grown around EE is fantastic We’re regular users of modules and extensions from Build with Structure, Pixel & Tonic, cartthrob, Solspace and Leevi Graham. The functionality that has sprung forth from these companies has turned EE from a CMS into an application platform.
The basic power of EE, coupled with some amazing add-ons means that we can use EE for any project. Add to that the power of the CodeIgniter Framework and the only limitation is the vision for the project.
I have to thank Mark Reeves at Slim Kiwi for helping me to see this last Spring. When Mark showed me what he was doing with EE my mind was blown. We had been satisfied to use EE as a CMS for our clients, but after sitting with Mark for an afternoon I realized that we hadn’t begun to tap the power of it. Since then, we have pushed our own limits and continue to do so with each new project.
Whether it’s Leslie Camacho at EllisLab responding to a tweet, Brandon Kelly at Pixel & Tonic answering a support request, or the hundreds of developers adding thoughts to the EE discussion forum or #eecms twitter tag, an answer to a question is usually minutes away.
The EE Community is among the most welcoming I’ve encountered in my 15 years of technical development. They (we) want to see the product thrive and people definitely go out of their way to make others comfortable.
