pMachine Updates CMS Expression Engine Features.

Welcome to the CMS Fanboy club. Content Management Systems come of age for Mac users. Easy to install and run on a Mac, powerful and flexible, pMachine’s updated Expression Engine tops the latest class. Oh, there’s a free version, too.

Back in the day, early 2004, Mac360 was one of the first Mac web sites to utilize pMachine’s new content management system, dubbed Expression Engine.

“EE”, as it’s called by the Mac360 ‘EE Fanboy Club’ (Tera, Ron, me) offered users a tremendously powerful way to manage content on web sites.

All that was required to get it going was PHP and MySQL, both readily available and free for Mac OS X (and various flavors of Unix, Linux, and we hear it works on Windows, though not as well).

pMachine upgraded EE to version 1.4 and added a free version, the Express Engine Core.

If you’ve ever wanted to try out a flexible, feature-rich web content publishing system that just works very well on Mac OS X, try EE. Try it for free. Try the free version. Try it.

To be fair, there are a few dozen content management systems that run using PHP and MySQL. Some of them are very good, some are Open Source, and most run just fine on Mac OS X.

Few of them have the feature set found in EE. From security to flexibility, from dependability to ease-of-use, from easy set up and install to high powered, high traffic web sites, EE does it.

We’re not the only ones who think so. Among popular Mac web sites, EE rules as the content management system of choice, because it works very well.

Who uses EE besides Mac360? MacDailyNews, AppleMatters, MacsimumNews, and many others; some sites which generate 10 to 20 times the visitor count of Mac360.

What does EE do? For creating a web site with easily updated content that’s safe, secure, scalable, upgradable, and has built-in forums, and more bells and whistles than Santa Claus? Nearly everything you can think of.

For example, Multiple Content Sections (as many as you want or need), Custom Entry Fields, Multiple Categories, RSS Syndication (automatic), HTML Formatting Buttons, Search Engine-Friendly URLs, URL Titles, Sticky Topics and Future Entries, Content Pagination, and more.

More? Yes. How about a Photo Gallery and an optional integrated Forum. Article Pagination (multiple pages), Image Resizing, Multiple Languages (over 15), User Comment and Membership System, Moderation, Anti-Spam Encoding and Security, Multiple Photo Galleries, and more.

Still more? Yes. Like a Template Library, Full Page Modeling, Global Variables, Email to Members, Member Groups, User Control Panel, Mailing List Managaer.

You get the idea. The feature list is huge. We’re a web site of pMachine fanboys, right?

Why EE and not, say, Word Press, or Mambo, or Drupal, or MoveableType, or even Bricolage, or Joomla? Just as the Mac hits a ‘sweet spot’ of usability with dependable hardware combined with an ‘out of your way’ powerful operating system, and a cadre of great applications, pMachine’s EE is a very Mac-like application.

Why? Perhaps because pMachine’s founder and developers use Macs. Perhaps there’s always a better way to do something and that’s what Expression Engine is. The better way. Just like using a Mac.

We (Tera, Alexis, Ron, Me) have a few sites using Expression Engine on a Mac mini. Powerful stuff, made easy.

Expression Engine as an application, comes ready to run and in a number of flavors. EE Core is free for personal or non-profit use. Expression Engine Personal, for non-commercial use, is now reduced in price to $99 and has all available EE features.

Expression Engine Commercial is $250 and includes unlimited tech support (which we’ve used a few times). The Forums module integrates into EE and is $50 for non-commercial, personal use, and $99.95 for commercial sites.

Is it worth it? Yes. Open Source is free, but all too often you get what you pay for. For most web site builders, you want a ‘sweet spot’ combination of ease-of-use, simple setup, a variety of templates, and a set of features that’s easy to learn, implement, right? Check.

Click Here to check out the Expression Engine details and the download link for the free version, EE Core.

For Mac users, all you’ll need is a Mac running OS X, PHP (built in to OS X, or use the excellent version from Marc Liyanage’s web site), and the MySQL database.

Tera Patricks
I was convinced that EE was prime time when Alexis put up her own web site on a Mac mini using EE, PHP, and MySQL.

Jack D. Miller
From what I can gather, web sites built on PHP and MySQL are all the rage these days.

Ron McElfresh
I’ve installed and managed everything from WordPress to Mambo to Bricolage to Drupal. Save yourself some time, lots of grief, start at the top.