Power To The People. pMachine’s Class Act On A Mac

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Interview with Rick Ellis, founder of pMachine and developer of the popular CMS application, Expression Engine (EE).

Mac360 - What are development benefits and advantages of using Macs vs. PCs and Windows when developing EE?

Rick - Both Paul and I do all our software development on our Powerbooks. For us, there is no distinction between our development servers and our personal computers.  They are one in the same.  That means we can be productive anywhere. 

Granted, it is possible to turn a Windows environment into the same kind of development platform, but it takes a lot more time and effort to set up and maintain. OS X requires literally one click to enable Apache Web Server, and OS X comes bundled with PHP. 

The only component we must install is MySQL, which takes five minutes. I can’t imagine working on anything else.

Mac360 - Do you have a favorite version of PHP and MySQL? For example, we use Marc Liyanage’s PHP version because the GD libraries are built-in, though we use Apple’s distribution of MySQL.

Rick - I’ve always used Marc Liyanage’s distributions.  He does a good job of compiling most of the libraries you need. There are lots of other versions out there but I’ve never bothered investigating them.

Mac360 - What specialized Mac tools do you use (BBEdit, whose PHP install, which MySQL installation)?

Rick - Paul and I use BBEdit to write code. We both use Marc Liyanage’s PHP and MySQL packages.

Mac360 - Any idea how many users of EE are Mac vs. Windows. vs. Linux?

Rick - If you are talking about the hosting platform, by far most users are on Linux, with Windows IIS coming in at number two.  However, if you’re talking about our user’s desktop platform I’d guess that we have a higher percentage of Mac users than average due to the nature of our software and the fact that a lot of web designers and high-visibility Macintosh sites use our products.

“Our immediate goal is to continue enhancing and extending the capability of our software, particularly through the development of add-on modules…”Mac360 - What are some of the other Mac-oriented web sites?

Mac360 - pMachine’s roots are in the “blogging” community. EE is much more aligned with CMS. Where is EE going? What’s on the horizon?

Rick - Blogging tools are light content management systems, so I don’t draw a hard distinction between blogging and CMS software.  Our goal is to completely blur the distinction between the two, by offering a blogging platform that is so powerful it can serve as a more traditional content management solution. 

Our immediate goal is to continue enhancing and extending the capability of our software, particularly through the development of add-on modules.

Mac360 - Podcasting has just begun to catch on. Do you plan a feature that makes it easy to set up Podcast/Videocast via EE’s built-in RSS system?

Rick - Well, a podcast is just an audio file, which can be uploaded using EE.  RSS pages are natively supported, and easy to customize, so I don’t see any need to offer a specific podcasting features.  In general, though, we’re always looking at new technologies to support.

Mac360 - What other Mac apps do you and others in pMachine use and why? Word, Excel, Mail, etc.

Rick - We use all the standard items:  Word, Excel, Photoshop, etc.

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