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Relaunching the site with Craft CMS

After many years on ExpressionEngine (EE), I've finally converted over to Craft CMS.

I say finally because I've been eyeing Craft CMS for a long time.

Around 2012/2013, Pixel & Tonic, one of the primary developers of EE add-ons, created Craft CMS out of the frustration they and other third-party EE developers were experiencing at the time. Craft CMS's launch caused somewhat of a mass exodus from EE.

Eventually, EE was bought by Packet Tide, another big add-on developer, who I feel have done their best to bring EE closer to a modern CMS.

But maybe a bit too late. ExpressionEngine is still playing catch-up.

You can see the influence of Craft CMS in the last few versions of EE. EE is following now rather than leading. The two CMSs are still very similar since Craft CMS was born out of ExpressionEngine. But Craft has completely overshadowed it.

Why Craft CMS?

I really loved ExpressionEngine. It just made sense to me when WordPress, Drupal, and Textpattern (other CMSs I've had experience with) did not, or were simply difficult to work with.

Even the latest version of EE feels like more of a visual change than an architectural one. Living with Craft CMS for a bit now, it's simply more polished, and their developer support is outstanding. The process of setting up fields and templates, even editing content, is still familiar to my EE experience, just way much smoother.

The main thing that held me back is that I had a number of client sites that were built with ExpressionEngine, and they weren't going to be trivial or cost-effective to convert. Primarily due to relatively expensive add-ons for event scheduling and e-commerce.

Fortunately, those clients re-did their sites or were able to downsize sufficiently that moving them to Craft CMS has become more viable. Having those sites to convert over and continue to maintain was the deciding factor for choosing it for the site you're reading right now.

To be honest, I would definitely choose Ghost CMS if it wasn't for the other sites. I really love Ghost, but it is for blogs and not anywhere near as customizable as Craft CMS. Having this site in Craft CMS gives me a good playground for the others.

First Impressions

So far, my experience with EE has made it pretty smooth to get into Craft. A number of years ago, I had gone through some how-to videos on CraftQuest, which were a huge help. I plan to revisit some of their screencasts.

As I write this, I just have basic, non-styled HTML until I choose a template design I want to go with. By the time you read this, I'll have had that sorted out. I have no worries.

I'm excited to start this new journey with Craft CMS.

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