I recently used ExpressionEngine to develop a web site for a client of ours. Here is what I thought of EE and what I discovered about its strengths and weaknesses.

Customization

ExpressionEngine's strength is in its flexibility. It can handle simple things like pages and blogs and you can also create custom content types to handle things like product cataglogues and business directories.

With this flexibility you lose a lot of automation that is found in other content management systems. Many simple things aren't automatic such as pagination and RSS. When things finally get working it is a beautiful moment, but be warned that there is a big learning curve.

Documentation

There is a very good documentation library on ExpressionEngine. There is a fairly large community following EE, and there are plenty of people working on plugins and add-ons. Devot-EE is a good website for EE plugins. In comparison to Joomla, EE lacks the depth and number of plugins and add-ons.

Usability

ExpressionEngine has a large learning curve for developers. If one does not have a logical and code oriented thought process, prepare for pain. Accomplishing something new is a joyous occasion only because the road to success was so tedious. I imagine EE would be a very dangerous tool in the hands of an expert. Creating or updating articles is very easy for users.

CMS General Information

ExpressionEngine costs money, between $99 and $250, and it is not open source.

Conclusion

• Large amount of freedom for developers
• Fair amount of plugins and modules
• Good online documentation
• Very steep learning curve for developers
• Inner workings and structure are not intuitive
• Not open source
• Costs money

ExpressionEngine is good for specific projects. Large scale blog or news sites with many users inputing content is a good example of a project for EE. EE is definitely for sites that need lots of customization.