(last edited on April 29, 2014 at 1:25 am)
I am about to start the process of moving my website from Expression Engine back to WordPress. The export process is somewhat involved, so I will be disabling comments disabling comments for older posts until I get everything moved over and functioning again. Expect to see some hiccups over the next few days!
Why move back to WordPress? I have the choice of upgrading to Expression Engine 2.0, which features a new codebase that is built on the well-regarded PHP Framework CodeIgniter. I’ve actually used CodeIgniter for a bit, and it’s a pretty nifty framework that I’d probably visit again. In fact, it would make a lot of sense for me to put the effort into moving everything to EE 2.0 and reap the many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of benefits that the new system brings. It’s been under development and user preview for a couple of years, and I can testify that the community is very active with great support. That’s what brought me to try Expression Engine in the first place, in addition to its integration with world-class forum and wiki modules under a common user management interface. If I were building a community empire or needed a content management system for a company, I’d certainly strongly consider basing it on Expression Engine.
And that’s the reason I’m switching back to WordPress. When I first made the jump from WordPress 1.6x to Expression Engine, it was because I thought the direction I was going in required the management of a community of users, features, and services. Therefore, I wanted a single user management system for good wiki and forum software. Recently, though, I’ve come to realize that I really don’t want that at all. I’d rather just be writing about stuff that catches my eye, not managing forums or building a content management strategy. I want to move fast, and I want to make things happen now. On top of that, I’ve never liked the blogging environment in Expression Engine. It lacks the workflow niceties that WordPress has: auto-saving, easy updating of the base system, and a more writer-friendly user interface. There have been, I know, many improvements in EE 2.0’s interface, but I haven’t seen anything compelling to keep me.
There are also three technical reasons related to the switch back to WordPress. The caching mechanism makes more sense for the kind of content formatting I do. The templating system is much more gratifying for change junkies like myself. The URL structure is more straightforward. And doing security upgrades is much easier. Or so I imagine. We’ll see how I feel in a few weeks.
5 Comments
As a long time WordPress user I would have to say I love the platform and the community. I can build practically almost anything I could possibly want on WordPress. Having said that, wordpress has its security issues and gets frequent updates, both the cored wordpress platform and plugins. Specially in the last six months or so, there has been way too many 0-day wordpress related vulnerabilities out there. This is something to think about
Secondly, it seems that you are using MediaTemple. If you are using MT grid, be very cautious about deploying wordpress on it. Not because there is something wrong with WordPress (in this circumstances) but because MT wordpress users is being hacked left and right with no fault of their own or the fault of WP. MT has some shady misconfiguration going on their side.
Last time it happened, few weeks ago literally 1000s of MT wordpress site hacked, including vanilla up-to-date site with no plugins; MT blamed it on the users. I had to painstakingly go through all my wordpress install file by file to check them myself and remove the JS redirect hack. My PR went down from 4 to 1 and Google labeled my site as “malicious site”. I haven’t got my PR back but I removed the hack but lost huge traffic. MT doesn’t wanna take any responsibility, even after I showed them that all my sites are up to-date.
Really horrible experience with MT, and I am not alone in this.
Bottom line. While I never had problems running wordpress by itself and I have been using them since the beginning, I had serious problem with WP running on MT; its a deadly combination. So I thought I should give you a heads-up. It has nothing to do with your ability to have a secured system with proper file permissions and up-dated system (I consider myself fairly security conscious), if the back-end is insecure your site with MT will get hacked like everyone else.
Good Luck.
Pavel: The hacks we’ve seen in the last six months or so have affected a range of PHP applications and it’s rather apparent we’re looking at a series of infrastructure vulnerabilities, unfortunately. These attacks damage thousands of WordPress installs, simply because WordPress is so widely used. MediaTemple has definitely been hit hard by this. That said, there hasn’t been a critical security vulnerability in WordPress in more than a year.
Pavel: I’m not on shared hosting, so I might be better isolated. MT, like lots of hosts that have inexpensive hosting, don’t really offer the hands-on support that people want, so I don’t really hold it against them. Security audits and sysadmin time is expensive. I already get hammered by thousands of hacking attempts every day (as does EVERY computer on the Internet), so I have just sort of adopted a “do my best” attitude toward it. I do appreciate the heads-up, though, on the current state of WP. There’s something to be said for security through obscurity (when I was on EE)…the number of comment spams went down drastically when I switched, though now I am seeing more hand-entered spam. Sigh.
I think you can resubmit your site to Google security audit, and you might get your PR back.
So as someone who was thinking of doing a project on EE… why the switch back?
Rick: I guess it wasn’t clear in this rambly post :) I’m switching back because EE just doesn’t suit my personality. I’d say it is a good platform for a small business or professional content provider, but it doesn’t have the writing and community features built-in to WordPress. I also have missed the instant gratification I get from the WordPress theming and plugins. There is no instant theming with Expression Engine, and plugins are a laborious affair. Upgrades are also laborious. One reason I’m switching to WordPress now is that I don’t want to go through the pain of upgrading from EE 1.6.x to EE 2.0.x.
I realized that the whole reason I was on Expression Engine, other than to try it out, was because I was thinking of being “more professional” in my content offerings and web development. It hit me a couple weeks ago that actually, what best suits me is the ability to move quickly and make changes on-the-fly for my own projects.
If you want to build larger websites with a flexible CMS and web applications, Expression Engine is a good platform. 2.0 is built on top of CodeIgniter, which is a nice PHP framework with quite a few useful features; I’m probably going to continue to use that for the handful of isolated projects I do. But for pure content slinging? WordPress, baby!