Now running on ExpressionEngine

30.09.2009

ExpressionEngine by EllisLab

To make a long story short, our websites were running on a custom made Content Management System (CMS) that served us well. We wanted to move to an industry standard CMS for the following reasons: scalability, ease of maintenance and speed optimisation. After considering different options, we chose ExpressionEngine and never looked back.

With the planning and definition period behind us, it only took the two of us three weeks to port the website on ExpressionEngine and to have it functional on a development server. As always, the support from both EllisLab and the community was top notch. Our next job is to migrate the other 4 websites of the International Polar Foundation to that new platform.

Add-ons in use

With the update to 2.0 getting closer, we didn't want to rely on add-ons too much but used a handful of them making the life of contributors and developpers a lot easier. Here is a short list for those of you wanting to know the nitty gritty details:

There are few other add-ons in use but these are the main ones. By looking at the list above, it seems we owe Brandon Kelly a few beers ;o).

Combined with a new server, moving to ExpressionEngine has made the site significantly faster for users and administrators alike. Using a paid solution like EE gives us a solid base to build on, a terrific online support, a good security track record and the ability to hire external developers more easily.

See you all at EECI 2009 in Leiden.