The Digerati team is in the middle of re-designing and architecting our www.lifechurch.tv site. For the past few years we have been using a tool called Content Fusion, built by Element Fusion. I think Content Fusion is a nice CMS for a single site, but when you get 12 campuses on it, you quickly see it is not designed to be used how we are using it. So, after a few months of research, phone calls (thanks David), etc, etc, we have decided to move our development efforts towards Expression Engine.
Here are some things that were very important to us, and why we chose Expression Engine.
1) Scaleability. Currently we have 12 campuses, that are truly sites and have many more on the way. We needed a CMS that could scale to 20, 50, 200 with no problem. We think that with Expression Engine’s Multiple Site Manager that we can facilitate this growth with ease.
2) Flexibility. Software can never be all things to all people. There are limits, and actually there need to be limits! However, when looking for a CMS we needed our solution to be flexible enough for us to customize it to meet our specific needs. This could be open source but did not NEED to be. Expression Engine has thousands of Add-Ons, and lets you develop plug-ins and build modules on top of their core. It also lets you integrate your own PHP code anywhere you need, so the sky is really the limit.
3) Give-away-ability. A core passion here at LifeChurch.tv is the ability to give things away. You see that modeled with Open, and in the near future you will see another big round of “giving” away. We are contacted all the time about giving away our code, and our site. We really want to be able to do that, so with Expression Engine we plan on making all our templates, plug-ins and modules available for free. Anything that we build we want to give it away. (more on this later!)
4) Standards based. A key for anything we are doing now following web standards. Expression Engine follows all the “rules” that are important to us.
5) Simple Integration. It was very important for us that our new CMS would play well with others. LifeChurch.tv is moving to FellowshipOne and our website will be highly integrated with it. So, our website needs to tightly integrate with our backend systems. Expression Engine and F1 will work well together via the F1 data exchange tool.
6) Design-ability. Many times I have found that a CMS limits the “design” capabilities to your website. This was not an option for our selection. Expression Engine is based on very flexible templates, and will allow us to design anything that we desire and use EE to manage the content.
7) Active user base. An active user base, developers group and forum was important to us. Typically when you find an active user base you find tons of people that offer support and ideas! We realize that we are not on an island, and really nothing is very original anymore. An active user base makes us better.
8 ) LAMP. Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. This was mission critical for us. The digerati team operates in this environment, and we needed our CMS to follow.
9) Multi Language support. Yep, this was important to us for the future.
10) Price. This might be a shock to some, but the digerati does have budget limits. Expression Engine core for non-profits is oly $99. After we added mulit-site manager, additional licenses for our campuses the total price was just over $400.
Currently we are in planning and design phase. We plan on rolling out the new site around the first of the year. As we get closer I am sure we will give some sneak peaks of new functionality and a peak at the new look.
For those who are wondering we also looked at: Drupal, WordPress, TextPattern, Typo3, and many others.
(via terrystorch.com | beta)
