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ExpressionEngine

ExpressionEngine is the CMS of choice at BridgingUnit when we need to create a website of any reasonable complexity.

We use ExpressionEngine to produce web applications and other advanced and dynamic solutions such as project management tools, competition submission schemes, event calendars, download centres, social networking tools and forums, as well as more basic websites, listing sites and even plain old blogs.

BridgingUnit is a member of the ExpressionEngine Pro Network and develops custom addons for ExpressionEngine, some of which have been made available to the public. One of these was even shortlisted by the members of Devot-ee.com in the 2009 AcademEE Awards as Plugin of the Year.

Made by EllisLab, ExpressionEngine is a superb Content Management System that evolved from a popular blogging tool called pMachine to become much more of a framework or toolbox for developing dynamic web solutions.

ExpressionEngine:

• Is a reliable, well-developed and supported system that is easy to quickly build sites with.
• Its backend control panel interface is very easy to use and can be customised according to need.
• Has excellent clear documentation that includes not just a user manual and knowledgebase, but a forum and wiki too
• Has a helpful technical support team that responds rapidly and a large community that is open and sharing. There’s even a Pro Network for when the going gets tough (and we’re in it).
• Their team take security very seriously. They have had barely any security issues, and those minor. Compare that to most other similar products. And the product itself comes with many security management features
• There are plenty of extensions, plugins and modules that come as part of the package already supported in the box - no need to cobble together dozens of third party extras. But you can call on these if you need as there are many addons that have been contributed by the strong and enthusiastic developer community (including ours).
• It separates code from design really nicely, allowing you to use your own templates and, if you need to, you can override things to easily add any additional required functionality either direct or via their extension architecture. So it can easily be used to produce XHTML the way you want it.
• In fact it can produce other formats too - XML, RSS etc - it’s all down to the templates you provide it with which will then pump out your content on demand to whatever website, widget, component or web service requires it.
• Produces search engine friendly URLs and features caching and optimisation features to ensure your site gives the best performance under load
• Is written in unobfuscated or encrypted PHP and uses the MySQL database, so you can reasonably easily integrate it with other products that use them too
• The new version 2.0 is based on the open source CodeIgniter framework which will open up all sorts of other possibilities and link it with another thriving development community
• Allows you to create the architecture you want and define your content the way it requires without forcing you into any particular format or making you hack a blog to do something it wasn’t really designed to do
• Basically it gets out of the way and lets you get on with designing the site the way you want to. Because of its flexibility, there isn’t a house style that you get forced into
• Is inexpensive, costing just less than $300 - so about £150, and only costs a little less than $40 per year to renew the license to receive official support and ensure you can update it with patches/improvements etc.
• Is used by high profile websites across the spectrum - from government and politics, charities and NGOs, media and design companies, engineering and industry