Why use Wordpress when there is something more expensive and has less features?

[SneakyDave]

For a number of years now, EllisLab has been marketing their ExpressionEngine product as the be-all end-all in CMS management.

 

A few years ago, they released their 2.0 version of the platform which was built upon CodeIgniter (priced at $299), I thought that was wonderful, but it turns out CodeIgniter was already dying a slow death, and EllisLab, it's maintainer, practically abandoned new development on it. The ExpressionEngine product stagnated, due to a number of reasons, and really didn't take off as much as EllisLab would have liked, even after offering a "personal" version to download for free. The officially licensed forum addon module and multi-site manager were priced at $50 each.

 

And then, the promise of ExpressionEngine 3.0 was announced, and this, THIS, was going to be the answer that people were looking for. It was going to be a revolution. Along with EE 3.0, the antiquated forum module was offered as a free addon. Eventually, the Wiki addon was also packaged with the CMS as a free gift. Addons for EE 2.0 wouldn't work with EE 3.0, but only minor changes were required, according to Derek Jones, CEO of EllisLab. There was a lot of fanfare, but no advertising, and not a lot of talk about the product.

 

So EE 3.0 has been out for a while, and it looks like a few developers have left the "devotee" dev site for EE, or they don't plan to upgrade their addons to EE 3.0. I haven't used EE myself, so I'm not sure what the real problem is with it, if anything. I've read some reports from devs that think EE has lost any edge that it may have.

 

Between 3.0 and 2.0 versions, EllisLab changed their support licenses, pissing off practically everybody that had a support license with EllisLab. Also during that time, they donated the code and license for the CodeIgniter framework to the British Columbia Institute of Technology. It appears to be a better managed production now than when EllisLab owned it. There was no price increase (thankfully) for EE 3.0, and upgrades were priced at $149.

 

The EllisLab Forums were overrun by spam for a period of over 9 months. I don't think they had a single moderator or staff member sign on to answer any questions, or clean that crap up, but they've archived almost all of the forums that they held for CodeIgniter and EE support, and created new ones that appear to be better moderated.

 

You can tell by the forum software that it is about 10 years behind the software leaders in this category. It EE wouldn't have abandoned it all those years, it may have been quite a contender, at certainly a better product than WordPress' BuddyPress. Regarding the EE CMS/blog system itself, you can't even search for articles on the EllisLab.com site, so I wonder if it just isn't a very good feature, or it's a hog on resources.

 

tl;dr; I don't understand why anybody would pay $299 for the drama behind EE when Wordpress is free, has more third party addons and support, and is better maintained.