As far as Content Management Systems go, Expression Engine is an efficient, functional solution for both developer and clients. But unfortunately, snappy functionality isn’t the only factor you need to consider when choosing a CMS. Compare EE with two of its “competitors”, WordPress and Drupal, and you’ll find that EE falls short on a number of other issues including: price, smaller community, less updates, and an unfortunate licensing situation.

Price on its own shouldn’t be listed as an “inadequacy”. If the world’s greatest CMS charged a fee it would be well worth the extra money for the service. But there is a hidden cost to charging for a CMS. My argument is that many of EE’s inadequacies stem from its price wall. EE has a flawed business model which limits its growth and long-term sustainability. Therefore, Expression Engine should be free!

Issue #1: EE Has A Smaller Community

EE’s barrier for entry is high – a commercial license fee of $299 per install – leading most developers to seek alternative solutions. As a result the Expression Engine platform has a much slower growth rate and a smaller user base than its rivals.

If there are less people using the software, then we can assume the following. EE has…
*a smaller community of developers
*a smaller amount of people offering support in their forums
*a smaller amount of add-ons (i.e. extensions & modules)

Despite anecdotal evidence that EE enthusiasts provide, “I think the support is fine”, and “There are plenty of modules”, the hard numbers prove that Expression Engine has a much smaller user base than Drupal and WordPress. It has less developers to share support question with, and less add-ons being developed.

Issue #2: Less Updates & Less Code Proofreading

Expression Engine has been slow to release new versions of its software. (See corresponding version release dates for: EE, WordPress, Drupal.) Why is this important? Technology changes everyday – it’s important to constantly evolve.

Furthermore, in my experience it has been much easier to upgrade WordPress and Drupal installations to new versions than with Expression Engine.

Even now as the latest EE version 2.0 has been released my admin panel is still only alerting me of version 1.6.9 – which must be downloaded and manually installed on the server.

WordPress, on the otherhand, has automatic upgrades announced the day they are released.

Historically a smaller user base tends to suggest that hackers are less interested in hacking the code, but in the case of software development it also means that there is less distributed proofreading of the code  – and therefore a smaller likelihood that vulnerabilities are going to be found. To put that another way, the larger the community, the more likelihood that someone will come across a security flaw, and that the bug will get patches more quickly.

Lullabot blogger Nate Haug recently did a comparison on the level of security between EE and Drupal. His assessment begins,

You can see that ExpressionEngine has had only one security advisory over the course of 3 years. Over that same time period, Drupal has had over 80. It’s easy to draw the incorrect conclusion there that ExpressionEngine therefore is more secure.

But as Haug concludes, fewer reported vulnerabilities does not mean less vulnerabilities! It only means they haven’t been reported. Point in case Haug was able to find 3 security vulnerabilities in version 1.6.2 of Expression Engine. Secondly, Haug explains that EllisLabs quietly fixes security vulnerabilities, further leading their customers into a false sense of security.

Issue #3: Licensing & Ownership

Expression Engine is a proprietary product. And as is with all property, law determines that one particular person (in this case, EllisLab) has the authority to decide how the product will be used. Therefore, nothing stops EllisLabs from discontinuing EE development or refraining from issuing licenses in the future.

This is in contrast to WordPress and Drupal which are “in the commons” (aka. in the public domain). No single person has exclusive control over the use and configuration of these CMSs. If the lead developers of an open-source project decide they no longer want to develop the product, the community goes on, and the product can be used freely by anyone; forever, without a license, and without having to report to a central authority.

A Better Business Model for Expression Engine…

Expression Engine would be a better CMS if there was a free version!

Revenue Idea #1: Sell Support
EllisLabs insists that the price is justified because they have “a team of committed developers and technical support specialist”. In my experience developing CMSs I don’t feel that the EE community has any better support than an open-source community. EllisLabs’ stance on this issue rubs up against a very old (and famous) argument addressed by the Richard Stallman’s 1985 GNU Manifesto,

If people would rather pay for a [software] service than get [software] free without service, a company to provide  service to people who have obtained [software] free ought to be profitable.

Stallman went on to found the free-software movement which was immensely influential in spurring software innovation (Linux, Unix, Wikipedia, WordPress, Drupal, etc), and subsequently, profitable organizations that were developed to support the free software (Red Hat, Crowd Favorite, Lullabot, etc).

Revenue Model Idea #2: Sell A Fully Hosted Version
EllisLabs could give away a basic version of EE for free, while selling a fully hosted version for non-developers. (Similar to the WordPress business model.)

Revenue Model Idea #3: Sell An Enterprise Edition
EllisLabs could give away a basic version of EE for free, while selling an enterprise version. (Similar to Movable Type’s business model.)

Final Thoughts

To recap, the price of Expression Engine inhibits the project.

Looking forward, I don’t believe that Expression Engine can gain the same market share as WordPress or Drupal (at least not anytime soon -  Movable Type still hasn’t recovered from their pay wall). But, it will help develop a wider community. And it will make Expression Engine a better product.

Capitalism breeds capitalism: whereas 99% of WordPress and Drupal plug-ins are free (giving back to the community!), in addition to the $299 Expression Engine start-up, EE users typically tack on another $350 for plug-ins (Wygwam $35, Matrix $35, Playa $75, BetaMeta $40, Structure $65, SolSpaceUser $100). Why have all of these separate niche communities developing proprietary code? Let’s reuse code! Let’s work together!

—

By the way, I’d really love to hear a counter argument in favor of the $299 licensing fee – do you believe the fee makes it more valuable than if it was open-source?

Warren emboldened the audience to be daring, “There really isn’t a long history of web typography, we are at the beginning of the web font revolution, and we can all be a part of the revolution.”

She noticed that in most of her favorite designs there was “no Arial”, and “no Georgia”. “The difference between Arial and Habano is rock & roll”, she affirms, pointing to recent album cover art from My Morning Jacket. Compare the two images yourself: on the left is the original My Morning Jacket cover with the Habano font, on the right is an example where Warren substituted the text with Arial.

“A question I often hear from designers and developers is, ‘How do you pick a font’”, she admitted. “It’s a difficult questions to answer, but I like to think of it as ‘How do you choose a pair of shoes?’ I think about the weather and my schedule for the day. Shoes just go with people!”

“This woman is wearing crocks, they are practical and they match, but they just really fit her style.”

“These are my Helvetica shoes.They go with just about anything. I’ve worn them on interviews, to dinner, or just hanging out with friends”

“Archer is a font that everyone is using these days. If you’re trying to communicate ‘friendly and approachable’, and if you want to say it the same way that Converse is saying it, then use Archer.”

Until recent years, web developers were stuck using only web-safe fonts (like Arial and Georgia!). But now sIFR and (more preferably) cufon are challenging developers to use non-standard fonts: to beautify and challenge design conventions on the web. This is Warren’s call for action: stop being so agnostic, 2010 is the year to “get stoked on web typography”.

Samantha’s slides from the presentation are on SlideShare:

The other dramatic change I noticed?

When I checked into The Driskill during SXSW Interactive, foursquare altered me,

Via Foursquare: “You are checked in with 250 other people”

But one day later during SXSW Music I received a paltry,

Via Foursquare: “You are checked in with 6 other people.”

What changed? The hotel was just as crowded, if not more so during music, but it’s pretty obvious that the music folk are less inclined to geek-out. I was surprised how many of my friends, ones who even had foursquare and Twitter accounts, didn’t really understand how to use them, or how they could be valuable to their business. Also, I was surprised how many of my friends had normal cell phones where the only app was SMS.

So, I’d like to share how you can get involved with foursquare, Twitter and Facebook using any mobile phone.

foursquare

1) Sign up for a foursquare account

2) Sign in and click “Settings” -> Under Account Info click “edit” -> Add your phone number

3) Check-in via a text to 50500 (like this:  @ Starbucks ! Spending too much money on coffee.)

Extras: From the web, you can visit the mobile address on the web to check-in, or use the desktop application FoursquareX which has a cool map view and plots your friend’s avatars around your location. (note: the SMS feature is only available in the US at the moment).

Twitter

1) Sign up for a Twitter account (duh)

2) “Settings” -> “Mobile” -> Add your mobile number

3) Send an SMS to Twitter at: 40404 (or for an international numbers)

4) Go back to “Settings” -> “Mobile” to decide who you will receive tweets from, or you can set it up as DMs only

Facebook

1) “Account settings” -> “Mobile” -> Add your number and preferences, click save

2) SMS “f” (with the quotes) to 32665 (FBOOK)

3) After you receive the confirmation text your status to 32665 “@ OMG. I’m Awesome”

As of March 2010, BING has 11.5% share (and growing) of the U.S. search market – which is a fairly big deal. So, how did they convince people that they needed Bing?

“We knew people were really happy with Google. So we asked ourselves, ‘How can we introduce a product that no body thinks they need?’, began Stefan Weitz (Director of Search at Microsoft). For the first time, the team fearlessly dove into these types of questions in a public panel: what followed was a degree of candor and humanness that’d I don’t think anyone would ever associate with Microsoft.

Bing and Farmville

Bing used a Cost-Per-Engagement (CPE) model (as opposed to the traditional CPM model) as a way to engage with their audience:

The fact is, more people use Farmville than Twitter. And they use in a different way, “more like a drug”. This gave the Bing team the idea to use the Farmville platform as a way to tell people about Bing. So, in exchange for learning a little bit about Bing, they offered fans some extra Farmville cash.

Bing’s results from using a CPE model with Farmville:

• Over 72% of users who clicked on the engagement became fans
• 59,000 users published the story to their newsfeed, extending the message across their network.
• Over 70,070 clicks were received on published feeds; on average each published story received more than 1 click.
• We received 400,000 new fans on Facebook within the first 24 hours

“The amount of engagement and feedback we received just from this community was enormous, because these people got exposed to us in a way that mattered to them. We’re not necessary moving past the CPM model, but there is something very important about cost per engagement”, explained the team.

Bing #Win, Big #Fail

The Bing team told stories of their triumphs: like the Bing Jingle Contest which was “something we just did as a lark”, yet resulted in a swarm of great press. #Win

But shortly after, when a group of high schoolers planned to perform the Bing jingle, the Bing team “innocently” shipped them a box of tshirts. Weitz explained the problem, “We saw this as an opportunity to engage with these students, but we went over the line. It felt inauthentic and overproduced. And when the video surfaced on Youtube we received a lot of negative press.” #Fail

5 Social Marketing Lessons From The Launch of Bing

1) You know nothing. Social media is one of the wackiest eco systems in the world, comparable to when the butterfly flaps its wing. The media circles that we gave the most attention to weren’t the same ones that gave us the most coverage and exposure.

2) When you screw up. Admit it quickly. Bing tweeted an ad for Victoria Secret’s mentioning that the girls were giving “VD advice” (Valentine’s day?). “What would have been a PR disaster 10 years ago, was covered up in 10 minutes by apologizing: ‘Oops! Our mistake.’ We laughed along with the Twittersphere and they calmed down.”

3) Have personality. As an example they give Zappos’ amazingly funny Social Media Guru video.

4) People want stories, not feature lists. The Bing team received an email from a 100-year old Cardiologist in Florida which read,”I want to thank you for naming your search engine after me.” To which they thought, “Well, clearly this person is crazy.” They followed up on the story, and met with Dr. Bing in Florida, only to find that not only was he unbelievably sane, but full of fascinating stories. The team went on to commission a documentary about his life which was shown at Sundance last year.

5) Give a Shit. People know when you’re not being authentic. People know when you’re pitching them.

The BING panel at SXSW: Aaron Lilly, Lynn Girotto, Stefan Weitz, Ian Schafer

Slides are available on SlideShare.

More information about the BING panel can be found on the SXSW site.

*On Gmail invitations: “The invite model wasn’t a marketing idea, we were just afraid that it wouldn’t scale it. It’s interesting that now this model is being used by other companies as a marketing strategy.”

*On project management: “One thing we do to make the projects fun is give it nick names. Like, for one project it was called “taco town”!  Having nick names like this gave us a sense of community through laughter: it made it fun to say things like, “Let’s take a look at ‘spicy chilli chese’”.

*On criticism: After hearing danah boyd’s criticism of Google Buzz and Privacy at yesterday’s SXSW keynote (i.e. “google assumed that people wanted their social network in their email”) the GMAIL team admitted to their mistakes and has decided to invite her to speak at the Googleplex in the near future.

*On the power of visual persuasion: “People thought that Gmail got faster when we changed the color.”

*On the speed of Gmail: The team discussed at length their strategy to improve latency issues within Gmail. Essentially speed is always top priority: all new features go through testing to make sure latency isn’t added along with the feature. Added latency can kill a new feature. Latency (along with debugging) is one of the critical reasons they deployed Google Labs (allowing users to add/test new features).

*On technology: “We have this amazing technology called ‘work really, really hard’”.

Why didn’t you come to SXSW in person?
“If I come to the US I will get so sued that I won’t get out of the US for quite a while.”

Could The Pirate Bay be shutdown now?
“No, you’d have to shut down the domain or something, but even then it’d become ‘thepiratebay2′ or ‘dotpiratebay’. So it’s really not possible.”

Are you going to end up in jail?
“No we’re not going to end up in jail. There is no question about it, we’re going to win the appeal. And if we don’t win in the appeal, then there is another appeal, and another appeal.”

Will The Pirate Bay ever release its source code?
“I wouldn’t ever want that because it sucks. But if you did you could just ask the police. It’s public info and they have it and you could talk to that person, but the person in charge of that investigation works for Warner Brothers so good luck.”

What do you do for a living since you have no money?
“We got seed capital for flattr about a week ago, until then we couldn’t afford chairs. And so now we have chairs.”

What is the future of The Pirate Bay?
“There is nothing going on our side, there is no one still working with it. I think it has a soul, that reboots itself from time to time. And as far as acquisitions, there is nothing happening. It just kind of died out.”

Is the Pirate Bay Evil?
“Not everything people do is good – people make Coca Cola and some people want it and some people don’t, but we don’t outlaw it.”

So is the Pirate Bay like Coca-Cola?
“No, the Pirate Bay is more like sugar – it’s bad for you but you can’t stop using it. Bad because you get sued for it”

Eric Frank began the night with a detailed explanation about his mission to make online text books for university students free and affordable. Frank co-founded the company Flat World Knowledge which claims to offer “online books by leading experts, peer-reviewed and free.” He pointedly addressed the problem as one that reaches beyond the frugal student:

The textbook industry is supporting a disruptive business model in which the burden is not only put on students, but is just as equally felt by teachers. In order to turn a profit the publishers push out new editions of text books – almost annually. This forces teachers to restructure their lesson plans.

Flat World Knowledge offers their books under a freemium model: the online copy is free for everyone, a printed copy runs about $40 (and all the content is distributed under a CC license). The concept was loudly applauded by the audience, but during the Q&A there were many questions regarding the credibility of the authors and the quality of the peer-review.

One key element missing from the Flat World Knowledge library is that they will never be able to share books that are already under copyright (which is about 99% of all texts). And it’s here that Google Book Search – which brazenly vows “to organize all the [books in the worlds'] information and make it universally accessible and useful” – could potentially cut deep into the future of online textbooks. With only 20 text books available at the moment, Flat World Knowledge has an ambitious road ahead of them. But perhaps by focusing on one field (whether it’s economics, foreign languages or history) they would be able to focus and lead that particular segment.

Later in the evening Neeru Paharia presented her work in developing the free online university: Peer 2 Peer University. More info about P2PU is available at the site: http://p2pu.org/

Paharia was followed by a panel of K-12 technologists/educators: David Bill and Arvind Grover – who also happen to be organizers for this weekend’s TEDxNYED event – and Kerri Richardson Redding, Director of Academic Technology at the Brooklyn Friends School. One of the most fascinating parts of this conversation was the stories from the classroom. Grover explained,

Our kids were REALLY confused about citations. They don’t really know the difference between Google and the places that Google takes you. This girl had done a wonderful job on this poetry project, and at the end of this long paper she had one citation: ‘Google.com’.

Grover teaches lessons about Creative Commons and copyright in the classroom precisely because in a multi-modal, remix society, knowing how to propery attribute a creative work to it’s original author is essential with how we communicate and share ideas. Grover continued with a anecdote about when his students were asked to be the creators,

When my students began the project they’d say things like, “I want to be paid for my work”, and “We’re going to make a million dollars!” So in this situation, as the creator, they’re quick to opt for traditional copyright.

He introduced one example of a girl who took a picture of a lock (see photo) and continued, “but then we debated whether someone will really pay money… for THIS! (referring to the picture of the lock). In his classroom he didn’t force his students to adopt a Creative Commons license, but eventually he found that his students would rather share their work and be part of something. “The biggest thing for students is being part of something”, concluded Grover, “And they – more so than their parents – came to understand that there is value in sharing content under a Creative Commons license.”

Client: The Black Eyed Peas / Bacardi
Agency: Maverick Digital
Responsibilities: WordPress, CSS, PHP, Photoshop
Project Description: The official tour blog for the Black Eyed Peas’ E.N.D Tour
URL: http://www.theendtour.com

Client: American Express
Responsibilities: Project Management, CSS, Photoshop, HTML
Project Description: Developing the monthly email newsletter for American Express.

Thanks to all the speakers and participants for their great contributions to this event! The videos will be online soon, and many of our reports are already online:

• Matthijs ten Berge, “Find ways that we can engage us with our public space”
• Martijn de Waal, Improving Cultural Public Space
• Gijs Gootjes & MediaLAB Amsterdam
• Cell Phone Disco @ Urban Screens