Agency Primer Notes: CMS Smackdown, all over but the plug-ins

Agency Primer: CMS Shootout – WordPress and Expression Engine from The Nerdery on Vimeo.

Promotors of last week’s WordPress vs. Expression Engine webinar hinted that there could be blood. Two Nerdery programmers trained hard for this CMS bout. They drank raw eggs and ran stairs, and then a nationwide audience of agencies tuned in for what turned out to be a rather amicable exchange. Or was it? Watch Thursday’s rematch above.

Here is a list of recommended plug-ins for  both content management systems, with WordPress plug-ins submitted by (in this corner) Anthony Lukes, and Expression Engine plug-in faves from (challenger) Brian Litzinger.

WordPress  plug-ins:

Dagon Form Mailer - This is my (Anthony’s) personal favorite because it’s easy to customize and it supports file attachments. Another favorite of mine is Contact Form 7.

Flutter CMS - This plugin allows for easy assigning of different data types and for easy custom page templating.

NavT Navigation Management Plug-in - This plug-in allows you to manage and customize your site’s navigation system.

Inline PHP - This allows you to insert php code into the text editor.

All in One SEO Pack - Pump up your SEO. Customize page titles, meta keywords, and descriptions. This works out of the box and can be fine-tuned for super-users.

Google XML Sitemaps - Generates an XML sitemap of your site to better your search rankings with Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask.

Akismet (comes with WordPress) - This helps keep spammers from posting comments on your blog.

NextGEN Gallery - Great photo gallery plug-in. Not an essential for every site, but this is a really well built plug-in that’s too good not to mention.

And in this corner, recommended Expression Engine plug-ins:

Structure - It forgoes the current template_group/template setup and creates “static” and “listing” pages that can be edited through a tree sitemap view. Traditional page style content and multiple entry pages can live within the same area.

Image Sizer - Resizes images as specified in EE tag and caches the resized image in the cache folder. If you update the original image, a new resized version is created. If the image is not on the server the tag will not return anything. The architecture is setup to only process images when needed.

FieldFrame - A framework for rapid development of fieldtype extension, FieldFrame will be included as part of EE 2 core when 2.1 is released.

nGen File Field - nGen File Field is a field type for the FieldFrame framework that adds a custom field type allowing you to upload files from the Publish/Edit interface, and also functions as part of the FF Matrix. This extension is useful for creating galleries and downloading libraries.

“No mas … no mas.” – Roberto Duran