Drupal vs. Expression Engine, pt3
Learning EE is an ongoing project. After having spent some time with the software, here are some impressions to share.
I have a tough time finding what I want in the documentation, particularly with regards to the template system. The template language also has some quirks that take some getting used to.
Drupal has a regular node structure, whereas in EE the articles, photo albums, file uploads, the wiki, and the forum all have “their own thing” - which makes EE’s back end/control panel a bit cluttered.
What I struggle most with, though, is mapping the sundry Drupal access control schemes like taxonomy_access and organic groups to EE templates. This is exacerbated by the way EE handles multiple sites running off a single install. In Drupal, each site gets a seperate database (or at least, a distinct table prefix), but in EE the database and all user accounts are shared. Our family site has public and private content and photos; even this simple binary scheme is harder to implement than I expected. I run another Drupal site with multiple organic groups, where members have widely differing permissions. Even though the painful upgrades of this site prompted me to look at EE in the first place, I’m not ready to tackle that migration just yet.