I just saw today that pMachine, maker of the pMachine Pro web publishing software (think Movabletype based on PHP instead of Perl), has released a public beta for ExpressionEngine, their new web publishing product. Looking at its list of features, it seems very impressive. Some of the things that caught my eye:
- Customized work-flows for entries (first draft, revision, final edit, etc.)
- Search engine friendly URLs (no ugly links with &’s and ?’s)
- Powerful templates, including sub-templates and version control
- Modular caching of pages, sections of pages, and database info
- Comprehensive tracking (referrer, hit, statistical, and online user tracking)
To be honest, this product would probably be overkill for this site. I could see this working for the EduTech site though. The price seems right, at $199 for a commercial license and $149 for an education/non-profit license. My only concern, and it’s a big one, is how this could/would interact with the registration/evaluation applications I’m developing. Things could get really complex and unmanageable really fast. I’m more for keeping things as simple as possible!