I’ve been playing with the 14-day free trial version of Expression Engine.  I wasn’t able to install it on my hosting account because the trial version uses Zend Optimizer to encrypt/obfuscate their PHP source.  Unfortunately, Zend Optimizer required root access for installation.  The fully licensed version will not have this problem, though.

In the meantime I installed the trial on my Linux system at home and created two weblogs.  I then imported all the entries from this site as well as The Bitch Girls into those weblogs and set about trying to figure out their template system.  While you can create multiple weblogs in Expression Engine, you have to do a lot of template customization to make those weblogs truly separate.  I think I’ve finally gotten it all figured out, at least in terms of how to code the templates.

There appears to be some kind of problem with the archive page, though.  It just displays the year and month and then nothing.  I will check the support forums to see if this is a known problem or if there is a fix.

I’m not sure if I’ll be implementing Expression Engine anytime soon, but I wanted to give it a try to see if it would be useful.  So far, though, it’s far superior in terms of posting performance in that no rebuilds have to be done for new posts or when changing templates/layout.  Also, comments seem to work faster than with MT.  However, this all comes at the price of being a little harder on the server since all pages are dynamic and require DB access to display them.  In a typical installation, using PHP as an Apache module, this would be mitigated somewhat by caching.  However, my webhost’s default configuration is to run PHP as a CGI process.  This provides better security in that they use a SUEXEC wrapper to allow the CGI process to run under my user ID rather than the ID of the server.  This allows for better file access control (i.e. you don’t have to set files and directories with 666 or 777 permissions) at the expense of the loss of caching.  I may try setting up my home system to run PHP as a CGI process to see how that affects performance.  I’d hate to finish the evaluation and buy the product only to find that it performs poorly in the actual production environment.