Expression Engine and publishing platforms

A propos of my previous post. . . In a funny twist of timing, Jonathan Weber, my former employer at New West, just wrote a column in the Times of London in which he reflects on exactly the issue of Expression Engine vs. other publishing tools that I touched on in my welcome post.

I am somewhat amused by his wondering whether he made the right choice in building on EE — I sure hope he’s happy enough with it, since I was a primary driver of that call — but I think his results so far speak for themselves. And ultimately he comes to the right conclusions, which are that these things are still way too hard to use and “way” not good enough for non-developers to really customize.

Though he refers to Yahoo! and Google as wanting to own this space (and we certainly have pounded a few collective stakes in the ground there), I still see lots of room for innovation from the edges. Last weekend at Gnomedex, I got a demo and met the founder of a product called Wetpaint, which is a really easy-to-use, pretty, WYSIWYG version of Typepad, and its getting easier to blend 3rd-party developer tools with many platforms due to entries from PostApp (aka WidgetBox), Ning, and the like. Just a couple of examples among many; I look forward to seeing more emerge.