They want the ability to write in a familiar environment – Word usually – and copy and paste the outcome. So far, that means Plone or Joomla. Yet, when I see the content the editors produce – filled with font tags, extra p tags and numerous other tags that make it look like how they want – but fill up the HTML with crud.

I’ll check out ExpressionEngine.

A few months ago I bit the (smaller-than-expected) bullet and learned how to use the ExpressionEngine CMS (www.pmachine.com), and have never looked back. I no longer feel like I’m trying to drive in the wrong direction on a one-way street… I was even able to use more complex relational features for a books & quotes section on my blog. Moreover, it was by far the easiest CMS I tried in the area of customizing the design of my sites. I like to design my websites from scratch (very picky about this) & then sprinkle in CMS code wherever necessary, which is exactly what EE lets me do.

I can’t remember where I first heard about ExpressionEngine, but for me, EE has the perfect mix of features vs usability. With a little hacking, this spring I was even able to develop a database-driven multilingual site that served Chinese or Mandarin pages depending on a URL segment, which was marvelous — it would have been an enormous headache (and likely impossible) to get the same result with a less powerful tool.