As someone who's done his fair share of ExpressionEngine development, the template system is a source of endless frustration as soon as you need to do anything remotely complex on the page or deal with user input. It is a great choice for blogging sites where a group of editors publish content to a site in predefined channels, but really falls down if you push it too hard.
Template processing is slow, processing order is wonky, and it's very easy to create N+1 query loops that can only be avoided by writing custom SQL queries/php. They also made some poor database structure choices in certain areas.
Mostly though it just boggles the mind why they put so much effort into creating a regex-based templating system when the app is already just PHP.
Still, probably the best CMS I've used and it certainly has its uses. I just wouldn't use it to develop anything complicated ever again.
> ...that have made the switch from EE to WP have loved it.
Might want to revise that to "from WP to EE."
Re:WordPress has left the building
by digitallimit0 on Tuesday January 10, 2012 @11:24PM
(#3450427)
Yeah, that confused my balls.
Here is a great blog post about the transition from WP to EE written by one of our designers - http://www.viget.com/inspire/wordpress-to-expressionengine/
and here is another unique EE site that shows the flexibility of its native theming system -
www.teamviget.com