EE in the Wild: Anton Peck

As promised last week, here is another personal website running ExpressionEngine. This time I bring you Anton Peck, a designer and illustrator. Anton recently re-launched his site on ExpressionEngine and uses it to display and promote his illustration and power his art blog and journal.

I asked Anton about his experience building his site with ExpressionEngine and he was kind enough to provide some background.

Why did you choose ExpressionEngine?

I chose EE after using just about every other system out there. I pretty much had three options:

1. Systems that were too narrow. Blogging platforms that needed massive “hacking” to turn them into something else.
2. Systems that seemed powerful enough, but appeared to have just been abandoned, and had very little community behind them.
3. Systems that far too complex in features and structure, requiring heavier PHP lifting than I was willing to do.

EE seemed to fit me well and had none of the above drawbacks. As a designer, I liked the language. I also liked not having to hack it right out of the box to do what I wanted. As my skills grew, I could let the system (and how I build my site) grow with me. What sold me was the community, I couldn’t believe how supportive everyone was when it came to working with EE. It’s like a family with them.

What challenges did you face while building your site?

The only real challenge (and even then it wasn’t too bad at all) I had was altering the stock RSS template into something that looked like how it needed to in various feed readers. This included making sure the site name showed up, proper links, and the ability to merge multiple weblogs with custom fields into the XML stream by using conditionals to test for the existence of a {summary}.

Did you use any add-ons? If so, which ones?

No add-ons for me. I actually purged as much as I could (I used to run quite a few) and developed the site as clever as possible with just the built-in goods.