EE in the Wild: Hivelogic

Long time developer and noted Ruby on Rails expert Dan Benjamin re-launched his popular Hivelogic website using ExpressionEngine. Yep, you read that right. A Rails developer running EE.

To be fair, Dan is also a pro PHP programmer, so it’s not that he’s new to running (or even building) systems like ExpressionEngine. It’s just that he finally decided to stop writing his own tools and use one that is mature, stable and maintained (by someone other than himself).

I’ve been building my own systems for 10 years and EE had everything I wanted. Using EE gave me an entry point to a system where I didn’t need to write my own software and I could focus on writing and producing content.

I’m happy to report that Dan used my ExpressionEngine Screencasts to get started and they seemed to serve him well. The website is fast under heavy traffic, functional and built according to normal EE development techniques.

To power Hivelogic, Dan is using almost a completely standard installation of ExpressionEngine. The only additional add-on he is using is Akismet, a necessity for combating comment spam. This, I think, is a testament to how powerful and flexible EE is out-of-the-box.

Let’s welcome Dan to the EE community!