EllisLab CEO on EE Growth and Challenges

There’s a thread in the EE Forums that has been going on since mid August. It started as a complaint that someone lost a gig because it required an open source CMS and questioned why EE isn’t open source along with some ideas on why that might be a good idea (growth).

Rather than go on a tangential rant about why making EE open source is a bad response to the problem, let’s just say I disagree.

I kept tabs on this thread because I found it interesting but it was mostly a lot of arguments and thoughts we’ve heard before. I certainly share some of the concerns that were laid out in the sprawling conversation but most of it felt like a rehash.

Until Leslie Camacho (EllisLab CEO) chimed in yesterday with a thoughtful response to some of the conversation. You should definitely go read it for yourself. Leslie had contributed earlier in the thread but this response hit a few points that I think have been sore spots for EllisLab and others.

First, on the popularity of ExpressionEngine and its growth. Leslie states that EE is one of the top systems (and the top paid system) and cites the Built With CMS Usage Statistics to back that up and that competing with open source is exactly the wrong thing to do.

In terms of selling EE vs. open source, its true that open source’s reach is way beyond EE. It always has been. However, I want to point out that EE is the #1 commercial CMS and 3rd party tools like Built-with back up this claim. This is especially true in the top 10,000 websites. Note that they count vBulletin in there, but its a forum system first.

Interesting to note that he also mentioned that the way EllisLab grows isn’t going to work forever.

Most websites use a custom system or no system at all. In terms of room for growth, its huge still. In other words, I’m most concerned with “how we grow” because that will make all the difference. I think our current business model and approach is at its peak and will stop being as effective as its has been within the next 12-18 months. We’re going to be ready to make that switch.

He didn’t really get into specifics about what would cause the growth to change but I’m sure the vagueness caused a few developers and businesses with a lot of skin in the EE game to get concerned. That being said, EllisLab wants to survive just as much (hell, more) than someone making her living selling related products and services, so I wouldn’t worry too much here.

On the exploding add-on development community and the intermittent whining on Twitter and elsewhere about how much EE costs with the most popular add-ons included.

I just didn’t anticipate that people would praise our community but hate on EllisLab for enabling the very thing they love the most about EE, a killer 3rd party professional dev community.

Some people then assume that we, EllisLab, aren’t doing anything significant. We don’t get credit for building and maintaining a platform that let’s things like Assets, Structure, Channel Images, Super Search etc… possible. Those awesome tools exist because we made EE in such a way that those tools could exist and thrive with no hacks and we work very hard to continue to improve it as such.

Leslie, you don’t get credit for this work from everyone but you certainly do get it from the people that can recognize the effort. Maybe we just don’t speak up enough against the haters. Honestly, battling the haters just gets tiresome after a while.

To wrap up, Leslie noted 4 things that EL knows are a problem with EE:

1. The installer.
2. The CP.
3. Support.
4. Stability (aka bugs)

I don’t think anyone can argue that those are 4 things that need some attention. I agree that the installer could use some work but it’s not that bad. Sure, installing Drupal is a nicer experience but installing EE isn’t hard…at all.

As far as the CP goes, it definitely needs some more tweaking but it has come a long, long, long way since the original beta release. Last month I upgraded Mijingo to EE 2.2 and it made a huge difference.

A quick anecdote on EE2. Recently I worked on a client project where we added an additional site to their EE1 MSM installation. The total sites now exceeds 20. Because they have an existing, stable system in place there’s no rush to upgrade them to EE2. So, I had to build this new site on EE1. And, let me tell you, it was a drag and I missed EE2 badly. I missed the great add-ons, the comfort of working in the CP and how much easier it is to create add-ons. In this case, the grass isn’t always greener on the other side. It’s greener on the EE2 side.