Buzz Marketing with Blogs: PMachine Announces a Ma-a-a-jor Upgrade to Expression Engine

PMachine Announces a Ma-a-a-jor Upgrade to Expression Engine

Why always on a Friday? So, Pmachine, the company that makes Expression Engine, announced today that version 1.4 is available. Oy, where to start? Well, first of all, this is an upgrade from 1.3.2 to 1.4, but it looks like there are MANY, MANY changes. Lots to absorb.

Why always on a Friday? So, Pmachine, the company that makes Expression Engine, announced today that version 1.4 is available.

Oy, where to start? Well, first of all, this is an upgrade from 1.3.2 to 1.4, but it looks like there are MANY, MANY changes. Lots to absorb.

But the changes seem to be in three main categories: pricing, the user interface, and what I’m going to call “Other”

PRICING

Unlike every other company in the world that start off free and then switch to a paid model—PMachine originally only offered Expression Engine for sale, but they’ve gone and are now offering a free version.

In a nutshell, if you’re using it for personal use, and you are happy with their core system, go download it now!

If you’re a personal blogger but want the whole version, they lowered (yes, lowered) the price to $100 (it was $150).

If you’re a commercial blogger, it’s still $250. Personally, I think this is a bit of a steep jump, but on the other hand, I like the simplicity, and instead of penalizing people for being popular or having multiple authors or blogs, they’ve made a pretty clear line: if you’re making money, they make money too. OK, fair enough.

Read the whole pricing message here. Incidentally, you other companies out there, when you make a big change in the price of your product, do write a nice explanatory note like this—it makes everyone feel better.

One last note: the free version comes with no technical support. But a) you can pay an EE developer to help you, and they’d probably get tech support because they have a paid license, and b) the best EE support is on the forums anyway, so I don’t really see how EE is going to avoid the indirect burden of supporting the free version. They’re hoping to make it up by folks who convert to the full product, which I think will happen.

USER INTERFACE

I’ll be honest. I haven’t had time to play with the UI much. But here are the features that you’re going to really like:

Relational custom fields. So you can have a custom list of products, or sizes, or colors, or keywords, etc. etc. for use in your main blog. (Is there any other blogging software that does this? I think not)
Entry versioning. Roll back to early versions of a post. (Again, who else offers this? No one.)
Multiple entry editing—make changes to more than one entry at the same time (but they don’t explain how this works...)
They tweaked the admin look and feel again. I gotta say, I wasn’t a fan of the 1.3 look; this one seems a little better, but just a little.
Adding new categories directly from an individual entry (finally!)

I’ll be looking at all of these in depth, and figuring out what they’ve still got left to do, in the future. (Check back!)

OTHER

Gosh, everything from a search term log to a new online manual to…

per-item view tracking
more better controls many different tags.
better conditionals (for templates that react to varying input and output)
mailing list templates (oh, thank goodness)
more spell checking
slightly better comment controls (but trackbacks still seem to be second-class citizens)
more photo gallery controls
more member profile thingies

There are two super-powerful things that I’m going to have to investigate. One, the previously mentioned relational custom fields, make this finally far more than just a blogging tool. This is now a CMS that calls itself a blogging tool. The other is the new Extension manager that exposes the inner core of the tool to anyone without needing to hack the actual source files. If this sounds greek to you, well, it means that your developer will be more likely to fix that niggling behavior that you want customized, because he knows that it’ll be easy and portable and less likely to break things.

MIA

What is PMachine still missing? Well, off the top of my head, the category tag isn’t changed at all, and it needed a lot more options to be truly useful. And the ping process doesn’t give enough feedback. One horrible thing—the 1.3.2 version of the manual is now gone, so if you have a question about how tags USED to work, well, you’re outta luck, as they say.

And there’s still no Skype field for members and… but at this point, I feel like I’m complaining that there’s a scuff on the hull of my nuclear submarine. It’s not perfect, but it’s a serious piece of work.

In any case, I know what I’ll be up to this weekend…

Posted by Travis Smith on 12/17 at 12:37 AM •

Comments

Well, they said that unless you have a paid version, you won’t be able to post in certain forums (let’s just hope others won’t be abused for that). But yes, there’s probably going to be more traffic on the forums. Not necessarily a bad thing, mind you.

Posted by Ingmar on 12/17 at 01:05 AM
Another powerful feature...advanced conditionals. And they work in the Query module too.

Posted by PXLated on 12/17 at 03:31 AM
And there’s still no Skype field for members…

Why not just add a custom field to your user profiles? Not their stock but quite easy to add.

Posted by Brian Z. on 12/17 at 09:15 AM
Oh my, what an idiot. Perhaps you should turn on captchas.

Posted by Ingmar on 02/14 at 03:59 AM