Wordpress vs pMachine

pMachine was a blogging application which dates back to 2003, in fact this was the base version of what is known today as the Expression Engine.  pMachine was developed by Ellislab, back then this great blogging tool already had several functions which were kept and fine tuned into Expression engine, some of them are the ability to manage multiple blogs and keep their profile separate as well as their behavior for user interfaces, forum modules were already included in pMachine and kept in Expression Engine, lets take a look at the features that pMachine offered back then in comparison with Wordpress.

Admin Interface:

The administration interface for pMachine was very simple, definitively not what it is today’s Expression Engine however several features were transferred and better organized in recent versions however some features were lost during the transition and in order to patch those holes Expression Engine created several plugins but as far as the admin setting and visual configuration Expression Engine was improved from its previous version (pMachine)

Lost Features:

As we have mentioned the transition from pMachine to Expression Engine was not completely smooth since some features had to be left out, one of them was called pMachine’s pBlocks, this feature allowed pMachine to rotate content throughout the blog, for instance a user might have had a series of headers which needed to be rotated every time the user change pages, with this feature each file was shown after a page reload, several other file types were allowed to rotate throughout the site, in Expression Engine the only solution is to use a plugin referred to as a randomizer which rotates “small” content.

Wordpress has many plugins and utilities which allow users to rotate all types of content during visits, this functionality can be added to a blog using the right plugin because as you may know Wordpress ships with only a couple of default plugins.

Useful Features Kept:

One of the useful features which were kept during the upgrade is the mailing lists were administrators are able to send emails to all of the contacts and members who have provided their email addresses during registration, this useful feature is able to keep track of emails sent to the group in what is called a cache.  This feature is actually not found in Wordpress but as any other feature it can be added with a custom plugin.

pMachine’s search engine was also kept and improved in Expression Engine since it is quite effective for small keyword searches, it is very fast as well; Wordpress also has built in search engines which allow visitors to find the content they are looking for fast, in some cases the search engine may not work due to outdated themes or installations.

The statistics feature was kept as well, some of the stats which pMachine users were able to show are: the number of members, comments, weblog entries, most popular weblog entries, etc. pMachine administrators were also able to show lists of entries submitted by each member in their profile page.

As you see there have been several functions and features kept while upgrading from pMachine to today’s Expression Engine, when you compare EE with Wordpress the only obstacle you might have to overcome is Expression Engine’s pricing, besides that EE is a great blogging tool to use.

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