Review: Expanse CMS 1.3

I reviewed Expanse a while back and had a few critical things to say, but a lot of hope for the future. Nate Cavanaugh, a developer of Expanse read the review and took to heart a few of my concerns. Seriously. Version 1.3 made some of the changes that I and others had commented on. Which goes to show that the development team of Expanse is responsive and concerned about their customer’s needs, which is one of the factors by which I judge software. A+ in that category. So, fantastic support aside, let’s look at the software itself.

Overview: Expanse is a CMS designed for artists, by artists, with the basic purpose of allowing for a portfolio, news, press releases and the ability to sell pieces and prints using Paypal. It includes a contact form and a simple, yet powerful back end for managing all of these features.

The first change I noticed since my last review was the ability to reorder the categories. Besides being able to turn on or off the main categories, select which one displays first and add your own, you can now drag them around to determine the order. Very nice.

Next, the gallery adds some functionality that improves the user experience through a touch of well-placed AJAX goodness. You can re-order your images, galleries, etc. through the same prototype drag feature. Mass uploading and easy description adding round out a very nice gallery.

The fact that a CMS finally exists that doesn’t require extensive hacking to incorporate a gallery is enough to warrant looking into Expanse. The fact that they went above and beyond to make it as user-friendly as possible warrants a second look. And the fact that the whole thing is template based and allows for absolutely, completely standards based code is simply a miracle.

The administration is well organized and simple to navigate. That’s important for my clients. I’ve had to hack functions out of CMS systems before just to avoid confusion. That’s not a problem here. Even the included WYSIWYG editor is satisfactory to me, and that’s extremely rare.

This CMS is not an all purpose solution, but on the occasions where it has fit the bill it has been my absolute favorite answer to client needs. To that end, it even has built in mechanisms to allow for re-branding the back-end so as to avoid the confusion of providing clients with software that doesn’t have your company’s name on it. Once again, very nice.

If I’m critical of anything at this point, it’s the advanced documentation. Nate has mentioned a few advanced features in the logic templates that could probably be expanded on in the documentation. There is however, an excellent templating system and the documentation that does exist allows for amazing possibilities.

The plugin architecture seems to be there. The plugins are missing, though, and that’s probably largely due to the price tag on Expanse ($29.99 right now). The open-source Wordpress has a plethora of plugins because they’ve created a playground for novice and expert coders to hack away and create in. Expanse hasn’t developed that yet, so plugin development is largely going to fall in the lap of the product’s developers. Which may be what they’re looking for. At this point, the system is exactly what they promised and isn’t, in my opinion, really lacking anything that a plugin would fix. There is a lot of functionality that could be added through plugins in the future, but I’m wonderfully satisfied with both the capabilities and the back end functionality of the system for the purposes of setting up a portfolio site with Paypal options for a client.

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