XP is very powerful and yet flexible. It is really fast, it scales. It's also a breeze to setup locally. That it is built and documented to be molded into your liking is something that helps us adopt it across a broad team of developers with different preferences. It's JavaScript core makes it just a matter of reading about the APIs to understand how things work. You can use the CMS for rendering, go hybrid (my preference), or all headless. The docs are solid and gets you up and running, the community is there to help. Enonic as a company feels more than willing to implement feature requests and bug fixes, its always been a very fast and pleasant communication with the core team. The core developers are active in the community, you get first-hand insights and advice. Frequent releases with each having a rather big impact for both editors and developers. A small but feature-full ecosystem, you'll find stuff on the market for most things you'll need. The Page Editor is nice, you edit parts of your page with drag-and-drop and editors love it. For developers the way you built apps feels solid, each file and folder has a meaning and you need to config next to nothing as long as you learn the structure. Enonic CLI is a great addition for developers.
As all big platforms there's an overwhelming amount to understand and know about the platform to use it best. Feels like people tend to start using it in an odd way, making them gain less from the full potential. Docs can sometimes be too brief in some areas, or contain small errors that are hard to detect for the untrained eye. Getting expert developer help for longer times on the platform is very difficult. The Html-editor feels outdated where even Wordpress has been a smooth editing experience for many years, Content Studio's editor have very limited features in comparison. The Nashorn engine will be removed soon, it's been a pain point that everyone works around anyway. Also some long-missing features: you still can't do custom input types, custom html styles/classes in the editor, control where uploaded media goes, image handling is sub-optimal, can't schedule publishing of modified content, co-edit content.
We run multiple custom facing websites, also intranet. Usually a lot of React apps running in the middle using Enonic to stitch everything together. We run everything in Azure using Kubernetes.
- Very agile platform based on javascript that's easy for developers to use. - You're up and running with a server in a few minutes and it's just works. Migrating and exporting data is easy too. - Lots of plugins / Apps on the markedplace to solve common usecases like GA/GTM, SEO ++ - Forum and slack-channel for communcating directly with Enonic staff and other users and enterprise support option - Cloud based subscription - Open source and free
- Upgrading to new major versions requires a lot of work and testing and the more applications and sites you have the longer each major upgrade takes. - The backend implementation of how data is stored not optimal resulting in an ever growing folder of files and folders that are not in use. - None (or few) out of the box sites to use. You have to setup/develop everyting from scratch. - Content Studio feels like it's made by developes for developers and can be hard to use in some cases
One platform for all our cms needs and a more streamlined development processes.
- Good balance between being powerful and easy to use - A very "full-featured" CMS - I can develop in TypeScript (or JavaScript) with the npm ecosystem backend too, but use Java in cases where library support is better in Java - I feel I have to good palette of tools to create good experiences for my content creators in Content Studio
- Developers can experience a bit long build times (if you are using the WebKit starter). - The community isn't very large.
As a developer, I make both web pages and web applications with Enonic XP. I think I can work very effectively to create robust and enjoyable applications for my customers.
Adding new functionality to a site is quick and easy. XP makes for a flexible content tool, and allows us to build solid websites with a high level of self-reliance in our editorial staff. It integrates well with existing ecosystems. Having close ties with the developers and a short feedback loop is very valuable to us.
Using modern javascript tooling is possible but sometimes clumsy. We have React components working, and we use Typescript, Webpack, Babel, etc, but there is some overhead to the build pipeline. Build times are very fast out of the box, but after adding all the necessary layers needed to get these features working, we see increased wait times.
We use Enonic XP to import data and display new and updated content automatically. We use Content Studio to allow many users to edit and work with their content directly and in a faster way than before.