If you paste text from MS Word, the proprietary characters (like curly quotes) are automatically converted to HTML equivalents.

URLs posted in entries or comments can be turned into hyperlinks automatically.

For individual entries, pMachines uses the following fields:

• Title
• URL Title
• Summary (optional)
• Body (default option)
• Extended Text (optional)

Formatting options:

• bold
• i
• u
• bq
• strike

Additional options:

• Link
• Image

Separate options for entire entry:

• Check Spelling
• Glossary

You can choose to require membership to post comments, or allow non-registered commenting.

Comment Moderation

You can optionally make user comments subject to admin approval.

Mult-protocol Support

ExpressionEngine supports the three major email protocols: Mail, SendMail, and SMTP.

Flexible Email Options

HTML email, priorities, word wrapping, CC, BCC and any combination of recipients, from member groups, to individuals, to members of your mailing list.

Mailing List Manager

ExpressionEngine comes with an integrated double opt-in/opt-out mailing list module that supports multiple lists and a custom template for each list.

Mail Caching

All emails are saved so you can keep a record of your sent messages.

Batch Mode Processing

This feature permits you to send email to very large lists without needing a dedicated email server.

Put "e-mail this article" and "printer-friendly" links on every article page, allowing your users to conveniently share and save the content.

Article bylines are automatically linked to allow users to e-mail the author. As a spam-prevention feature, you can set Big Medium to present users with an e-mail form instead of sharing the author's e-mail directly. Big Medium sends the e-mail behind the scenes, without sharing the e-mail address with the public.

Create editorial work-flow by creating statuses that you can assign your entries to, like "first draft", "revision", "final edit", etc. You can color-code them too.

Preview | Quick Save | Update buttons on data entry page

pMachines offers three date options:

• Entry Date
• Expiration Date
• Comment Expiration Date

You can set an expiration date and your entries will be removed from your site automatically on that date.

You can post entries into the future and they won't appear on your site until that date.

View your uploaded images in the convenient File Browser

Image Resizing and Thumbnailing

ExpressionEngine lets you resize images and create thumbnails, with support for the three major image manipulation protocols: GD, NetPBM, and ImageMagick.

Encourage your site's visitors to spend more time on your site by making it easier for them to find additional content. Big Medium can add a "latest articles" list to your article pages, allowing your visitors to browse links to the most recent articles from that section of the site.

Member Groups

You can define an unlimited number of Member Groups, each with over 40 individual user privileges. Each member of your community is assigned to a Member Group, determining what they are allowed to do.

Member Activation

Members can "self-activate" via email or you can validate accounts manually.

Advanced member profile management

Each member has their own profile management page, in which they can set preferences and update their personal information.

Subscription Manager

The member console allows your users to manage their email, comment, and RSS subscriptions.

Role based permission system - Drupal administrators don't have to tediously setup permissions for each user. Instead, they assign permissions to roles and then group like users into a role group.

ExpressionEngine is a true multi-user system. Each user can be granted a wide range of privileges, letting you define with precise control what each user is permitted to do.

Each entry can be assigned to multiple categories, and you can create as many unique category groups as you want.

News aggregator - Drupal has a powerful built-in News Aggregator for reading and blogging news from other sites. The News Aggregator caches articles to your MySQL database and it's caching time is user configurable.

A robust online help system for administrators, editors, reporters, and end-users.

Permalinks - All content created in Drupal has a permanent link or "perma link" associated with it so people can link to it freely without fear of broken links.

Personalization - A robust personalization environment is at the core of Drupal. Both the content and the presentation can be individualized based on user-defined preferences.

Polls - Drupal comes with a poll module which enables admins and/or users to create polls and show them on various pages.

Include pullquotes on your article pages to create colorful design elements and emphasize key ideas. Pullquotes are large-font snippets of text from the article that are inserted into the page with the article text flowing around them.

With RSS, your content can be made available for syndication. ExpressionEngine supports all major RSS formats, including the new Atom format.

Content syndication - Drupal exports your site's content in RDF/RSS format for others to gather. This lets anyone with a "News Aggregator" such as NetNewsWire or Radio UserLand browse your Drupal site from the comfort of their desktop.

Big Medium can present links to related information in a consistent location and format on every article page. Although you can also include an unlimited number of links within the text of the article as well, the "related links" section allows you to consolidate all links in a single place on the page for easy browsing.

You can create relationsihps between entries in different weblogs, enabling information to be shared.

The URLs produced by ExpressionEngine do not contain query strings which are disliked by search engines. Rather, they mimic the directory structure of static sites.

Searching - All content in Drupal is fully indexed and searchable at all times.

Weblog entries can be made "sticky", forcing them to always show up at the top of the page.

Each template represents an entire web page.

Templating - Drupal's theme system separates content from presentation allowing you to control the look and feel of your Drupal site. Templates are created from standard HTML and PHP coding meaning that you don't have to learn a proprietary templating language.

With our Embedded Template feature, any template can be nested within another template, allowing you to use common headers, footers, and other site elements. This feature is so flexible you can put templates within templates within templates within templates...

Tracking Features

Hit Tracking

Each template has it's own hit tracker, enabling you to see which pages are most viewed.

Statistical Tracking

ExpressionEngine tracks a variety of statistics, like total number of entries, total comments, total trackbacks, and more.

Online User Tracking

This features allows you to show who is online, how many people are visiting at any given moment, and how many people have ever visited your site.

Search Term Log

The search terms submitted by your users are saved so you can see what people are searching for.

Analysis, Tracking and Statistics - Drupal can print browser-based reports with information about referrals, content popularity and how visitors navigate your site.

A full-featured user commenting system is built in, supporting advanced features like moderation, membership, and the most full-featured anti-spam protection available.

Threaded comments - Drupal provides a powerful threaded comment model for enabling discussion on published content. Comments are hierarchical as in a newsgroup or forum.

[Note: I think we'll want to start this for the Issue Briefs (esp. the policy options) section.