A Present for Your Friday

Some of you may be aware that Derek Allard and I spent the last two weeks at a make-shift office in Bend, working on some of the more difficult challenges in developing 2.0.  Or maybe you just noticed our absence from the forums the past few weeks.  Either way, people want to know what we’re up to, and we often get asked “How is 2.0 coming along?” Well, the three-day weekend seems as good a time as any to give a micro-update on the progress of the next major version of ExpressionEngine.

The short answer is that it’s coming along nicely.  The long(er) answer is that we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us, but that the majority is behind us.  ExpressionEngine is a huge application, and as Derek Allard and I are building the control panel essentially from scratch, we’re taking the unique opportunity we have to do a line-by-line audit of old code before slapping it into new controllers and models.  It’s a time consuming process, and to borrow a phrase from D’Allard, “it’s not sexy work”.  But the advantages are clear, both to the end user, and to ourselves and third party developers, making it worth the time and labor.

ExpressionEngine 2.0 is primarily about the technology leap being made with respect to its architecture (running on CodeIgniter), and a complete overhaul of the control panel UI.  That’s no small thing of course, as that means both the server side and client side code are changing dramatically, even if there aren’t any new features to add to a particular process.  But we still have a number of tricks up our sleeve for you that we think will revolutionize your workflow when building and maintaining sites.  I leave you today with one such nugget, a small insignificant thing, but something we think will be quite helpful and a time saver during the install process.