ExpressionEngine 2.1.2: Leaner and Meaner
ExpressionEngine 2.1.2 is due out in December and will mark our last release of 2010. In addition to a solid number of bug fixes, I’d like to offer a glimpse of one of its new features right now.
If you’ve ever tried to modify our control panel themes, you know it can be an arduous task. Handing off a tweaked control panel to a client meant taking our default theme files, duplicating them completely and modifying just that one bit you needed to change. While this worked, it was inefficient and difficult to maintain, requiring you to constantly keep your customized theme in-step with ExpressionEngine’s oft-improving stock theme.
ExpressionEngine 2.1.2 introduces cascading control panel themes. Simply put, your tweaked theme need now only consist of the files you’ve actually modified. Let’s say you want to tweak a bit of markup on the Publish page for your client. Just create a new theme folder, let’s call it “my_theme”, and drop your modified publish.php into the my_theme/content folder. Voilà! No other files or folders required. Anything you haven’t provided will be automatically fetched from the default theme.
Cascading control panel themes also means that our Corporate and Fruit themes are now nothing more than CSS and images. The end result? An even leaner and meaner ExpressionEngine, with a faster and more robust control panel for you and your clients.
