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ExpressionEngine 2.2, Add-on Developer Preview

I have had discussions with many of you (add-on developers) over the last couple of months and one of the things that you have asked for is a clear path to getting preview copies of ExpressionEngine so that you can adjust your add-ons prior to a major release.

This year we want to have an official Developer Program, but while we work that out we want to make sure everyone that needs it has access to a Developer Preview, starting immediately with EE 2.2.

This is specifically for EE Add-on Developers only. If you develop add-ons for EE publicly or privately, you qualify to participate. To get the EE 2.2 Dev Preview, please:

1. Complete this NDA and make sure to name similar to firstnamelastname.fileextension
2. Email Marcus with the subject “EE2.2 Dev Preview” from an email associated with an ExpressionEngine.com account that has support access and/or a Commercial license.
3. Include a link to your add-on site or otherwise provide proof to us that you are an add-on developer.
4. Make sure to include your ExpressionEngine.com username.
5. We’ll send you a link to grab the EE 2.2 Developer Preview copy.

If you develop add-ons, here is why you want a copy (the following courtesy of Greg Aker).

“We have made some significant changes in user auth, refined sessions, and completed even more work on the File Manager.

General changes:

• Added a temporary workaround that broke some addons using $this→EE→load→_ci_view_path
• Added getters/setters for the session cache
• Added an auth library that handles all user authentication.
• More File Manager refinements, including resizing on the publish page and renaming duplicate files.

Going forward, we would like to be a little more strict on enforcing public/private/protected class vars and methods. This is unfortunately a slow process in moving a PHP4 codebase to PHP5, so if you are using these, please let us know what getters/setters you might need. However, if you’re looking over code and see either:

or

assume they are private.

We’re planning to take a hard look at hooks with an eye toward adding in needed ones- though as always, we’ll proceed with caution. We’ll be evaluating the ideas in these threads that we already know about:

http://expressionengine.com/forums/viewthread/185398/P18/
http://www.solspace.com/docs/detail/date_field_filter_extension_hook/

We’re also considering:
a. Adding a hook to login (if it doesn’t already exist) so members can use facebook/twitter/LDAP/AD Auth if they want.
b. Adding a hook that allows manipulation of file metadata prior to insert in order to add extra data.

Any additional ideas, or elaborations on the above ideas, are welcome. We’d like to get the hooks squared away early in the sprint and another developer build out sooner rather than later. Which is a long way of saying- the sooner you chime in on the above, the more likely it will impact the code this sprint.

The public release of ExpressionEngine 2.2 is tentatively slated for late June and we have a code freeze planned for June 9 (one week from today). Anything that doesn’t make it into EE 2.2 will be considered for EE 2.2.x updates and/or EE 2.3.

Thanks in advance for your participation and if you have specific suggestions of what you want to see in a developer program, please let me know.