SXSW 2009 Recap, Meeting Kaylee
Its difficult to believe that only a week ago we were all arriving in Austin, preparing for 5 days of adventure with the EE Community. I can say this was the best SXSW yet. A big thank you goes out to everyone who took the time to sit down with us, feasted with us at the Moonshine, or found other ways to connect.
Yes, we’re all excited about seeing the ExpressionEngine Developer Preview (Kaylee), but underneath that SXSW 2009 was a wonderful reminder that it is the people, all of you, that makes what we do worth it. That includes those of you who couldn’t join us. We thoroughly enjoyed every event, every date, and every conversation (check it out on Flickr).
I want to take a moment to give a big thank you to the teams that provided prizes for the Party at the Moonshine.
EngineHosting
EE Screencasts
GearLive
Hambo Development
Newism
Solspace
Train-ee
I will now make a valiant effort to recount the highlights and bring everyone up to speed on 2.0 progress.
Friday
The team arrived in Austin throughout the day. We took the time to relax during the afternoon and make sure that we were well rested. In 2008 we were busy scrambling to finish a big presentation. This year we recovered from traveling quietly in our rooms or in the hotel lounge; we met Robin and Greg for the first time (well, first time in person). As one might expect, they both are wonderful.
Ryan Irelan (EE Insider, EE Screencasts) was kind enough to treat the entire team (including Nevin, Laurie, and Neal from EngineHosting) to a delicious Mexican dinner.
(checkout Ryan’s SXSW 2009 set)
Saturday
We were up bright and early to meet Hadley Stern (AppleMatters.com):
Then it was off to our first EllisLab Date back at the hotel:
We had no formal presentation or plan for the Dates. We were simply committed to sitting down with people and getting to know them. And, of course, we demoed Kaylee. We asked people if they had specific questions or if they wanted us to to give them a brief highlight tour, or if they just wanted to “click around”. Usually they wanted all three and we obliged. The Dates went anywhere from one to two hours. They sometimes involved food and almost always involved coffee. Some people took us up on our offer to help them with technical questions on their sites. Lisa even mapped out an in-depth plan to implement a section of a large library site. But they always ended with Kaylee. I’ll have more info on Kaylee later on.
At 5:00pm we turned our attention to the Party at the Moonshine Grill. So did about 600 other people (yes, 600). We expected somewhere between 150-200 people to show up but at 5:30pm our party was announced on the official SXSW Twitter feed… twice. We ended up with an extra 400 people! This is, of course, the type of “problem” we want to have.
We ran out of food around 7pm but the stellar team at the Moonshine Grill quickly whipped out more and we fed everyone who showed up. A big thank you to everyone in the EE Community who introduced EE to new people at the party.
At 7:30pm we started the prize giveaway. I need to take a moment and give a round of applause to Laurie (EngineHosting), Lisa, Robin, and Greg for doing such a great job handling the large crowd. Greg, as it turns out, can make himself heard over hundreds of people.
Also at 7:30pm the first ever Community World Domination Summit was held in a private room at the Moonshine. Twenty-four web development teams were represented and they ranged from one-person shops to teams that implement EE for enterprise clients on a regular basis. ExpressionEngine veterans Mitchell Kimbrough (Solspace), Greg Storey (Airbag Industries), and Ryan Irelan (EE Insider) hosted the event.
The discussion was 99% business-to-business related, 1% ExpressionEngine 2.0, which is exactly what we hoped for. Our goal was to listen and give teams the opportunity to tell us how EllisLab might help them utilize EE better and improve how we do business. It was a great discussion and we walked away with a ton of ideas. For those of you who were not present, let me assure you that this was just the beginning of the discussion. We are committed to making it continue online and of finding ways to offer something similar to the numerous international teams outside the United States.
To everyone who did attend, our sincerest thanks to you. Your insight, honesty, and innovation was inspiring to hear. We’re really looking forward to seeing where this all leads.
The party began to wind down around 9pm and it was time to head to the sleeper hit of SXSW, the Solspace Nightcap hosted by Mitchell Kimbrough:
Solspace reserved the upper level of great Mexican restaurant and provided cocktails and other goodies free of charge for everyone to enjoy. The entire thing is devoted to connecting EE people with each other in place where we can all just relax (and is relatively quiet). It was a blast.
Sunday to Tuesday
The rest of SXSW was filled with EllisLab Date. Every date was unique, each conversation different, and the discussions motivated us a great deal. The highlight though was watching Derek Allard give Veerle the grand tour of Kaylee. For those of you who don’t know, Veerle worked closely with us to develop the new look of 2.0 Control Panel. Two of the three default themes that will ship with 2.0 are hers. This was the first time she saw her themes in motion. Seeing her delight at how we implemented her work was a pleasure indeed.
Kaylee
We obviously showed Kaylee off quite a bit at SXSW. We were very comfortable demoing her to people when we had the opportunity to discuss what was being viewed face-to-face. This is a critical distinction between SXSW and this blog and our forums. Kaylee is an important milestone, but she is still alpha software and not ready for to be shown to a large, general audience. But, we do want to fill everyone in on the major points discussed at the various EllisLab Dates.
The Date conversations can be distilled into four questions.
When is 2.0 coming out?
There isn’t a release date, but there is a release process. First, there is the Developer Preview aimed at getting the new 2.0 code base into the hands of EE developers. In fact, if you follow the blog regularly then you already know the First Wave of Invitations went out late last night. The Developer Preview will go for several rounds. During this time our dev team will be completely focused on training EE devs on the new code so they can train others.
Following the Developer Preview will be the semi-Public beta. This will take place when ExpressionEngine 2.0 is feature complete. Right now EE 2.0 is feature locked and the next major milestone is being feature complete. This means that the code is complete and ready for debugging and testing outside of our internal team. There will be an application process but it will be much broader in scope. If you rely on EE but are not an add-on developer, this will be your opportunity to get involved prior to public release.
Sometime during the semi-public beta we’ll set an internal release date. At this point we’ll roll into buzz mode. It will be obvious to anyone following along. 2.0’s release will not be a surprise.
What will happen to EE 1.6.7?
ExpressionEngine 1.6.7 will continue to be available for download and purchase after 2.0’s release. We view 2.0’s upcoming release as more of update to an operating system. EE 1.x has a significant install base and we estimate it will take a minimum of 2-3 years for the majority of the community to update. We will support 1.6.7 for a long time to come and we think it will remain a viable market for add-on developers for some time.
In other words, 1.6.7 is not going away. There is no reason to wait for 2.0 to get started. You can be safe knowing it will be supported for a long time and that the upgrade process will be straightforward. There will be no pressure from EllisLab to jump to 2.0 right away. Like 1.x before it, 2.0 will need to prove itself in the marketplace. We’re very confident it will.
How exactly does EE 2.0 work on CodeIgniter?
This was discussed in-depth with a number of developers and since the details don’t apply to a general audience, let me sum it as “exactly as one would expect.” ExpressionEngine 2.0 is like any other application built with CodeIngiter with all the advantages that brings. If this is a topic of interest I’m sure the dev team will address that in future EE Blog updates.
What Features and new information were made public?
- The Gallery Module is being deprecated. The plan is to incorporate features directly into 2.0 that allow people to accomplish the same thing without having to maintain an additional module. There will be a migration path so that people who rely on the Gallery can easily move it to a Channel instead. We have yet to determine is if this will take place in 2.0 or 2.1, but either way the Gallery sees the beginning of the end as of 2.0.
- ExpressionEngine 2.0 has true file management natively.
- ExpressionEngine will have an Image Editor. It will allow you to crop, resize, and rotate your photos.
- Publish/Edit interface includes direct access to the File Manager, new field types (Upload, Numbers), and can be redesigned using just the mouse.
- Huge improvement to flat file integration with the Template Manager. When you save a template as a file EE 2.0 will create a file with the proper extension (main.css, index.html, feed.rss). If you create the file in your favorite editor and save it to the specified folder, 2.0 will now create matching templates for the new files.
There are literally hundreds of little features and improvements in 2.0. The above are just the highlights from what we showed at the Dates and in no way represent a complete feature list (we will not do that until the beta).
Every new feature can be categorized under a single theme: Control. From start to finish 2.0’s primary goal is to give you much more control… from the installation process to how the Publish interface is presented to clients, to template management, to actually working with the CP, we wanted to take your control of EE to a whole new level.
I’m sure there are things we talked about at SXSW that didn’t make it into this post. We’ll answer as best as we can on the forums, but please understand that we’re moving back into efficiency mode and we won’t be devoting a lot of time to answering “how does feature X work” type of questions. We want to move as quickly as possible to getting 2.0 into the hands of as many people as possible and that requires being less detailed in our forum responses. We apologize in advance for that.
What’s next?
Sometime next week we’ll be launching a new 2.0 FAQ. We’ll also be updating the EE Blog a bit to make it easier to find 2.0 information. The next official 2.0 progress update will take place around April 3rd. See you on the forums!
