Thread

I’d like to take a moment to speak about the speed and quality of the past few release cycles.  There’s no point in mincing words: it’s been less than what you and we have come to expect from EllisLab.  If this has concerned you, double or triple that concern, and that’s how we feel.  And we have a plan in motion to fix it.

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I’ll have more thoughts soon, but just quickly this is exactly the kind of post I’ve been waiting to see, so thank you! Looking forward to what EllisLab does over the coming months.

I am actually glad to see the honesty and purpose of this post. I personally have been growing very concerned by the recent activities - especially with big bugs remaining unfixed in software for extended periods.
I might only be a member with a few licenses - but being here quite a lot makes me want to see things right. And of late i have been coming back less and less, helping less and less - and that is a big change from previous EE mentality.

But with a growth of the size you are talking about, you are going top struggle to not grow the team - and in growing the team people that did the work in a well spirited manner will then become team managers. And any manager/staff environment will lead to a different company spirit.
I wish you good luck in this challenge - it is certainly going to be hard. But this is 100% necessary as i do not want EE to go on in the same direction it is.

I look forward to follow up posts on how this is progressing, and interested in your decisions / methods utilised to solve this difficult situation.

I’ll echo what nevsie said.

I’ve been around since the old pMachine days (8 years now), and frankly the quality of work that was put out back in the day, and up until recently has always been top notch, so much so I’ve never had to really avail myself of support (Look at my join date, then post count).

Still a great track record, really… but yeah, it certainly does concern me that date bugs are in a final application that should have been caught VERY early on… I mean disappearing posts once edited… that’s core stuff right there.  I can only surmise that this was an early bug that somehow made it’s way back in through a messed up update/diff. 

I’ll update my personal build and modify my DST settings to see if I can make this issue go away for awhile until the next incremental update.

I’m not sure what bug TJPrevite is talking about, but I hope I don’t run into it.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to ever update to EE 2. Honestly 1.6.x has done everything I want, they way I want, for years. I then bought mojomotor and had so much fun playing with it that I get fired up for EE 2. I’ve been a bit less excited since installing EE2. It feels like it a public beta. I used OS X public beta and a lot of the problems I’m having EE2 feel like problems from those days. You knew it was fixed in the next release, so you just had to deal with it until then.

Then the absence of galleries, etc. Kind of felt like a step back in functionality. The promise of building EE2 on CodeIgnighter was that development was supposed to be easier, so I expected the updates to come faster.

And some of the bugs do seem weird in a shipping product. The images in comments one as an example. That’s a fairly common thing to do.

My only other “issue” is forum response time. I know I post at weird times, but it feels like things are slower. I’m totally being subjective on this. I tend to bang my head on something for a long time before I post. When I finally do I’ve probably been struggling for a few hours, so waiting a few more hours is frustrating. If the answer is “It’s a known bug and fixed in the next release” you can see where some people might be getting upset.

Glad to see you guys are aware.

I’ve used ExpressionEngine daily for over three years and recommend it so much at my current job that I get teased about getting a commission. (By the way, I do accept PayPal.) I’ve also been around since the old pMachine days (just passed 9 years), and this past year has been really frustrating.

From the December launch date that became a public beta, to a release date of software that’s surprisingly buggy after such an extended beta period, and which frankly, is not up to the excellent quality standards of the past, it’s been a tough year. While MojoMotor is really cool, I was very surprised to see it released when EE2 was still patchy, and it’s difficult not to think that development resources that could have been used to make EE2 shine went to MojoMotor.

Finally, I’ve been surprised at the difficulty in integrating CodeIgniter and ExpressionEngine, which was one of the most exciting aspects of EE2. (For instance, it seems that you can’t globally set global_xss_filtering to true for the CodeIgniter instance that runs ExpressionEngine.)

I appreciate the frankness and directness of this blog post and I’m glad to see that EllisLab is aware of some of these issues and is preparing to address them. I’m looking forward to ExpressionEngine 2.1.1 and can’t wait to see what 2.2 brings.

Great to see EllisLab acknowledge the recent issues felt by many of us.

It’s a critical time for the product and for all of us who make a living (almost!) exclusively from ExpressionEngine.

I have my fingers crossed that the new team member has a @monooso or @brandonkelly approach to their work so that the UI/UX becomes as integral as the codebase.

And we have a plan in motion to fix it.

To be fair so did the Cylons and look at how that worked out.

It might be helpful if you said what you are wanting from posting this. If you’re wanting feedback looks like you’ll get some, but I’d hate to see people piling on. If you are wanting feedback I’m sure people will be happy to give you more. Just give the word and I am sure there will be a cathartic unloading. I’ve got other issues, but I am a patient person. Well, clear until I blow my top anyway.

I’ll second iain in saying: don’t lose sight of the design/UI/UX design of EE2 as well.
Jamie Pittock raised a few interesting points during his talk at EECI2010 which had many people agreeing.

Hi,

It’s nice to hear EllisLab frankly acknowledging some problems developers are complaining so often.

Every time a new version of EE2 is being released I download it in order to evaluate if it is reasonable to switch from EE1.x. And every time my answer is negative. I have 4 major concerns:

1) CP is unacceptably slow. Some pages, e.g. publish forms having many fields, load 10-15(!) times slower than the same pages in EE1.x.

2) There are very very serious bugs, such as that, which should not wait until next release but be fixed immediately.

3) There are features planned, but not implemented as yet which might break functioning of some third party add-ons. I mean adding “final” declarations. Is this really needed? And when this feature will be added? In which release?

4) And the last. Please, please, please return the hook “show_full_control_panel_end” !!!
So many add-ons in EE1.x use this hook and are not portable to EE2.x! Please, don’t force developers to resort to hacks. Of course this hook poses some risks: add-ons which use this hook might be incompatible or might interfere with core functionality. But these are the risks which both developers and add-on users accept. Perhaps, it would be possible to return this hook conditionally, that is it would be needed for site admins to enable it or, alternatively, while enabling add-on which uses this hook a warning could be shown to user explaining that incompatibilities might possibly happen.

2) There are very very serious bugs, such as that, which should not wait until next release but be fixed immediately.

That particular bug was patched and a fix made available on August 18th. https://support.ellislab.com/bugs/detail/13503/#9045

Derek, it would have been more interesting if you could have discussed the other points that Laisvunas made.

I only answered #2 because he linked to a specific bug that was publicly resolved some time ago and not still waiting as he indicated.  I don’t think it would be productive for this thread to become a discussion of responding to individual complaints or questions.  And no, that is not a hedged answer, 3 and 4 have been discussed at length on these forums already - the first would be better served as a support thread by itself, as it certainly is not true of the majority of environments and installations.

3 and 4 have been discussed at length on these forums already

Hi Derek,

you can hardly claim that adding “final” declarations was discussed at length in forums. It was mentioned by Pascal in this post and it is the same post from which we know that this addition will break some add-ons. We do not know anything about timing: approximately when or in which EE2 release - 2.2, 2.3, 2.5 - “final” declarations will be added? Of course this addition will not break EE installation which uses only first-party add-ons, but what will happen in case there are several dozens of add-ons from various sources?

There was discussion about “show_full_control_panel_end” hook, but it was too limited: some developers saying “please, return our beloved hook” and EllisLab answering “that’s dangerous, we will not do it”. There was no discussion about possible alternatives to complete removal of “show_full_control_panel_end” hook, such as enabling that hook by site admin or warning users about possible incompatibilities.

It’s nice that EllisLab frankly acknowledged the problems #1 and #2 and I hope to see quick improvement in these areas. But problems #3 and #4 are also very serious and deserve the same frankness and attention.

Thanks for the feedback, Laisvunas. The team will give consideration to those points before taking any action.