Thread

I’ve got some experience with EE V1, but I want to get up to speed quickly with V2.

Where is there some good information for this?

Also, is there an article somewhere which talks about the major new enhancements in V2?

Thanks in advance.

EE2 is still the EE you know and worked with, major difference is it’s now running on the CodeIgniter framework.
Best place to start are still the docs:
http://ellislab.com/expressionengine/user-guide/

Things that might trip you up:
- weblogs are now called “channels”, {exp:weblog:entries} is now {exp:channel:entries}
- dynamic=“off” is now dynamic=“no”
- the publish form has a new feature called custom publish layouts, it’s still a bit clunky but otherwise works fine:
http://ellislab.com/expressionengine/user-guide/cp/content/publish_page_layouts.html
(best to have a play with this and try a few things)
- Snippets are a new addition to global variables:
http://ellislab.com/expressionengine/user-guide/templates/globals/snippets.html
- installing add-ons: all add-ons go inside the “third_party” folder, any theme files they may have in the “themes” folder, no more installing files in 3 different locations.

Michael Boyink has a new edition of “building a website with EE2” that also covers a lot of bases, highly recommended:
http://www.train-ee.com/courseware/books/detail/building-an-expressionengine-2-site-small-business/

I had a quick squiz of the user guide prior to my post and I didn’t notice much had changed so I thought I better ask.

I appreciate the update.

From the sounds of things, I have to say I am a little underwhelmed.

:/

I’d venture to say you’re not alone:
http://thenerdary.net/articles/entry/a_plea_to_ellislab

I’d venture to say you’re not alone:
http://thenerdary.net/articles/entry/a_plea_to_ellislab

WOW. That was quite a read.

It has probably answered my query more thoroughly than any manual would.

That’s too bad that things have stalled for EE. I rather liked it’s approach.

It’s the only CMS kit that comes built from the ground up as an ad-hoc business entity wizard with a templating engine. This is what made me choose it over others, but I have to say, there were some serious thorns in it’s side that contributed to making me want to give up web development in general.

No point upgrading my license from V1 then :/

In fact, in all seriousness, can someone tell me if there are compelling reasons to base new projects on it’s usage based on the lack of confidence expressed in it’s maturity?

In my opinion, the thread on The Nerdary (already referenced) offers the most compelling reason.

I’ve been doing software (alas?) for 30 years. Though the water level has dropped from flood-stage, the EE community’s reservoir (even now) of commitment is extraordinary. Not to mention, EE+addons (yeah, even EE2) offers extraordinary functionality, flexibility and power. EllisLab is working through big-time growing pains. Big surprise. Not. As I recall, companies like IBM, Apple and Microsoft (Coke and Pepsi as well) hit multiple crises along the way. The next two-three years will be chaotic for EllisLab. Good. We will grow up as they grow up. Meanwhile, place your bet and have fun. Whether it’s EE, WP, Drupal or ‘x’ (... Visicalc, dBaseIV, Lotus Notes, Netscape ...), predicting the future is a losers game. Put all that energy into working on real projects. I’m not sure the EE community is going to allow EllisLab to fail, anyway 😉.

(I remember crashing the Netscape employees-only meeting where Barkdale predicted, to cheers, the entire destruction of Microsoft by their 1.0 .... browser. Now, that was fun.)

Cheers for your thoughts on that…

Yeah it does take a bit of thinking to decide which horse to bet my new projects on.

Speaking of alternatives, I was gonna go back to an XML/XSLT framework I wrote years ago (xao-php.sf.net) but apparently PHP has been unable to find an XML library to support XSLT2 (no, I am not going to use Java Bridge to access Saxon).

So currently, I have my nose buried in the Apache Cocoon 3 manual.

We’ll see :/

Having to create back-office interfaces is not an idea I’m crazy about, but if you want the job done right….

The more I think about it… It would be good if you could just ditch EE’s templating engine and have all the channels dumped as raw XML which cold be transformed using the only templating language supported by the W3C.

For what it’s worth, I’ve been using EE2 for client projects since the last 4-5 months and don’t intend to use 1.6 for any upcoming projects unless some legacy plugin/extension is really necessary.
Apart from that it’s EE2 all the way 😊

Having to create back-office interfaces is not an idea I’m crazy about, but if you want the job done right….

Precisely. It’s never done right. Even by you (or, at least, me). Software is ridiculous. But fun.

I’m not being dismissive. If you are passionately committed to building CMS infrastructure (and not as a hobby, but as life), you must do it. No one else’s work will ever satisfy. But few of us are suited by skill or temperament for that. Otherwise, the best thing is always to hold one’s nose, avert one’s eyes and push out ‘sausages’ that feed hungry users.

Trite, I know. But not irrelevant. I’d better get out of this thread now before I become a walking platitude.

(Hey, anyone who is a spasmoid already knows these things, I’m sure ....)