Expression Engine 2.0

Loose notes from SXSW 2008. Panel session on upcoming massive update to CMS Expression Engine 2.o:

Now powered by code igniter — fully objeect-oriented OSS PHP framework. The ingredients of EE left uncooked. So now EE is built on a framework. This is a big deal. Code has merged, communities are merging. Faster, easier development for Ellis Lab and for 3rd party devs. Instant increase in capabilities of both systems.

Database: Abstracted querying. Tools, such as the database forge class. YOu can manipulate your database at the code level.

New libraries: Session, HTML generation, form generation, unit testing. JQuery and javascript libraries.

Obsessive about making CodeIgniter the fastest in its class. No bloat! Super efficient. Performance is highest priority.

Code Igniter is fully MVC.

EE 2.0 control panel just rocks. Super well designed, fast, smartly laid out. I want this! Includes a wiki engine. Capable of building arbitrarily complex tools on the back-end. Control panel is completely redesigned and super-slick. Infinitely customizable.

Want to talk to people who have worked with both Drupal and EE. How do they stack up? I think you get a lot more “out of the box” with EE. And the support is supposed to be fanatical.

Timing is great – we’ve been debating on frameworks (Django) vs. CMSs (primarily EE) for the past week at a “web summit” the three of us J-School web devs were holding. By letting us drop all of our existing PHP tools into place without modification, EE could provide a migration path that would be very painful if we were to move everything to Django.

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