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This weekend at SXSW, Ellislab has been giving a limited presentation on ExpressionEngine 2.0. There are no official dumps of information available and details can change but what has been coming out so far is quite huge. Here are the points that I feel are most important for me to make in my view of these updates (note: with few details available, some of these points may be based on false assumptions.)
There will be much more crossover between the ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter communities. Currently there are remarkably few developers who have made much of a crossover splash. In other words, there are likely more people than we know crossing the lines, but there has been little open evidence of this.
My second point is a much stronger implication to go with the first point. There will be many more ExpressionEngine coders available. A search of the EE forums has shown frustration with the lack of developers available for ExpressionEngine. Developers in the pro network are often unavailable and many of them are designers rather than coders. An integration of CodeIgniter will open the barrier between the developer heavy CodeIgniter community and the designer heavy ExpressioEngine community. Designer, meet coder!
CodeIgniter essentially gets a huge boost in the number of available libraries. If ExpressionEngine components can run on CodeIgniter without the entire ExpressionEngine CMS then CodeIgniter will be in the somewhat unique position of being a framework with highly refined finished products available from paid developers (such as a forum, wiki and even a CMS.)
CodeIgniter becomes the engine! The ExpressionEngine community knows that Ellislab has gone through some big restructuring with recent versions of ExpressionEngine. The company’s name changed from ExpressionEngine to Ellislab and the flagship product took a small step back from the spotlight. Now the company is about Ellislab and an umbrella of products, not just the CMS. Now the company may go through another big restructuring process, though not as big as the last one. Considering that ExpressionEngine modules will be decoupled and become almost stand-alone products (running on the new “engine“) ExpressionEngine will now take another step back from the spotlight while the importance of CodeIgniter moves forward. I am very interested to see how the packaging and branding will look when the final result is revealed.
For all those people asking how to build a CMS in CodeIniter, your question will be answered in a big way!
The rest of the updates seem to be more on par with previous big updates but not so groundbreaking. Overall this will also be a nice refresh to the code base. At this point the system is four years old and still on a 1.x branch. ExpressionEngine was getting to be a little dated and this newest update will put the problem of dating to rest. From here, due to the more modular approach (even core libraries can be replaced in CodeIgniter) I can see the system continuously being refactored by both Ellislab and the community into a bright new future. Next stop, PHP 5.
Problems?
This will not be an immediate upgrade for many people and I can see the release being a huge headache. I wonder if Ellislab will continue to support the 1.x branch. Anyone using 3rd party add-ons will be left in the dark until features provided by those add-ons are dealt with (perhaps this will be an opening for EE developers to make some cash doing upgrade work.) Some add-ons won’t be needed but there will still be work to implement the features in the new version of EE. Developers with a large client base using EE will likely be keeping old clients on the 1.x branch for quite some time. The more reliance on hacks and crazy structures to get around old limitations, the more pain there will be in upgrading. Developers with many supported add-ons will need to ramp up for more support and coding work. Some of these developers may not have solutions ready right away. Mitchell, I am looking at you!
Licensing issues will also be interesting. I will be interested to see if I can develop applications using a hybrid of Ellislab paid products and CodeIgniter which would currently violate the license (social networks using a custom blog system but the Ellislab forum module.)
This all sounds very exciting. I am happy to see CodeIgniter become more important rather than falling off the side. I’m sure there will be restrictions and limitations which will dampen my enthusiasm though but right now all we can do is wait and see. Actually, who is waiting? I have work to do! Back to ExpressionEngine 1.6.2!
