EECI2009

Image: Leslie Camacho of Ellis Labs announces the upcoming release of EE 2.0.

I was lucky enough to attend EECI2009 in the Netherlands last week. Overall, the strongest EE/CI conference I've attended so far, which is perhaps a good sign for the growing community around these products. It was an interesting thing to have both EE and CI people in the same building. I hadn't thought about it all that much, but these two communities are very different, and it was sort of amusing to see all of the EE people (designer-ish, stylish, expensive bags) mix with the CI people (nerdy, large brains, beer, blunt.)

There are also a growing number of EE developers who extend and modify that platform. Chief of this tribe is no doubt Solspace's Paul Burdick. He gave an excellent presentation on add-on development which clarified a number of issues about the future of this important activity for EE. Here, in PDF form, are the slides. Paul is responsible for a number of major add-ons, including the tag module. He is one of the original developers of EE itself, having been the main dev at Ellis Labs for quite a while. The other major emerging EE add-on developers were at the conference as well. These folks include Brandon Kelly and Leevi Graham. In true Australian form, Levy wore a outback-looking hat for the duration of the conference. (My apologies Leevi if it was in fact some other sort of hat.)

The big news at the conference was that EE 2.0, the new codeigniter-based version of the product will be released on December 1, 2009. There was much rejoicing when this long-delayed announcement was made. Now, after the rejoicing, I'm sure that there's quite a bit of hand-wringing/scrambling going on across the community. Many people who rely on EE for their business (Grist included) are now trying to figure out if/when/how to integrate this new development into our work. Part of what I heard from the likes of Paul made this easier to think about -- it's now clear that a) EE1.6 will continue to be supported for quite a while yet and b) many important add-ons for EE may not be ready for EE2 any time very soon. So there's certainly no pressure to upgrade, and plenty of reason to wait, play with the new product and see what happens. We also heard about a planned EE 2.1 release, which sounds like a more stable basis for an enterprise-upgrade.