Anticipating ExpressionEngine 2.0
I love ExpressionEngine. From my experience, it blows every other CMS out of the water in terms of power, flexibility and ease of use. EE lets me create sites that are far beyond my technical ability in terms of complexity and does it with style. As a result, I’m very excited about version 2, recently demoed at South by South West Interactive.
What We Can Expect
The main improvements that the guys at EllisLab have been touting are a back-end based on their CodeIgniter framework and a redesigned control panel.
The new integration with CodeIgniter doesn’t affect me as much as it will some, but I can definitely see the benefits of the move. The CI gurus will hopefully begin to play a more active role in the EE community and cook up some additional functionality for us bloggers, further extending EE‘s capability to scratch our every itch. They’re bound to benefit to, being able to implement features of EE, such as the forum module, in their own CI applications. It looks to be a win-win situation.
With such a major update, it was always likely that the admin area was going to receive a makeover. EllisLab have hired the talented Veerle Pieters to redesign the interface, unfortunately leaving behind the nice current style designed by Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain.
From what I’ve seen of the control panel, I must say I’m not 100%. The new layout is a big departure from the subtlety and relative minimalism of 1.6. It’s bigger, brighter and, perhaps appropriately, more ‘2.0’. However, the rearrangement of features and jQuery integration look like they’ll improve flow considerably and, even if I’m not entirely sold on the gradients and large text, I’m sure I’ll grow to like the new design fairly quickly.
There are other new additions to the admin area that look useful, such as Accessories and Quick Links. Make sure you check out the screencast for a full run down of the new features. Of course, it’s likely to change a bit before release but, by the looks of things, it’ll be a nice improvement to the EE experience.
Some of the smaller changes have caught my eye too, like an improved file upload system. My biggest hopes don’t seem to have made the press release though. Here are some issues I would love to see addressed in the new version.
My Wishlist
Improved Typography Handling
This is definitely my biggest gripe with EE in its current form. I find myself having to code posts by hand, removing all whitespace between elements such as table cells to stop the XHTML formatting from inserting paragraph and break tags all over the place. This makes my posts pretty much unreadable in the publish page, means I’ve got code stored in my database tables and adds a lot of hassle to posting entries. I would disable it completely were it not for the character conversion that is available with that formatting option. I like my quotes curly and my code clean.
Fortunately, Derek Jones has mentioned in the forums that typography will be getting an overhaul in the upcoming release, so fingers crossed.
Removal of Index.php by Default
Removing the index.php from URLs is one of the only hassles when setting up a site with ExpressionEngine. Though the process is well documented, it can be quite tricky for inexperienced users, especially those new to .htaccess.
I’m not sure how feasible it would be for the developers to include this behavior by default. I realise that a lot rides on that index file and there are all sorts of compatibility issues depending on hosts, but if it’s possible to work around it manually, surely it could be included as a setting? I don’t know anyone who would opt to leave it in their URLs given the choice.
Improved Code Insertion
It’s clear that the publish page will be getting some serious tweaking in 2.0. The things that bug me at the moment are pretty minor but get in the way when posting entries.
When inserting links, the title attribute is labelled as optional but, if left blank, defaults to the link text rather than being discarded. This means I have to go back and remove an unwanted title attribute from almost every link I insert.
Image insertion isn’t great either, with img tags being placed at the bottom of a field rather than where the cursor is. As I usually write my posts outside of the publish page and paste the plain text in before adding images, it becomes a real hassle having to scroll up and down.
Ready and Waiting
The news that 2.0 will be available as an upgrade from 1.6.2 came as a bit of a shock to me. Understandably, the guys want to make the transition as easy as possible for users, but I hope they haven’t compromised anything as a result. The new version sounds like such an overhaul I can only really see myself working with a clean installation.
Upgrade or not, I’ll be wanting to get my hands on the new build as soon as possible. I take my hat off to everyone at Ellislab for all their hard work and can’t wait to put version 2 through its paces this summer.
Debbie (3 months ago)
Kevin (1 month, 3 weeks ago)
Sam Rayner
Richard Angstmann