ExpressionEngine 2.0 will be released on December 1

Ellislab has announced that ExpressionEngine 2.0 will be released on December 1. Ellislab CTO Derek Jones made the announcement via a pre-recorded video message that was played at the EECI conference in Leiden, The Netherlands.

We’ve been waiting for ExpressionEngine 2.0 for close to two years so this is pretty big news!

Later in the day Derek Allard showed off the new file management tools that are going to make uploading and cropping/resizing entries a whole lot easier. EE 2.0 is starting to look a lot slicker than a few months ago and I’m pretty excited about the slicker administration interface that will greet our clients once we switch over.

Round-up of the morning talks

Leslie Camacho, President, Ellislab

• Leslie showed off some big clients who use ExpressionEngine, including Vodafone, Cisco, Barack Obama and A List Apart. He was quick to point out how ExpressionEngine has evolved from a CMS to a website framework to a web application framework. “A web professional’s success will be the ability to deliver websites that are web applications customised to specific client needs,” he said. With EE 2.0 built on the CodeIgniter framework, it’s going to be a whole lot easier to build the types of web applications that the marketplace is demanding.
• Pricing will increase slightly to $299 per licence for EE 2.0. They’re introducing a couple of new tiers - a $99 freelancer license for a small web shop that is just starting out and wants to try out ExpressionEngine for their own website. They are also introducing a corporate license for large corporations that use ExpressionEngine and need that extra level of technical support. He didn’t give any detail on costing for the corporate license, but I would imagine it would be pretty steep.
• Upgrading from 1.6 to 2.0 will cost $50.

Simon Collison, Erskine Designs

• Simon went through some of his early sites built with EE and how Erskine Design’s approach to website development has evolved.
• He made the case for better communication from Ellislab, especially around release dates; I think the Ellislab team took the criticism well.
• I’m really interested in Erskine Design’s development of an Advertising module for EE. After I told Collison we’ve used OpenX before, he invited me to have a beer with him to commiserate! He won’t be pushed on a release date however.

Derek Allard, Technology Architect, Ellislab

• Interesting look at how they use agile development techniques such as SCRUM to develop 2.0. He mentioned a very cool project managed tool, PlanningPoker, where you bet on how many hours you think the job will take. Quite a fun spin on the difficult job of estimating jobs.
• Showed off some of the cool file management tools available in EE 2.0. Really excited about the prospect of “batch upload via zip”. There will also be a lightbox-driven file management tool which will make selecting an image from thousands in a folder slightly easier (especially when differentiating between pic_1_1.jpg and Pic_1_1.JPG; sometimes thumbnails are better!)
• He mentioned that add-ons will be “packaged” meaning you won’t have to drag the add-on files to different locations.
• Fieldframe will be native to EE 2.0. Brandon Kelly has offered it to Ellislab for integration.
• There will be a native file field as well

Verlee Pieters, duoh.com

• Showed some of the design evolution in EE 2.0. Her talk was a bit slow and stilted because of her second-language English
• She mentioned using the CSS border-radius and transparent PNGs, and shrugged her shoulders when asked about IE6 support. Verlee reckons that IE6 users will just have to live with straight edges and opaque PNGs! This is quite a big statement from one of the world’s best web designers. I added on to her point by noting that IE6 will no longer be supported in the EE 2.0 backend which brought a round of applause. (I guess developers are pretty pumped up about seeing the demise of IE6.)

Photos courtesy of Matthew Pennell.