EECI 2009: Leslie Camacho on EE 2.0

EllisLab El Presidento Leslie Camacho opened the conference on Thursday morning with a keynote on ExpressionEngine’s history, community and future. He also included—via a video by CTO Derek Jones— some important announcements about EE 2.0 (more on that in a moment).

Leslie talked about the foundation they’ve built for EE 2.0: It’s a proven CMS in the market and has 102,000 registered members (presumably on their forums) and the base for EE 2.0 (CodeIgniter) is a “highly praised framework.” The creator of PHP described CodeIgniter as “faster, light and the least like a framework.”

ExpressionEngine 2.0 contains 50+ new features and improvements, as well as brand new UI (you’ll hear more about this next week in our exclusive coverage on EE Insider), a File Manager and Image Editor. EllisLab has made a concerted effort on allowing more control when developing websites with ExpressionEngine. The control will be in templates, installation and the publishing process.

During the short video presentation by Derek Jones (which, surprisingly, featured a “cameo” appearance by yours truly) he announced the release date of December 1, 2009 and that it will have some very cool new features like a fieldtype API (they are building FieldFrame into ExpressionEngine!).

The conference attendees left the session energized, abuzz by the announcement of the release date for ExpressionEngine and ready for the conference sessions.