EllisLab Plans to Increase Company Resources to Improve EE 2

In an unusual blog post, Derek Jones (CTO) from EllisLab addressed issues with the last few releases of EE 2.

I’d like to take a moment to speak about the speed and quality of the past few release cycles.  There’s no point in mincing words: it’s been less than what you and we have come to expect from EllisLab.  If this has concerned you, double or triple that concern, and that’s how we feel.  And we have a plan in motion to fix it.

I don’t think it’s a big secret that the EE 2 Control Panel feels slower than EE 1 and that there have been plenty of bugs in releases. Expectations were high for EE 2 so every issue is magnified tenfold. It was, however, surprising to see the EE 2.1 release go out the door with the date bug but it didn’t strike me as outrageous. I didn’t think EE 2 was doomed. If you’ve written software 1/100 as complex as ExpressionEngine, you know how easily bugs can work in— especially bugs that surface after changes and are not caught during regression testing. 

Derek didn’t give specifics about plans but did say that they need to scale the company to keep up with the growing community.

Right now our biggest challenge is scaling our internal structure concurrently with the new growth we’re experiencing while sticking to our roots (no “going corporate”, no VC money). We want to keep the same spirit that EllisLab enjoyed when there were just three or four of us, while making adjustments to staff and work practices that will allow us to succeed alongside this significant growth (which we are thankful for).

I truly hope that part of this scaling includes adding “enterprise” support that gives people implementing for large corporations a dedicated support line that isn’t the EE Forums. If I or my clients could have an account manager or dedicated support person, it might ease the apprehension we sometimes see when pitching ExpressionEngine as a CMS solution.

Derek mentioned that they’re focusing now on hiring another developer to help maintain and improve EE 2. This is definitely a good thing but please don’t forget about scaling support!

Read Derek’s entire blog post: Acknowledge, Identify, React