EllisLab Releases ExpressionEngine 2.7

Earlier this week EllisLab released ExpressionEngine 2.7, which includes the new Grid field type, New Relic support, Markdown parsing, and more.

There is already information posted about these additions to ExpressionEngine but here’s a quick recap.

Grid, a new field type that makes it simple to include tabular data in a single field, is essentially a native implementation of Pixel & Tonic’s Matrix add-on. I will leave it up to Pixel & Tonic and EllisLab to convince you which you should use (I personally prefer Matrix). It is encouraging that EllisLab is starting to add features and make the out-of-the-box experience of ExpressionEngine more complete for how people are using their software in 2013. However, the way they went about it wasn’t exactly ideal.

New Relic, a service that makes application performance monitoring services, also gets support in ExpressionEngine 2.7. In order to use this feature you do need a New Relic account. This is very much a nod in the direction of the upper scale enterprise market.

Markdown, my favorite way of writing text for the web (and how I’m writing this post), also gets some attention in EE 2.7. Previously, you had to use the excellent Smartdown add-on from Experience Internet but those add-ons have been set free and are no longer maintained or supported. Markdown is now a native formatting option so there’s no need to install another add-on to get that functionality. Very nice.

There’s more in EE 2.7, too. Read the entire blog post by EllisLab] to get the scoop.

So, should you upgrade now? Well, that’s tough to answer.

I always wait a bit before updating so I can let some bugs shake out. EllisLab’s releases have gotten a lot better compared to earlier releases of EE 2, however there could still be bugs in there that haven’t been caught. Be careful and always back up.

Over at Mijingo I am running ExpressionEngine but I try to keep slightly behind the current version because it’s ecommerce and, well, I’d rather not have a bug interrupt my customers’ ability to get the learning materials they need.

Evaluate your situation, carefully measure and assess the risk involved in upgrading and then make your choice.