All entries filed under “EllisLab”
Over on the ExpressionEngine blog, software developer Kevin Cupp wrote about what Varnish is and how to install and configure it.
The idea of caching is familiar: why waste resources regenerating the same content from scratch on each page view? But Varnish takes it a bit further by stepping in before the request even makes it to ExpressionEngine or Apache (or your favorite HTTP server). Even better, it can intercept a request before it hits the disk!
It’s a nicely done, in-depth article for people who are running their own servers and have the capability to install software–or for people like me who just want to learn more about how Varnish works.
If you don’t run your own server (like me) and need Varnish, you should look to see if your host has it available. As an example, I run on the great EngineHosting and Varnish is an add-on to their managed service.
It all started (again) on Saturday when Marcus Neto tweeted:
Marcus may be a little biased. He did previously run EE Templates, which at one time had both paid and free themes.
A few people responded on Twitter and took issue with the idea that ExpressionEngine (and EllisLab) should ever embrace themes. They won’t work, right? WooThemes tried and it didn’t work out for them. They’re a group of smart people who have had a lot of success selling themes. A betting person would guess the reason is because there just weren’t enough potential customers. That betting person would probably be richer than someone trying to sell ExpressionEngine themes.
The other sentiment from those opposing more prominence in the theming world seemed to be rooted in either the desire to keep things as they are, (not “ruin” EE with themes) or some other curmudegeonly-driven reasoning. “Get off my lawn” is a valid reason, I suppose, but hardly one that should be taken seriously.
There are three reasons why ExpressionEngine themes haven’t worked.
First, the focus of the community using EE has been on developing custom websites. WordPress, as one example, has a long history of being themed. Many developers alter a base theme and use that to start their sites. ExpressionEngine developers typically (always?) start with a blank slate and implement custom static HTML templates.
Second, ExpressionEngine isn’t free, so people looking for cheaper themed sites might not pay for commercial software. Free software and free themes (or $50 themes) are tough to pass up if you don’t have a budget. And, let’s be honest, the majority of people needing websites don’t have a real budget. I don’t see anyone paying $200 for a license and then using a $50 theme. But, hey, maybe someone would.
The third reason, albeit much less of a factor, is that the ExpressionEngine user base isn’t big enough for EE to take off in a way where people theme it like crazy. Theme-focused WordPress and Drupal dominate usage statistics of the top 10,000 websites (with WordPress owning more than half). ExpressionEngine has an important place but at less than 10% (even if you remove vBulletin, primarily forum software, from consideration) it’s not big enough to attract the masses of people who build sites with themes.
EllisLab’s CEO Leslie Camacho has clearly stated his thoughts about some of those numbers and how it is no secret that an open source CMS would dominate the market while a commercial CMS would have less of a stronghold.
In terms of selling EE vs. open source, its true that open source’s reach is way beyond EE. It always has been. However, I want to point out that EE is the #1 commercial CMS and 3rd party tools like Built-with back up this claim. This is especially true in the top 10,000 websites. Note that they count vBulletin in there, but its a forum system first.
Should EllisLab focus on themes and making them easier to use and more popular? Yes. What would it take to make that happen?
- A lower ExpressionEngine license price tier ($39)
- More documentation on theming
- A EllisLab-supported theming vendor/community site
Why should they? Because why wouldn’t you want to reach as many people as possible who may enjoy using your product?
Publish Layouts in ExpressionEngine are a great idea. But they haven’t been reliable for a lot of people…myself included. As I read through the Twitter streams about ExpressionEngine I see a lot of comments about having to reset Publish Layouts after an upgrade, after removing fields and more.
Marcus Neto of EllisLab put out a call to get some more bug reports and steps to reproduce:
Have you run into the Publish Layouts problem? Get in touch with Marcus or file a bug with steps to reproduce the problem.
EllisLab CCO James Mathias presented at the Made by Few Web Conference in Little Rock, Arkansas. The theme of his talk was “respect.” James shared his personal experience and lessons learned as a web designer over the last 12 years. He also shared a little bit about his experience working online and for EllisLab.
Only 22 minutes long and definitely worth the watch and listen. And now I know how to pronounce his last name. Oops.
Today EllisLab released ExpressionEngine 2.4. All of the details are carefully laid out in a blog post but here’s the executive summary:
- 80 bug fixes
- Faster Control Panel
- Better “Remember Me” functionality “optimized for multiple sites and/or devices”
- File Manager Improvements
- Sorting and filtering by keywords
- Category editor now includes file browser for the category image
- Increased security to files via the browser
- Credit and location metadata editable through file modal
- Watermark files without resizing
- Development Updates
- Hidden configuration variable for file upload paths (yay!)
third_party_path configuration variable added- New Developer log to view warnings on depracated functions
- File field library so developers can use the file browser in their own add-ons
- Pagingation library improved and simplified.
- New Hooks: deleting members, modifying template data, defining template types, pulling in rows for content edit page.
- Two new constants:
URL_THEMES_THIRD and PATH_THEMES_THIRD so users can customize where the third party folders live (yay!).
View the changelog for the entire list of bug fixes, feature additions and improvements.
Yesterday I asked you for your wishes for ExpressionEngine in 2012. The feedback is mixed (keep it coming!) but there was more than one mention of easier upgrades and a one-click update process (like WordPress).
As is usually the case with software, I’m sure this is easier said than done but I agree that it needs to be done. I sincerely hope that this will be on the radar for the EllisLab development in the coming year (and hopefully before EE3).
EllisLab Product Evangelist Marcus Neto will be presenting at the January meeting of the Bay County Florida Web Pros to talk to them about ExpressionEngine.
Learn how you can use EE to build dynamic websites without knowing how to program! Marcus Neto (@marcusneto) is driving here from Alabama to introduce us to this awesome content management system. He’s the Director of Enterprise Services at EllisLab (they created Expression Engine).
On the surface this may not seem like a big deal. But members of local web professional groups like the one Marcus is visiting would probably (and surely already do) choose tools like WordPress instead of ExpressionEngine. I see it as an important step to help grow the community and number of people that use ExpressionEngine. If it were up to me, Marcus would spend 2012 on an airplane (sorry, Marcus), traveling to speak and evangelize at dozens of web meetups across the country (and world). Only so many people follow the #eecms hashtag or search around for alternatives.
Stefan Rechsteiner reminded me with his tweet that today, December 5th, is the day that EE1 is no longer offered as a license option when you buy ExpressionEngine. Almost 2 years to the day, EllisLab released the ExpressionEngine 2 Public beta. It is certainly due time to retire the old and focus solely on the new.
The blog post last month from EllisLab with the detail has all the information you’ll need. Including important bits:
If you absolutely must start projects on EE 1.x, please email sales and we’ll work out a solution for you.
Please note that if you already own ExpressionEngine 1.x, download access will not be affected by this change.
Of course, support isn’t gone immediately but it won’t be around forever:
Second, as of April 23rd 2012, ExpressionEngine 1.x will no longer be publicly supported. If you have mission critical projects that need support, we’re happy to continue supporting EE 1.x through private & enterprise support contracts.
In a blog post, EllisLab CEO Leslie Camacho announced today that as of December 5, 2011 ExpressionEngine 1 will no longer be offered as part of the download when you purchase an EE license. Additionally, public support for EE 1 ends next April.
There was no mention if they’ll continue to update EE1 with any needed security releases.
Read the entire announcement.
In a blog post today, James Mathias announced that EllisLab is looking to add a designer to their ranks. James was hired this year as the Chief Creative Officer and this new position will bring a second designer in-house at EllisLab. This is, I think we can all agree, a good thing.
EllisLab is looking for a full-time production designer and developer to work on a wide variety of amazing projects, from ExpressionEngine to the EllisLab family of websites, and a bunch of fun things in between. The position provides variety and experience to help you grow and hone your craft.
Read the the entire job announcement the details and the email address you can use to apply.
It’s sometimes called “Kennygate” but some who are paying attention know it as that time EllisLab got called to the mat, acted on it and is now paying the price.
For the uninitated, “Kennygate” started with a blog post on October 13, 2010 by Kenny Meyers wherein he laid out several complaints about and suggestions for EllisLab and ExpressionEngine. Most of them were valid points about ExpressionEngine 2 and how they communicated. I once described it as a “ranticle” because it was a rant and perhaps, in my personal view, a little more incendiary than was warranted.
In the end, it didn’t matter how I described it because the community responded and raised their digital hands and pixelated voices in agreement. The outcry from the community was only tamped down when EllisLab responded. Not only did they respond with a blog post but it triggered a series of decisions and announcements whereby they promised improved communication about ExpressionEngine bugs, releases and plans. You could hardly find anything wrong with this response. It was swift, decisive and came directly from Leslie Camacho, the CEO of EllisLab.
But that’s where it began.
Quietly Growing
I started using ExpressionEngine in early 2006, which is relatively recent compared to others who have been around since the pMachine days. My recollection of working on EE in my early days in the community was that EllisLab (then called pMachine) was notoriously quiet and private. Maybe this was just the company inherting what I see as EllisLab founder Rick Ellis’ personality: outside of the limelight and just interested in creating cool things that help people. EllisLab weren’t interested in bragging about what they created. They knew it was cool. Their users loved it. I loved it.
Feature for feature, it is tough to argue that ExpressionEngine wasn’t a giant leap forward for how people created and managed websites. In a time when blogging tools were surging, ExpressionEngine was the affordable CMS that could do more than just set up a blog. It was the prim and proper, powerful CMS that would help designers and developers out of the awful situation of having to cram a website into a buggy, unsecure blogging tool.
March 2008
In March 2008 at SXSW, EllisLab held a special session to demo and talk about their upcoming release: ExpressionEngine 2.0. It featured a complete rewrite of the code using the open source PHP framework CodeIgniter, a colorful new interface designed by Veerle Pieters and lots of eye candy. The group in attendance was excited (I was not at SXSW that year) and buzz online palpable. This was the big coming out party for a company and product that had always lived quietly in its own corner of the CMS world. I was excited, you were excited, the nerds were excited.
The release date for EE 2.0 was set at “Summer 2008.”
21 Months Later
One of the highlights of Kenny’s blog post for me was this part where he addressed the nearly 2 year delay in releasing EE2:
Stop licking your wounds over the EE2 release date fiasco. We get it. Nobody won. ExpressionEngine 2’s release caused a lot of internal and external strife.
That’s right. Nobody won. Not EllisLab and the staff, not the community, not the add-on developers, not the people writing (and rewriting) books and other training materials. That’s why this article isn’t about rehashing that particluar piece of ExpressionEngine history.
In December 2009, EllisLab released the EE2 public beta. This was the first time the public could purchase and get our hands on and use ExpressionEngine 2. Up until that time you had to be part of the private beta or developer preview, the latter of which started earlier in the year (in February or March, if I recall correctly).
EE2 beta wasn’t always pretty but it was a beta.: feature complete and in need of a lot of testing in the field. There were major bugs, some unnecessary use of jQuery effects and a lot of gnashing of teeth in the community over the Control Panel design.
The beta was far from perfect but it was released. That’s a huge milestone. Within days of its release there was a book available on ExpressionEngine 2 and some developers had already migrated their add-ons to work with the new release. It seemed like we turned a corner.
Two Point One
The following Summer, in July 2010, EllisLab released ExpressionEngine 2.1 as the first non-beta version of the software. It still had some issues, but again, it was an improvement and between then and this week—with the release of EE 2.3—ExpressionEngine has slowly gotten better and more reliable.
The response by the community to the EE 2.1 release was to embrace the new version and run with it. Quicker than I thought would happen, people stopped building sites in EE 1.x and moved to EE 2.1. EllisLab, did you notice that? I know you did. That’s a huge achievement.
Today we have EE 2.3, a thriving add-on community with more than 800 EE2 add-ons listed at Devot:ee and a bunch of community websites and services.
The Response
If A equals success, then the formula is A equals X plus Y and Z, with X being work, Y play, and Z keeping your mouth shut.
–Albert Einstein
After “Kennygate,” Leslie Camacho responded with a blog post. He acknowleged Kenny’s post and talked about what they plan to do and the problems they’ve faced.
Historically its no secret that we’ve been bad at communicating with the Community during times of growth and the stress that goes with it. That’s precisely why I hired Leslie Doherty.
There’s no arguing (not even from EllisLab I’m sure) that ExpressionEngine 2 was a messy situation. But the community survived thanks to the relentless efforts of the EllisLab team. I don’t write that glibly or as a backhanded compliment. We ship websites. They built the software that let us ship those websites. Let’s not downplay or forget the difference.
The reaction by EllisLab—to somehow atone for their sins of shipping EE2 two years later than originally announced and communicating poorly along the way—was to open up and communicate more but, a lot of the time, overcommunicate. The overcommunication led to speaking freely about ideas that weren’t solid yet, talking off the cuff during podcasts and other public interviews (I’ve had several off the record conversations with EllisLab where project information was shared with me that was still in progress or still in the idea phase. I am not including those conversations as part of my analysis).
As part of an effort to be more open about what the team was working on, they took Kenny Meyer’s great suggestion to set up a status tracker, which listed the current work on EE2 and who was working on it. It was widely lauded and appreciated. Now we’d know if they were working on an oft requested feature or a particular annoying bug we’ve run into. It was our little window into their daily work on EE2.
But then they stopped updating it. It is stuck in an unclear time and lists people that no longer work at EllisLab. The problem isn’t that they stopped updating it, it’s that they create the tracker in the first place. I have never worked for EllisLab, so take this as pure speculation, but I don’t think it’s in their company culture to have public work trackers like that. Isn’t that okay? Yes, I think so.
This is the curse of transparency.
There was the time CCO James Mathias was chatting on the EE Podcast and took a completely inaccurate and inappropriate swipe at a popular ExpressionEngine add-on developer and add-on that undoubtedly made EE a better product. It came just after Pixel & Tonic released Assets, completely overshadowing the updated File Manager (which is now a solid feature in EE2). It came off very poorly but I would guess that the CCO was just trying to have a candid, frank conversation with his hosts.
I wrote extensively about the odd state of the announced yet unannounced EE Reactor project. In what was most likely a gesture of openness by tweeting progress and mentioning it in a blog post (see my posts for more information) it created genuine confusion. And now I’ve written twice about and helped publicize a project that might not ever happen or go past the experimental stage.
This is the curse of transparency.
EllisLab was very public about their hiring of a designer (which turned into hiring James Mathias as CCO). It was a much needed position for a company that didn’t employ a single designer. James is a great hire for EllisLab. In the blog post announcing James’ hiring, Leslie Camacho noted:
After a long in person interview in Seattle, he persuaded me to take the risk and bring him on in such a way that he’d have the authority and leeway to do what needs doing to make EllisLab a user experience focused company, something we started out being but drifted away from.
This note about refocusing EllisLab on UX was lost on most of the community (including myself until I reread the blog post while researching this article), because everyone thought James was coming in to fix the Control Panel issues. In fact, that was the focus initially and announced as such. As far as the community is concerned, the only new design we’ve seen is a community page for EllisLab, new forum badges and some other designs unrelated to the Control Panel. There have been some EE Control Panel tweaks but just not the overhaul that perhaps some expected.
This isn’t a bad thing at all. I’m not arguing that EllisLab is making wrong business moves. EllisLab has an internal agenda that fits their business and product goals. You can’t argue it should be anything except what they want it to be. But after “Kennygate” they’ve been giving the perception of being transparent about their plans and now the community expects it.
This is the curse of transparency.
A New Tack
Almost two thousand words later, we’re finally here. What is EllisLab to do today, right now to break the curse of transparency? This is total backseat CEO advice, but I’ve come this far, so why not go all ten toes in?
First, I’d like to see them go back to only talking about stuff that is solid and ready to launch. In his blog post Kenny Meyers wrote:
The Apple silence strategy works when you release high quality, excellent products that surprise everyone. You released ExpressionEngine 2 beta. Start talking.
EllisLab, go back to the Apple silence strategy. No, your products aren’t as beautiful as what Apple delivers. But few achieve that. In my personal projects, I rarely pre-announce anything. What happens is that excitement of announcing saps the energy to complete the project. Yes, annonucing is exciting but save it!
A favorite article of mine is Joel Spolsky’s Mouth Wide Shut. It opens like this:
When Apple releases a new product, they tend to surprise the heck out of people, even the devoted Apple-watchers who have spent the last few months riffling through garbage dumpsters at One Infinite Loop.
Microsoft, on the other hand, can’t stop talking about products that are mere glimmers in someone’s eye. Testers outside the company were using .NET for years before it finally shipped.
EllisLab, please announce products and services when they’re ready. Not when you think of them and not because you think announcing early will make the company seem like it communicates more. That’s just playing into the hands of the curse.
Being transparent about major bug fixes is, of course, important. And those active in the forums and the bug tracker know that EllisLab is responsive and transparent about bugs, bug fixes and when they will be rolled out into releases. You’ve even updated us on your release schedule so those people who maintain a lot of sites can plan and schedule updates.
As your customers that’s what you owe us. You don’t, however, owe us to expose your entire annual master plan 12 months before you want to see it come to fruition. If you ever feel like you did, I’m sorry. I think that sucks.
The secrecy and announcement of MojoMotor was a great example of not saying anything until it was ready. That was a great unveiling of a new product—despite the awkward timing with EE 2 still in beta—and it generated a ton of excitement.
If you do go radio silent on everything that is unfinished people will still complain. Yes, Twitter will be full of bitching and moaning and plenty of flapping jaws. That’s okay.
Stick with it. Show us your stuff when it’s polished and ready. I can’t wait to see what is coming next.
Yesterday, EllisLab released ExpressionEngine 2.3. It’s another major improvement release that included 70 bug fixes in addition to other tweaks, enhancements and security updates. The update is available now under your “My Purchases” area at ExpressionEngine.com.
The biggest updates were:
- Improved pagination that allows you better control over how you paginate channel entries and their comments.
- Member search tokens, so you can create better searches that return more accurate results.
- Copy and paste custom field tags from the Custom Field Group page (very handy!).
EllisLab also posted two short video overviews of new features. I’ve included them below.
I couldn’t find this in the change log but there is a report on Twitter that EE 2.3 now sets “Automatically turn URLs and email addresses into link?” to No by default. If true (I haven’t tested it yet), that’s great news.
Leevi Graham is reporting that only 5 CodeIgniter files were changed from EE 2.2.2 to EE 2.3. I’m not sure this means anything significant other than the changes in 2.3 were focused on fixing bugs in existing ExpressionEngine code, not altering CodeIgniter to support new EE features and functionality.
The reaction I’ve read on Twitter has been positive so far, without any major issues upgrading from EE 2.2.2. As always, please back up your site files and database before upgrading and don’t upgrade directly on a live server without testing the upgrade on a development server or localhost first.
Have you discovered other improvements or problems with EE 2.3? Let us know.
Video on Pagination Updates
Video on Member Search Tokens
If you are a professional designer, developer or agency and use ExpressionEngine regularly or develop add-ons for EE, you can apply to the ExpressionEngine Professionals Network. There are requirements that you must meet to be considered so be sure to read them before applying.
A new feature of the Pro Net is that you can now edit your Pro Net listing to keep company, contact and other information accurate and up-to-date.
A couple of weeks ago, I wondered aloud on this site what EE Reactor is and even tossed around some ideas about how it would work. There was some push back in the comments and in private conversations but the reason behind my write-up still stands firm: don’t publicly talk about projects that are unannounced in a way that makes them seem announced. It’s confusing. Even to this so-called insider.
That’s what led me to speculate about the EE Reactor project. The part of my theory that EE Reactor would be a separate download for license holders wasn’t correct. In the comments, Leslie Camacho (EllisLab CEO) chimed in and noted:
There will only be EE proper, like Media Girl said. We’re not doing the Magento thing with multiple editions.
So, there we go. EE will be EE. Good news. How the flow of Reactor code changes to the EE releases will work isn’t finalized, according to Leslie. He said the plan is to allow “as much autonomy as possible in terms of what they want to work on” but they won’t have free reign on pushing out changes. The plan right now is that EllisLab would have tight control of the process and code would be thoroughly tested and reviewed, similar to how CodeIgniter works.
In response to my worry that developers would be, without a doubt, working for free to help improve a commercial product that could improve the amount of money EllisLab makes, Leslie answered:
People contribute to projects because it helps them in some way, because they like adding to something that makes a difference in people’s lives, and because they simply love doing it.
I couldn’t agree with this more but it does generalize the issue a good bit and flatten some of the nuances of this arrangement.
In the days following my article, I had conversations with various people in the community to get their opinion on the EE Reactor idea. Here’s what I heard:
- Great idea and a huge testimony to how great our community is.
- EllisLab should hire more developers instead of allowing people to work for free.
- What does this mean that EllisLab needs outside developers to make their product better?
- Dumb idea!
- This might allow developers to get their feature requests in so they can build better products.
Let’s unpack some of these.
Is it spec work?
First, on the idea that EllisLab is allowing people to work for free on a commercial product. This is always a touchy situation, especially when it comes to design contests and spec work. Admirably, EllisLab speaks out against spec work in the information page for the Professionals Network.
Please note that asking for free or underpaid work in exchange for a reward at a later date is called Speculative Work (spec work) and is not a standard business practice among professional designers and developers.
Does the EE Reactor work really fit the definition of spec work? Well, not really. The developers participating aren’t doing it in anticipation of paying work down the road with EllisLab or that they would get paid if there code fix or feature implementation gets pulled into the EE2 release product. So, in that sense it is not spec work.
What do you think?
In the comments of my article, Aaron noted with sarcasm:
If developers wanted to build products for me for free and then purchase them from me afterward, I’d welcome them with open arms too (If anyone is interested, please get in touch).
This is an argument that I’ve pondered myself but how the EE Reactor project came about was organically from the community (see Steven Hambleton’s comment), not EllisLab trying to strong arm developers into doing their work for them. Context is what matters here.
Doesn’t EllisLab Have Developers?
Yes, they do. And if you’re running EE 2.2 you’ll know that they’ve been hard at work chipping away at bugs, refinements and improvements. As I’ve mentioned before, if you used EE 2.0 and EE 2.1, you can immediately appreciate the difference EE 2.2 makes. It’s not a redesign, a redevelopment or anything of the sort. But it is a big improvement over what they had. While underwhelming compared to the Assets module by Pixel & Tonic, the File Manager is solid and better than what was shipped with EE 2.1.
So, EllisLab does have developers on staff. But they (we) are fortunate enough to have a room full of talented developers in the community. Will all of them participate in the Reactor program, if it moves forward after the initial test stage? I don’t know.
Creating Better Add-ons and Websites
One take on this is that by allowing EE Reactor to happen, the add-on developers can have more influence over the addition of new hooks they need and, most importantly, bug fixes that are keeping them from improving–or even releasing–their add-ons.
But it’s not just about developers. If a member of the EE Reactor team is building a website for a client and runs into a bug (and as of right now there are plenty, he or she could fix that bug and submit it to be included in an upcoming release of ExpressionEngine. In order to finish the site the developer would have to fix the bug anyway, so why not push that out for the benefit of everyone else?
Community
For a community that has a lot more commerce in it (add-ons, EE license, training materials) than other big CMS communities, we are never slow to help each other out. A group of developers seems willing to give some of their time in exchange for any of the above or nothing at all. Maybe they just want to help.
I was skeptical about this idea when I first heard it but after talking to others and hearing nearly all sides of the story, this looks like a great experiment.
In the comments of a recent EllisLab blog post, my friend and supplier of the finest gin, Kenny Meyers asked:
What’s EE Reactor?
I’ve been thinking the same thing and I thought it was just me. I’ve seen EE Reactor referenced in a way that made it seem like it was an announced somewhere but as far as I can tell it wasn’t. In the EllisLab blog post there was a bullet item that read:
EE Reactor concept update
Surely I had missed the original announcement if there was going to be an update. So I went hunting.
A quick google search turned up three tweets from Leslie Camacho about phone calls regarding EE Reactor and an update that “it’s going quite well…”.
Then there were some more mentions in the forum thread about “The state of EE”. All of the other Google results have to do with actual reactors and, you know, physics.
I’m not the only one wondering. In the forums, Danny Tam asked:
Are there any links you can point me to to learn a bit more about this EE Reactor? Can’t seem to find anything on it.
He was pointed to Leslie Camacho’s Twitter feed. Well, okay.
Another response to questions about EE Reactor was:
The reactor group (not branch) for CodeIgniter started in an effort to have a branch of CI that the community was responsible for maintaining and adding to with oversight from EL.
Recently the idea came up to harness this idea for EE. That is what is being discussed in this thread.
Leslie did answer Kenny’s question a couple of days later:
Like CodeIgniter Reactor, but for ExpressionEngine. We have four awesome devs eager to give it a trial run, goal is to have it set by EECI. If it works with 4, we’ll expand.
CodeIgniter Reactor started as a community run branch of CodeIgniter (Reactor is now a team of developers). It moved along at a faster pace than the version developed by EllisLab because it did not have the weight of commercial software (ExpressionEngine and MojoMotor) sitting on top of it.
The CodeIgniter you can download today is CodeIgniter Reactor but it’s no longer called that. As stated in a blog post by Derek Jones last month, “CodeIgniter ‘Reactor’ is CodeIgniter” and the EllisLab branch of CodeIgniter is “no longer being publicly maintained.” I don’t know if that means that ExpressionEngine 2 is still truly based on an open source version of CodeIgniter or not.
Is ExpressionEngine Reactor a community-driven version of ExpressionEngine?
It’s an interesting question and theory because EE is a commercial product and not open source like CodeIgniter. From what I can gather, EE Reactor is going to be an experiment wherein a set number of developers are allowed to poke, prod and improve EE and then EllisLab may pull (some or all of) those changes into the commercial version of ExpressionEngine.
Because EE doesn’t have a free version and isn’t open source like CodeIgniter, I don’t see how this could be anything but a tightly controlled experiment. What are scenarios on how this would work?
Here’s one I could come up with: if you own an EE license you could opt to download and use the EE Reactor version instead of the EllisLab version.
There are some potential downsides to this theory:
- EE Reactor could begin to implement features of commercial add-ons.
- More people would choose the Reactor version than the core EE version thereby shifting the development of the EE people use to a completely different team of developers.
- The Reactor developers would be doing free development work for EllisLab.
- Support could be a mess because the EllisLab support team would have to know two different “kinds” of ExpressionEngine.
- Fragmentation of add-on support (“Does this add-on support Reactor?”).
There’s a lot there. The above list is just me riffing on my theory of how it could work. As I’ve made clear earlier: I have no idea what EE Reactor is or how it really will work.
But people sure are talking about it like it’s been announced already.
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