The 2012 Wrap

Can you believe another year has already flown by? We sure can’t. The ExpressionEngine community is a unique bunch. You always seem to push the limits of whatever you’re doing. It’s been a pleasure reporting on various news, releases, and hoopla the ExpressionEngine community has created this year.

Without further ado, here is the 2012 ExpressionEngine Community Wrap!

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Back in January we asked you what your EE 2012 wishes were and a lot of you made yours known. Go back and review your wishes in the comment thread. Did they come true?

A big wish from this site (posted back on January 19th was to bring back EE Core. Well, wish granted. Thank you, EllisLab.

This year saw a total of seven ExpressionEngine releases from EllisLab. The year started with EE 2.4 on January 24th and ended with EE 2.5.5 on December 20th. If you have a spare minute while you’re waiting for midnight to strike, check out the entire changelog to read about everything that has changed with ExpressionEngine in the year 2012.

For a broader look at ExpressionEngine as a whole over the past years, Vim Interactive put together an info graphic that gives visual representation of who we are as a whole.

The ExpressionEngine CodeIgniter Conference

There were two EECIs this year. One in Leiden, and one in Austin, Texas.

Ryan compiled a round up of slides from EECI EU, and I had the opportunity to live blog a lot of EECI Austin.

A notable piece from EECI Austin was the Developer Round Table, which I was able to transcribe nearly 100%. It’s a good read if you want to get a vibe of how the top add-on devs think the community is doing.

And, as a result of such discussions, add-on companies have started making changes, for what I think, is for the best.

For a full look-back at EECI in Austin, check out our round up video.

EECI in Austin would the last conference run by Whoooz! Webmedia. Turner Parscale purchased the assets to EECI and will continue hosting events, though in a new format.

Ch-Ch-Changes at EllisLab

I think it’s pretty safe to say this was a big year of change for EllisLab. And it seemed a lot of these changes came all at once. They launched a brand new site. Ryan posted an opinion piece on all the changes at EllisLab.

The Affiliate Program was ended for various reasons. This definitely had an impact on community run sites, such as EE Insider and Devot:ee, which used the affiliate commissions to keep these sites going. Check out Ryan’s opinion piece on the matter.

Then there was the whole Professionals Network incident. Originally, Professionals Network links went to the Enterprise page on the new EllisLab site, but that has since been changed, and work on a new Professionals Network has started.

2012 marked the end of the EngineHosting/EllisLab relationship, which unfortunately, also resulted in a lawsuit and another lawsuit. EllisLab forged a relationship with Nexcess.

EllisLab transitions from a forum based support system that was included in an ExpressionEngine license purchase, to a separate, paid, private support solution.

EllisLab restructured the licensing and pricing for ExpressionEngine. One flat fee. Regardless of the project type.

ExpressionEngine

ExpressionEngine 2.5 introduced a new Rich Text Editor fieldtype. Described as “a very lightweight WYSIWYG”, the RTE fieldtype is useful to clients who need basic text formatting.

EE 2.5 also introduced the Cookie Consent Module as an optional download to comply with the EU Cookie Law.

The black magic that is Stash took the community by storm and became a powerful way to create more flexible EE templates.

Language packs for ExpressionEngine moved to Github to create a more centralized method for making sure they’re up to date. As a result, many add-on developers followed suit.

DevDemon Updater was released to streamline the update process for ExpressionEngine and add-ons.

Stack Exchange was a hot topic this year, leading to the public beta of the ExpressionEngine Stack Exchange site.

An Event Apart relaunched in a big way, and is now powered by ExpressionEngine.

Eric Lamb and Ben Croker talk about ExpressionEngine add-on development, and a whole lot more.

How-to Articles in 2012

Education and training are a big part of this community. Here’s a round up of in-depth training on EE Insider this year.

• Using Cache Wisely with ExpressionEngine
• Review and Overview of Forms 2.0 by DevDemon
• A Comparison of WYSIWYG Editors for ExpressionEngine
• A Review and Overview of HelpDesk by Krea
• Automatic Add-on Builds Powered by Source Control
• Reusable Form Templates with ProForm
• Template Partials using Stash
• Review: Content Elements by Krea

From everyone here at EE Insider, thanks for a great year!