ExpressionEngine 2.0: New Features Tour

ExpressionEngine 2.0, the new version of my favorite content management system, has finally been released. This version boasts a multitude of new features and a vastly improved design.

It’s been a long wait, and it’s finally ready to use…or is it? Let’s take a trip in the Wayback Machine to examine the past year in ExpressionEngine history.

March 2009:

Eagerly awaiting the release of ExpressionEngine 2.0. The EE team has been teasing us about it for about a year now, and last May they posted a sneak preview screencast of the brand-new File Manager and it looks pretty amazing. I’ve been pretty excited about EE 2.0 all year. Expected release is Summer 2009.

Summer 2009:

EE 2.0 release is delayed. That said, they needed to make sure everything was in tip-top shape before releasing.

December 2009:

It's here! Although it’s ready for anyone to use, technically it’s still a Public Beta, which means there may be a few minor bugs here and there. So I’m not quite ready to jump in and start using it on client projects just yet. Also, third-party add-ons are still playing catch-up.

While new EE 2.0-ready add-ons are being released every day, a few essentials (most notably, Pixel&Tonic’s indispensable Playa and FF Matrix) have yet to be updated. They’ll come along sooner or later, but it’s hard to build complex sites without them.

April 2010

I’m still waiting for add-on developers to play catch-up so that I can fully dive into EE2. From the tinkering that I’ve done with it so far, though, I’ve been very impressed. Here’s why…

2010 Expression Engine 2.0 Public Beta Feature Tour:

The Control Panel has been redesigned, with a beautiful interface by Veerle Pieters. ExpressionEngine 1.6’s design isn’t horrible, but navigating deep into the control panel to find obscure settings can be a pain. EE 2.0’s control panel uses a nice dropdown navigation system, and overall it’s a lot faster and easier to get to where you need to go.

The Edit Template page further eliminates needless clicking around. You can now set preferences and member group access for each template directly from its Edit Template page. Similarly, the New Entry/Edit Entry page allows you to add, remove, and rearrange fields on each entry with a simple drag-and-drop. This is a huge timesaver. You can even add custom Tabs to the New Entry/Edit Entry page.

One of my favorite new additions is a built-in File Manager. EE 1.6 has no built-in way to manage all the various images and other files that end up populating your EE-based website, and its file upload process is baffling even to the geekiest of geeks. EE 2.0’s File Manager is fantastic. You can preview, upload, and download files, as well as resize, crop, rotate, and flip images.

This only scratches the surface of the improvements to ExpressionEngine in their 2.0 Public Beta release. You can visit their site to learn more, and even download a free 30-day trial. It’s ready to use for creating blogs as well as any website that needs regularly updated content. Unfortunately, until we get the EE2-ready versions of Playa and FF Matrix, any site that requires complex relationships between entries or complex custom fields will have to make do with EE 1.6.8. Which in itself still pretty great, all things considered. Definitely worth the wait.

Are you an EE geek too? Check out EE’s own historical release timeline.

Have you used EE 2.0 on a project? If so, we would love to hear about it. We look forward to integrating it with our own workflow.