Developers and designers from as far away as South Africa and Australia recently journeyed to Brooklyn for The 2011 ExpressionEngine CodeIgniter Conference. Tai and James were among them. Here’s what they learned.

Mightybytes has built a number of our favorite sites in EE, including: The Chicago Diabetes Project, Court Theatre and most importantly, our own site, mightybytes.com. ExpressionEngine is a unique product; although it’s built on the CodeIgniter open-source framework and popular with an open-source-minded development community, the CMS itself remains a commercial product from EllisLab. Unlike many commercial CMS’s, ExpressionEngine is very in touch with its user base and values its community highly, and the EECI conference made this quite apparent.

Far from the high-powered Drupalcon Chicago in March, EECI took place at the Invisible Dog Art Gallery, former factory for the 80’s fad toy. (Allegedly, when the current owners took over the space, they found all of the raw materials for toy assembly still in the basement.)

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.

Using an outdated system to manage your website’s content is fraught with many potential problems, including the possibility that the site could get hacked. Arts organizations and non-profits are particularly susceptible to this because they are often resource-constrained in technical departments and if they have IT resources at all, upgrading the website’s content management system typically isn’t at the top of an already long list of needs.

WordPress, Expression Engine, and Drupal have become the de facto tools we use to build many web-based projects these days.

Blogging software and content management systems (CMS) not only empower our clients to maintain their own sites, but also increase search engine rankings and simplify the process by which they integrate the Web into daily business routines.

The original Mightybytes site had a section which would pull random quotes about the company and display them in a container. The quotes were hard coded into an XML file, and as we moved the site over into Expression Engine, I wanted to move the quotes into the system as well. A cool back-end redesign deserves an even cooler front-end redesign, so I created a gadget which could cycle through all the quotes in the system. My concept was an infinitely scrolling system of tiles, which would slide in the direction indicated by the user.