ExpressionEngine February Update

Let’s talk about ExpressionEngine 6

We know that a lot of you are looking forward to the release of ExpressionEngine 6 and so are we. We have many great features planned that we hope will bring value to the developers and the end-users. We also greatly value our ExpressionEngine Community. The eecms slack channel is once again thriving, there are new faces every day, and everyone is helping each other out. It’s great to see so many people excited about the future.

The core of ExpressionEngine has never been the codebase, it’s the community

Today we want to shine some light on ExpressionEngine 6 and a bit of what the future holds. For the last four months, we’ve been heads down gathering feedback, discussing features with developers, talking with end users, designing, and pounding out some code. We want to make sure we’re bringing value to our users and not just adding a bunch of cool features. I’m sure what you really want to hear about is what’s going to be in the 6 release. So let’s talk about a few features and updates.

You’ve already seen some early screenshots of the 6 control panel. We’re really excited about a modernized control panel that is also easier to use. Some of the excitement will be saved for the actual release, but know that a big goal of ours has been the experience for developers and the end-users alike. We really hope most of your frustrations with the current CP design will be out the window the moment you dive into 6.

Another item that we heard loud and clear was that people want the ability to customize the entry listing screen. Well we can say that this will for sure be part of the upcoming release. We want editors, designers, content writers, and everyone else to enjoy using the CMS. We feel that this is a much needed update to allow users to be able to quickly access the information they need.

Speaking of end users, how often do you wish that members could have multiple roles? That is a feature which has been brought up many times in the past. We’re pleased to say that the member system has been rewritten to a role based system. Users will now be able assign members to multiple roles allowing for better content management and user based permissions.

Another item that has come up time and time again is around ExpressionEngine as open source software. In the future, we’ll elaborate on our plans for the open source project and how we foresee the community and our team working together to develop an amazing product. While the core of ExpressionEngine will remain open source for the foreseeable future, we’re excited to announce that we will also release ExpressionEngine Pro at or shortly after the 6 release.

ExpressionEngine Pro will offer more custom features, better branding options, increased efficiency, and other features.

ExpressionEngine Pro extends the ExpressionEngine core product with many great features that empower agencies, developers, and other Pro users to build extremely powerful and easy to use websites and web applications. ExpressionEngine Pro will look much like the ExpressionEngine you know and love, but will offer more custom features, better branding options, increased efficiency, and other features to elevate the end users experience beyond anything we’ve seen in ExpressionEngine before. While we’d love to talk about everything we have planned for EE Pro’s release, we’re going to save the full line up for the release. Rest assured though, we’re not planning to move anything you know and love about ExpressionEngine out of the core product and into ExpressionEngine Pro only.

We’re not planning to move anything you know and love about ExpressionEngine out of the core product

Moving away from ExpressionEngine 6 for a bit we’ve also been working to resolve many bugs from 5.3 that the community has reported as well as update 5.3 for PHP 7.4 compatibility. Of course these updates will be rolled into ExpressionEngine 6, and we’ll also be releasing an update to 5.3 in the very near future.

Finally a quick update on the timeline. The release date for ExpressionEngine 6 core is still to be determined. However, the current plan is to turn it over to dev-preview as early as mid-March. We recognize that’s a little bit later than we had planned last month, but we feel it’s the right move to ensure everything is ready to go. More on this front to come.

Overall, we hope you are looking forward to the future of our community with excitement and anticipation. The core of ExpressionEngine has never been the codebase, it’s the community. Those in Slack, the forums, at EEConf, and anyone else reading this are the ones that make the difference. We not only want to ensure that the community continues to grow, we want to make sure we’re a part of it. If you see any of our team in Slack, never hesitate to say hi, bring up a feature you’d like to see, or just banter Andy about the Cleveland Browns. We wouldn’t be here without you guys, and we never want to lose sight of that.

The best is yet to come.

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