Welcome to the new site and forums!

Welcome to the new ExpressionEngine forums on the new ExpressionEngine web site!

Long overdue, our forum theme is modern and fully responsive. If you’re a long-time user of the ExpressionEngine forums, though, you may wonder where some features have gone. Well, the two details go hand-in-hand.

If you’ve created a theme for the forum module before (or any forum application for that matter), you know how painful it can be. There are all these small discrete parts, that the application pulls together in contexts that make sense to it, but maybe not to you. So we set out to do some work that would have value extending far beyond updating our own web site.

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That’s right, we’re rebuilding the forum module to have the behavior and flexibility you expect from ExpressionEngine. We took a page from Apple, recognizing that to truly improve a valuable but aging product, we need a reset. So like you may have experienced with Photos, iMovie, Pages, and Numbers, the new module isn’t going to start life with feature-parity. But it’s already a hundred times improved. Better still, like those apps, you will be able to run them in parallel, giving you plenty of time to switch without having to give anything up.

Our site is running what I consider the Alpha version. It’s not even feature complete yet from goal for a 1.0.0 release. But when we do ship, you can be confident that it’s been battle tested on a real-world site that relies on it for community interaction.

There’s no release date yet either. But I’ll be able to soon share some details of its new underlying architecture with third-parties. It’s truly elegant, and will make building and maintaining complex modules that sling around lots of data and variables a breeze.

Most importantly though, I’m excited about what this will bring to ExpressionEngine’s ability to build modern web communities. You may hear folks hyperbolically talk about forums being archaic or even dead, but take a look at any strong online community and you’ll find threaded topical discourse. The flexibility of this module will enable site builders to create those engaging experiences without compromise, and with joy instead of pain.

Enjoy the new site!