Is Expression Engine still alive?
News and General
Hi all,
I’m writing this brief post just to find out if it’s still worth using Expression Engine today. I have always liked this CMS, I genuinely think it’s one of the best, but in the latest years I have always had the sensation of an unstable and/or dying project, therefore I haven’t used it for a while. The reasons are slow update releases, the sale to Digital Locations, then the sale back to Ellis, then the sale to this Packet Tide company, which as far as I understand, is a development company which used to develop EE add-ons? Also, one time in 2019 I opened a bug report and basically it was completely ignored. Someone answered me in the forums saying that the bug didn’t really compromise the functionality in a serious way, which I’ve found quite an odd response, which reinforced my idea that behind this project there was not enough manpower.
Since I am thinking about using EE for some coming projects, could someone more knowledgeable than me honestly help me deciding if it’s worth using it? Is the project still alive? I see version 6 has been released, but it looks like it’s mostly a revamp of the admin area. Again, something that doesn’t make me think about a strong way forward.
Thanks a lot in advance for any advice!
Thanks for gettin in touch about this.
ExpressionEngine is alive and doing well! The ExpressionEngine 6 release was a pretty large undertaking as a whole https://docs.expressionengine.com/latest/installation/changelog.html
In the last 14 months or so, the Slack group has grown from just under 2k members to almost 7k. These days thats where most of the activity is happening.
https://expressionengine.com/blog/join-us-in-slack
As for the 2019 bug report, we’re happy to take a look at it if you would like to link it here. By and large part of 2019 was a transition for ExpressionEngine as a whole. So while I don’t know the details around your bug report or the response to it, we’re happy to take a peek at it!
Thanks, -Tom Jaeger
Hi Tom,
Thanks for your reply!
It’s good to hear that EE is doing fine as I had a feeling that it was going through something in the past couple of years as you confirmed, at least with regard to 2019. Thanks for pointing out the Slack group to me. I’ve actually joined it yesterday.
As for my bug report, it would be great if you could share your opinion about it.
To be honest, I was coming back to EE after some time (it was indeed 2019) and was studying the docs to refresh my mind when I encountered this odd behavior using the siblings tag. I asked the question in the forums and didn’t really get to understand if I was getting something wrong or if there was a bug in the software. I pointed out that the behavior could have caused problems if a child had more than one parent. In fact, after that I raised a bug ticket which never got even classified.
At that point I thought the project was not really active anymore and with a bit of frustration turned back to WordPress and similar for subsequent projects.
It would be nice to give it another shot since I think EE is still one of the most flexible and well thought CMS platforms out there. I always loved it, since I bought my first paid license over 10 years ago.
Thank you.
Just a quick update for anyone finding this thread. We had a developer look into it and update the github issue linked in the post above. We also touched base in Slack about it.