Since 1993, I’ve ping-ponged back and forth between open source and commercial software to run farces.com. Most recently—since July 2002 according to the Wayback Machine—I’ve been running some version of Expression Engine or its predecessor pMachine Pro.
For quite some time EllisLab has been working on Expression Engine 2.0, and announced several release dates. In September 2008, Rick Ellis, the company’s chief executive published a statement that “the major systems have been completed” but that “we need to push the release into fall.” That’d be fall 2008.
Today’s promise is to ship by SXSW 2010. Sorry, but I can’t help but be reminded of the Jobsism: “real artists ship.”
I wasn’t really worried last year about shipping date slippage. Software’s complicated and it happens; EllisLab is a tiny developer. What did concern me then, and concerns me even more now, is that Ellis’s September 2008 statement also carried this bit: “the CodeIgniter [PHP web application framework] integration is functioning very well.” I was concerned because Kohana forked from CodeIgniter in 2007 because the development community got frustrated with the lack of bug fixes and new features.
Paul Burdick, the company’s chief technology officer, left EllisLab last April. More bad news, but I held my tongue. Today Solspace—a web design and development shop focused on Expression Engine—announced Burdick had been hired as lead developer. Solspace has developed useful modules for Expression Engine, but they’re expensive. Now Burdick’s coding talent is locked up, behind a paywall as it were.
Something happened today, though, that makes my stomach hurt. EllisLab announced it is “revamping EE’s license options to reflect the expanding needs of the EE community….” That doesn’t bode well.
Expression Engine has always been a hybrid: commercial software with community support. EllisLab has technical support staff members—and I’ve always gotten excellent, timely support—but the community itself provides much of the support and there’s no one to call if something goes terribly wrong.
So, the short version is I’m possibly going to be soon shopping again for software to run the site.
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