Greg Aker

Drama...sigh

Be a part of the solution

Filed in: ExpressionEngine, Blobbing

January 9, 2012

Ah, it's winter. (side note: I seriously need to get the winter theme up and going on my site.) It's that time of year where the ExpressionEngine user-base starts to get restless. Oh, who am I kidding, it can happen at any time of year. So a recent comment on Kenny's article over at The Nerdary got me thinking, and I decided to dust off my long ignored blog.

I don't think users of ExpressionEngine have any clue what it's like to be a developer at EllisLab, what it entails, or what the fuck they do. It just so happens I have a keen insight into it, and have been wanting to post this for a long time.

Let's go back in time to when I came on full-time. At that point, Allard, Jones, Robin & Pascal had been working their tails off. Not knowing the codebase, my job was to fix low-hanging fruit bugs and try to bring some consistency to the UI. For those of you who where in the public beta, you saw these changes. We added a javascript combo-loader, added future caching headers. This helped to dramatically speed up the experience in the control panel. At a point, Allard broke off and started on Mojo. I had no problem with this. There are times when too many people working in the same area can cause more problems than it solves. So for those of you who have lambasted the choice for Derek to be working on Mojo at this time, I'm sorry, but I disagree with you.

Les has said before that things weren't handled correctly in the 2.x conversion and during the public beta, Robin, Pascal and I worked hours on end to fix things up. Given that there was several years of previous development, a change in CTO and other leadership/dev team shuffles, from my perspective, things weren't as bad as they could have been.

I understand why people were upset/on edge during this period. We made drastic changes during the closed beta. Due to the time it took, people expected ajax requests to their brain and for ExpressionEngine to code their site for them. So back to reality, shit happens, software has bugs and we just do our best to make it better.

After we rolled out of the public beta and felt we had a product we were proud of, we started thinking about things to change. For some reason, the ExpressionEngine community seems to think that unless it's direct changes in the UI, nothing happens. However, let's look at what 2011 brought ExpressionEngine, which was taken straight from the changelog

Build 20110101 (initial release)

Version 2.1.4

Release Date: February 1, 2011

Build 20110405

Version 2.1.5

Release Date: May 12, 2011

Build 20110512

Version 2.2.0

Release Date: June 22, 2011

Version 2.2.1

Release Date: June 30, 2011

Version 2.2.2

Release Date: August 1, 2011

Version 2.3.0

Release Date: October 11, 2011

Version 2.3.1

Release Date: October 17, 2011

The rumor-mill also tells me that there are some amazing things in store for upcoming releases.

Seriously, people. Get a fucking grip. To say the EE dev team didn't get anything accomplished in 2011 is disingenuous and completely unfair. These people work their asses off day in and day out to allow you to be successful and build sites you otherwise wouldn't be able to.

Are there alternatives to ExpressionEngine, absolutely. Let's look at them.

So in otherwords, you need to be a developer to use both of these. Using ExpressionEngine tags doesn't make you a developer. You could use Zend Framework, but again, you need to know your shit with Object Oriented PHP. You could try to roll your own CMS, but again, you need to be able to program PHP, and not just use some methods laid out on a super object.

There's WordPress and Drupal. I've never touched Drupal, and haven't logged into WordPress in years, so I can't comment on those other than to say that chances are, you have to know some PHP.

Like I said, the EE dev team is a group of extremely bright, fantastic people. Prior to leaving EllisLab, I largely stopped using Twitter due to the constant shit-talking on work I did. Let's put it this way, how would you feel if I looked at sites you did and said you were doing things wrong, stupid and you sucked? Probably not real good. The support team is in the amazing hands of Kevin Smith. If you want to hear someone talk passionately about support, talk with Kevin. I commend him with the job he's doing. A second designer has been around for a couple of weeks.

I don't think enough is charged for EE. The user-base is huge and everyone who uses it is an expert at what it should do. Funny how things never seem to match up.

So finally to my point. You can disagree with what EllisLab has done, but know where to point the fingers. Executive teams make these decisions and stand by them. Les has said he wants to be the guy to blame, and James Mathias has proven he wants to hear from people. Les and James are my friends, and two amazing people. Secondly, they are at the helm and great listeners.

Have meaningful conversations with the people at EllisLab who are in charge of change, don't throw the developers or the support team under the bus. Their work puts food on your table as well as theirs. Remember that. Let's stop rehashing the same shit every few months. If you want to see change, do something about it. Don't be a dick on the internet and say the people in the trenches aren't doing anything.

I don't want this to be any kind of sounding board, so comments on this post are off. Make positive change and contribute to the solution, don't be the problem.

Happy New Year,

-greg