There’s no use denying it: ExpressionEngine’s control panel, or CP, can be a little daunting, even if you’ve been using EE for years. Which is why I like Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain’s simplified CP theme so much. While it doesn’t do much, if anything, to address the CP’s underlying architecture, it does clean things up and reduce some of the CP’s visual clutter—which is not nothing. I recently installed it on Opus, and like it so much that I’ll probably be using it for client sites that aren’t running EE 2.x (the theme only works with EE 1.6.x).

For the last seven months or so, ExpressionEngine 2 has been available as a public beta. However, with the release of ExpressionEngine 2.1 (change log), the beta period is officially over. The road to this moment has been a long one for the folks at EllisLab—it’s been over two years since we got our first glimpse of ExpressionEngine 2—so many congratulations to Rick Ellis, Leslie Camacho, et al.

And as a way to celebrate this auspicious moment, the folks at EllisLab have unveiled a brand new ExpressionEngine website. In the interests of full disclosure, I worked on the new website and I consider it a real honor to have been involved in the project. I got to work with people I respect for a community that I value and to help promote a product that has had a huge impact on my career over the last few years. What more could one ask for?

With the impending release of ExpressionEngine 2.1, the new version of ExpressionEngine will officially be out of beta. EllisLab has just announced their plans for the transition and here are a few of the highlights:

• ExpressionEngine 1.x will no longer be available for purchase after ExpressionEngine 2.1 is released. However, ExpressionEngine 1.x owners will still have access to download their files.
• Folks who purchase ExpressionEngine 2.x will also have access to ExpressionEngine 1.x through December 31st, 2010. (Presumably, most third-party developers will have made their add-ons compatible with ExpressionEngine 2.x by then.)
• EllisLab will continue to provide support for ExpressionEngine 1.x “as long as there is sufficient demand for it” (i.e., probably through at least part of 2011).
• EllisLab will continue to provide bug fixes and security updates for ExpressionEngine 1.x.

You read all of the details here. Additional information and discussion can be found in this forum thread.

If you’ve done any significant ExpressionEngine development in the last year or so, then you’re probably familiar with Brandon Kelly. With add-ons like Wygwam and FieldFrame, Kelly has quickly joined the upper ranks of “rock star” EE developers, alongside such developers as Solspace and Leevi Graham.

In October of 2009, Kelly announced that he would be leaving his job and forming his own company, Pixel & Tonic, to focus on full-time EE add-on development. And on February 23, 2010, Kelly unveiled the new Pixel & Tonic website.

Use any of Kelly’s add-ons, and you quickly realize that he sweats the small things—his add-ons are elegantly designed down to the littlest detail—and it’s no different with his website. It may not be the flashiest developer website, but it’s a solid, good-looking one that is packed with useful information (including thorough documentation for all of his apps). But the real magic happens if you’re using a “cutting edge” browser, such as Safari 4.

Kelly has used CSS3 to develop the website, which means that users with newer browsers will see a lot of subtle visual flourishes that give the site an extra level of polish. For example, the form fields are just lovely thanks to a nice use of gradients and rounded corners. Also, he’s using HTML5 to mark up the website, which means that the website’s code is more sensible, semantically correct, and easier to maintain.

Of course, this means that IE users are left behind. Visually speaking, the Pixel & Tonic website is an absolute mess in IE6, and only slightly better in IE7. But, as Kelly points out, that’s not really big deal for him:

So what about IE? Well, thanks to the fact that I’m targeting other web developers, I can say with 97.3% certainty that you’re not using it. Which is awesome, because that gave me a practical reason not to worry about it (besides just not caring). I did scope out the damages a couple days before launching, and it wasn’t pretty. Not even remotely usable. I’ll probably deal with that in some form eventually, but it’s most certainly not going to be full support.

Kelly has been blogging about the processes behind the website, which is a nice way to get in the head of one of ExpressionEngine’s premier developers.

All in all, a very nice website and a nice sign of things to come. It’s certainly a website that I plan to return to a lot in the future, if only to keep abreast of the coolness that Brandon Kelly unleashes upon the EE community.

Regardless of whether you agree with him politically or not, of whether you voted for him or not, I think we can all agree that Barack Obama’s campaign websites—that his overall web presence—was quite remarkable, and displayed a use and understanding of the web that no other political candidate had displayed to date. One needed only to compare the look of his website to that of his opponents. Obama’s website was beautifully designed and laid out. Its smooth, elegant look was upbeat, warm, and inviting, and made other candidate websites seem crude, kludgy, and ancient by comparison.

Since then, it’s been interesting to see the impact that the Obama campaign has had on what other political candidates have begun doing with their websites. Unfortunately, I’ve seen some websites where it looks like the candidates in question haven’t really learned anything. Rather, they simply co-opted Obama’s visual style, which just means they end up looking derivative (as if they’d applied some sort of “Obama-izer” effect to their design in Photoshop).

All of which is to say, I’m very pleasantly surprised by the website for John McCain’s senate campaign. The design is clean and thoroughly modern, but doesn’t at all look like an Obama rip-off job. There are all manner of intriguing little details (like the different states of the little buttons that populate the site), the content is laid out nicely, and there’s a nice use of Cufón to introduce some additional typography to the site. And I must say, I love the logo design. Like the design, it’s clean and modern, and its simple, graceful design lends itself well to being iconic.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the site runs on ExpressionEngine and was built with HTML 5.

I do have a few minor quibbles, though. Some of the colors seem a little heavy-handed to me, but then, I’m personally not a big fan of red and orange together. And the header—which I assume to be a shot of the Arizona landscape—is a nice idea, but the actual execution, with its deep blues, feels ominous and gloomy. Which isn’t exactly the tone you want for a political candidate’s website.

The website was designed by Forty, and they have a nice write-up of the process behind the website on their blog.

A Whole New Wooooorld: Structure + ExpressionEngine:

Even with the EE 2.0 release in December, I think the best ExpressionEngine event in 2009 was the rise of Travis Schmeisser’s Structure. While 2.0 lays the groundwork for a bright future, in the short run it’s more of a step backwards because so few of EE’s amazing community-built addons have been ported so far - even with new functionality, a 2.0 upgrade takes away far more than it gives at the moment.

In contrast, the Structure module immediately makes major improvements to your site’s UI, construction, and template codebase, and it also plays nice with other addons, creating a faster, smarter EE experience. No software I installed last year saved me as much time and effort as Structure did, and Travis deserves all the credit for that (and he got quite a bit, including Devot:ee’s Module Of The Year award).

I couldn’t agree more with that last sentence: Structure has quickly become an indispensable EE add-on, one that I use on almost every one of my EE sites.

I’ve been using ExpressionEngine for a number of years now. Not surprisingly, I think it’s a very robust and flexible CMS that can handle many different types of content, from blogs and wikis to photo galleries and discussion forums. However, one type of content that can be rather difficult to create and manage in EE is an event calendar. Enter Repeet, a plugin that allows you to simulate recurring events with standard weblog entries (among other things).

Repeet had been originally developed by Brent Wilson, but recently, Solspace acquired the plugin and have released a new version with several improvements. I’ve found Repeet to be a very useful addition to my EE toolbox, and so I’m glad to see it get these updates.

Want to help Haiti relief efforts and stock up on some solid third party addons for your ExpressionEngine project(s)? Well now you can do both, thanks to Solspace.

We’re raising money in the Solspace store for Haiti relief. We’re encouraging you to buy from the store with a 20% discount. We’ll take 20% of your total purchase and send that to the Red Cross for Haiti relief. In effect we are donating 40% of software sales, giving you a 20% discount incentive and Haiti the rest. The effort will last through Wednesday.

Our goal is to raise $2000 and we will monitor that goal on the Solspace home page.

As of right now, they’ve raised $459.97.