Insights

EEConf 2026 ran October 7 and 8 at Oakham House at Toronto Metropolitan University. Two days, ten presentations, a roundtable, and Mayhem, the open-mic lightning round at the end. We were in the room for all of it. Links to the presenters' slides will be added as they become available.

The short version: ExpressionEngine 8 is faster, has no known breaking changes in the normal operating path, and is built for a world where AI agents work alongside humans. Packet Tide is hoping to ship it by the end of 2026. None of that changes the EE 6 deadline. Security fixes for EE 6 end December 31, 2026. Audit your add-ons and get to EE 7 now. That's most of the work, and the step to EE 8 should be small when it ships.

Everything else at the conference was about doing the work better: images, migrations, testing, deployment, accessibility, and a lot of frank talk about AI.

What's new in ExpressionEngine 8?

Tom Jaeger opens EEConf 2026 with the ExpressionEngine 8 keynote.

Tom Jaeger of Packet Tide opened with the keynote, and the line we'll be repeating to clients for the next year came early: "A major version should not be a major headache." Packet Tide says there are no known breaking changes in the normal operating path, and they aren't aware of changes existing add-ons need to make.

He backed that up with numbers from a real site with 222,987 entries, upgraded from EE 7 to EE 8. The Channels screen dropped from 224 ms to 119 ms. The control panel homepage went from 355 ms to 201 ms. Every screen they measured was faster and ran fewer queries.

Fresh installs get better defaults: the system folder outside the webroot, an environment config file, and SQLite as a database option. Upgrades keep your existing setup.

On AI, EE 8 makes a site's structure readable to AI tools, adds a library of reusable prompts, and treats agents as another interface alongside the control panel, CLI and API. Agents get explicit permissions and nothing more. One slide said "Agents don't get a back door," and Tom added that "the goal isn't to remove humans." This is the direction we're leaning into, and we're happy to have Packet Tide leading the way.

Portage's import review screen, showing exactly what a structural change will add, update and remove.

Bryan Nielsen walked through the features, running his slides on EE 8 itself. The one agencies will care about is Portage. It packages structural changes (channels, fields, templates) on one install and imports them on another, with a git-style diff before anything changes. That's the staging-to-production sync problem every database-driven CMS has, and it's the reason people get tempted by flat-file systems. We would use this for the majority of our client sites.

Also shipping: themes you can install and edit in the control panel, overhauled Channel Sets, Entry Snapshots (an entry's full state as JSON, useful for headless builds), a Backup Manager in core that can store to S3, Cloudflare R2 or Backblaze B2, centralized logging, and a profiler that now catches AJAX requests and redirects.

Tom Jaeger and Bryan Nielsen take questions at the EE 8 follow-up session.

Day two had a follow-up Q&A with Tom and Bryan, and a few things got cleared up. SQLite is optional and purely additive. If you're on MySQL nothing changes, and existing sites can't convert to SQLite. Add-ons that write raw SQL may not work on SQLite installs, and Pro Search doesn't support it yet. A theme store will ship after the 8.0 release. Postgres support is "on the horizon" with no date.

What did the developer sessions cover?

Gavin Lawrie on how srcset and sizes pick the right image.

Gavin Lawrie's argument was that slow images are usually the wrong image rather than a badly compressed one. Very few of the sites he audits use srcset at all, and if you preload a hero image without the same srcset and sizes on the preload, the browser downloads a file it never uses. He also benchmarked EE 7's built-in image resizing modifiers at 1,375 ms time to first byte, against about 70 ms for the other methods he tested, so on image-heavy pages it's worth benchmarking alternatives. His closing line: "The goal is not simply to compress images, the goal is to send the right image."

Rowan Sentesy on ExpressionEngine migrations.

Rowan Sentesy of Hop Studios showed how AI made EE's native migrations worth using. An AI skill writes a plan, a human reviews it, and then the agent writes the migration. In one demo it built a new channel and seeded it with real content and images. Rowan put it as "the plan is the most important thing. The code is the commodity." The migration skill is free on GitLab under MIT.

EE Test Lab's dashboard, from Robin Sowell's session.

Robin Sowell introduced EE Test Lab, which spins up test EE sites, writes tests, and keeps a shared library of what it learns about add-ons. It grew out of CartThrob support, including a checkout bug where Stripe charged $100 while the site recorded $80. It isn't public yet. She plans an MIT release.

Lucas Nicely: a price change and an authentication rewrite shouldn't go through the same process.

Lucas Nicely's deployment talk drew a line between content changes and code changes. A price change belongs in the CMS where an editor can make it. Code goes through a pipeline, in small, frequent deploys. Cowboy edits on the live server fail, and so do three-month change-approval processes.

Where does AI fit for agencies and their clients?

Michael Rog: "Your Content Knows the Answer." - Presentation Slides

Michael Rog gave the most practical AI talk of the conference. "Every EE project that I do is basically a knowledge base wearing a website costume." Because EE content is already structured into channels and fields, an "ask this site" feature that answers only from your own content and cites its sources is cheap to build: about a hundredth of a cent per answer, or roughly $1 for 10,000 questions a month. He asked his demo a question in Polish and got the right answer back, even though the site has no Polish content. He was clear that he isn't selling AI, he's selling business outcomes. This is something that we will be offering to our clients on their ExpressionEngine sites.

Lydia Chiu moderates "Panic at the LLM."

Lydia Chiu moderated the roundtable with Oliver Cannell (IC360), Travis Smith (Hop Studios), Michael Rog and Doug Black (Triple Nerd Score). It was the most candid hour of the conference. Hourly billing makes less sense when an eight-hour job takes one, and several agencies on the panel have moved to fixed pricing and subscriptions. Simple brochure sites are going to Wix and Squarespace, while the complex sites need more engineering than they used to. And people said out loud that keeping up is exhausting. We felt that one.

What else stood out?

Doug Black: "All Bones, No Body." - Presentation Slides

Doug Black rebuilt a marketing site with EE as the editing backend, his Bones add-on serving JSON, Astro building static pages and Cloudflare R2 holding images. Hosting costs $0 a month, editors still log in to EE, and as he put it, "If they hack it, it's only an HTML file." He was just as clear about when not to go headless: member logins, ecommerce, heavy search, or a team without JavaScript skills.

Gilbert Lin on accessibility reports that clients can act on.

Gilbert Lin of Hop Studios showed an open-source accessibility scanner built for clients who can't justify something like Siteimprove, which he estimated at about $12,000 a year for 1,000 pages. His example scan of an 850-page site found 86,000 raw issues. Grouped by cause, that became 20 tasks, and 65,154 of the raw issues were a single color-contrast problem repeated across the site.

Dylan Smith on moving the Tucson Sentinel from EE 1.6.8 to EE 7.

Dylan Smith founded the Tucson Sentinel and once sat on the W3C's HTML Working Group. The Sentinel had run on EE 1.6.8 since 2009. This summer he moved it to EE 7.5.25, skipping five major versions, with 48,175 entries, 112,233 members and 64,031 files along for the ride.

How he did it was the interesting part. He wrote scripts to transform the database, rehearsed the migration on throwaway copies, wiped them and ran it again until it came out clean. Then he tested with his reporters in their real workflows instead of as a super admin, which is how he caught a clone bug that only showed up for non-admin users. AI tools sped up the scripting.

He also used the move to clear 15 years of workflow requests: a copy desk review queue, per-story Cloudflare cache clearing, entry locking, and a DocumentCloud migration. The old install's list of core hacks ran to hundreds of lines. The new one has one small core hack and a couple of add-on patches.

Formidable, a new form builder, at Mayhem.

Mayhem closed things out. Justin Alei (Red Sea Studio) demoed a simple forms generator. Stephen Galbraith (Nerdgency) announced Formidable, a drag-and-drop form builder with conditional logic, workflows, and the ability to turn hand-coded HTML forms into managed ones, aiming for a mid-November release. Gavin showed JCOGS Image Pro Field, which gives editors cropping and focal points without template changes. Doug Black showed off his brand new CT AI add-on, which lets shoppers use AI to shop your CartThrob store.

What should EE site owners do now?

• If you're on EE 6, list your add-ons and check each one's EE 7 and EE 8 status. That list decides your timeline, and December 31 doesn't move.
• If you're on EE 7, plan EE 8 as a normal upgrade: staging first, add-on check, then production.
• Either way, check images and accessibility on your top pages. Both are cheap to find and usually come down to a few template fixes.

Still on EE 6 and not sure where your add-ons stand? Send us your add-on list and we'll tell you which ones are ready for EE 7 and EE 8, what needs replacing, and what the upgrade will take. No charge, and you'll have it before December 31 stops being a deadline you can plan around. Start here.

We left Toronto super optimistic about ExpressionEngine. The team is shipping, the community is building real things, and nobody's pretending AI solves everything. It's an interesting time in this industry, and it's nice to be going through it with this group. Hope to see everyone again next year!

EEConf 2026, Toronto.