Insights

The ExpressionEngine community ran its first virtual meetup in a couple of years on April 29th, and we made a point to be there. Three presentations, an extended Q&A, and a good chunk of unscripted conversation about where EE is headed. If you run a site on ExpressionEngine or you're thinking about your CMS options going forward, there was a lot worth paying attention to.

We took notes. Here's what matters.

ExpressionEngine 8 Is Coming

Tom Jager, president of ExpressionEngine (Packet Tide), gave the opening talk. He covered how the team is using AI internally, lessons they've learned, and then dropped the headline: ExpressionEngine 8 is in active development.

This isn't a minor version bump. The team is treating V8 as a real shift in how the platform gets built and released. We've been through enough EE upgrades to know that matters.

Speed, and a lot of it

The control panel is already showing speed gains of 3-4x over EE 7. That's not a typo. If you've ever sat waiting for the entry listing screen to load on a site with thousands of entries, that alone is worth paying attention to. Front-end template parsing improvements are still being worked on, but the control panel side is reportedly close to done.

Portage is back

Portage, the tool for migrating structural changes between environments, will ship as an add-on with V8. Channels, templates, statuses, categories. You make changes in dev, push to staging, push to production, and it just works. The team says it's nearly instant even on sites with hundreds of channels and thousands of fields, which is frankly hard to believe until you see it. Plans are to roll it into the EE core in a later 8.x release once they've had room to iterate on it.

If you've ever manually rebuilt channel fields on a production server because there was no clean way to sync from dev, you know why people got excited about this.

Theming support

The long-awaited theming support was briefly confirmed for V8. Tom didn't go deep on specifics, but mentioned that theming and Portage share underlying architecture, which is why they've been developed together. We'll be watching this one closely as more details come out.

Everything else in the V8 pipeline

A revamped logging system is slated for the 8.0 release. The release cadence is changing too. The EE 7 point releases (7.1, 7.2, etc.) were basically major versions in disguise, which made it hard to keep up. Going forward, expect smaller, more frequent updates.

During the Q&A, Tom was asked about timeline but wasn't ready to commit to a specific date yet.

If you're currently running EE 7, there's no fire drill here. EE 7's long-term support window runs through approximately mid-2028. But V8 is shaping up to be a meaningful upgrade, and the path from 7 to 8 should be smooth for most sites.

AI Inside the EE Development Process

Tom spent a good portion of his talk on how Packet Tide uses AI to build ExpressionEngine. Not in a hand-wavy "we're an AI company now" way. More practical than that. They use it for writing tests, catching issues in code reviews, and accelerating the development cycle. They were also candid about what hasn't worked, including an agent swarm system that burned through usage without producing great results.

The part that matters for EE users: more tests, more automated code review, faster iteration. They were clear that humans still review everything. AI speeds up the process, it doesn't make the decisions.

For developers building on EE, two things worth knowing. ExpressionEngine's documentation is now available through Context7, so you can pull the docs directly into your AI coding workflow instead of relying on whatever the model happens to know about EE. And there's a first-party EE MCP server in beta right now. It handles add-on generation, channel setup, and developer-focused tasks. Content management features are on the roadmap but held back from the initial release. If you want into the beta, reach out to the Packet Tide team.

Template Layouts: Worth Learning If You Haven't

Jelle Dijkstra from eewebsite.eu gave a walkthrough of EE's template layout system. We've used layouts on a few projects, but Jelle's talk was a good reminder of how far you can push them.

The short version for anyone not deep into EE templating: layouts let you separate data collection from presentation. You gather all your channel data in one template, assign it to named variables, then arrange those variables in a layout template however you want. One EE instance handles the whole stack, versus the traditional embed approach where every embed spins up a new instance of the template engine. Four embeds on a page means five instances running. Layouts cut that down to one.

Jelle also showed how you can use layouts for conditional routing (showing different content to logged-in vs. logged-out users), looping through multi-step processes, and building application-style pages without writing PHP. The gift list example from the London conference was a good proof of concept for that.

A possible hands-on workshop at the Toronto conference in October was mentioned, which would be a great way to get comfortable with layouts if you haven't used them. Resources and code examples from the talk will be shared through the EE Slack community.

New Add-On: IC Helium

Oliver Cannell from IC360 demoed IC Helium, a bulk editing tool for channel entries. The original use case was GDPR: stripping customer names, emails, and phone numbers from old e-commerce orders without deleting the entries. You keep the financial data and order history intact for reporting, but the personal information gets cleared out.

It's expanded beyond that. You can bulk-update any custom field across any channel. Need to flip a toggle on hundreds of products? Clear out all the content from a duplicated site before handing it to a new client? Change pricing across an entire catalog? Helium handles it in batches, gives you a preview before you commit, and supports date ranges so you can target specific time periods.

We can see this being useful for anyone managing a larger EE site with e-commerce or membership data. Documentation and a roadmap are on the IC360 website.

EEConf Toronto: October 7-8

The in-person conference is happening October 7-8 at Toronto Metropolitan University. Tickets are available at econf.com, and hotel details for the area should be posted soon. The conference committee is also looking for talk suggestions, so if there's something you want to see covered, there's a suggestion form on the EEConf site.

We're planning to be there. If you're running an EE site and want to connect with the people actually building the platform, it's the best opportunity all year.

Sponsors

Quick shoutout to the sponsors who make EEConf happen. Cornerstone sponsors Hop Studios and tripleNERDscore, along with community sponsors BoldMinded and Arcustech.

If your ExpressionEngine site needs an upgrade, a performance tune-up, or you're wondering what V8 means for your setup, we'd love to talk about it.