Big news from EllisLab today at SXSW, where they are demonstrating the upcoming ExpressionEngine 2.0. Derek Allard announced that EE will be powered by CodeIgniter, their open-source PHP framework. This is a big deal, immediately expanding the community base of both systems and ‘promoting’ CI developers to instant ExpressionEngine experts, as well as giving CodeIgniter a bunch of very powerful libraries that were only previously available in EE.
They also revealed the new look for the EE admin panel, designed by Veerle Pieters – the UI has been completely re-imagined; as well as reducing the number of multi-nested menus, it also seems to be much more customizable to allow you to add custom content to the back-end for your clients. There’s a lot of (jQuery-powered) scripting and Ajax trickery going on too, allowing ever more granular levels of customization.