Ennovy.org

ExpressionEngine 1.6 has been released today. Woohoo, something new to play with! A month ago I was under the impression that 1.5.x was going to be the last version before 2.0.

All of the new features are mentioned in the changelog, but here are some of the bigger things I am excited about this release.

(Note: readers who don’t know EE will not understand much of what I’m saying.)

Custom Category Fields. I was so so excited to learn that this was coming in 1.6. With Custom Category Fields you can create custom fields specific to each category group.

And, there is also a new setting for Category URL Title! YAY! Something I have been waiting for since 2004!

Pages module. The new Pages module makes it easier for you to add pages to your site. Pages are mainly used for more static content. When you want to create a page, you still have to create a new entry in a weblog, but now you can specify a specific URL for the page. And it doesn’t seem to clash with the way I currently organize my static content, which is good.

Note that there already is a Pages module out there by Mark Huot – and since they have the same name, there will be a conflict. Mark Huot’s module has been renamed to Tome. I haven’t used Mark Huot’s module, but based on the activity in the forums it seems to be quite popular.

Hidden templates. With hidden templates you can prevent people from accessing certain templates. Many people, including me, use the {embed} variable to include certain templates into other templates, so that you can use one snippet of code in one template in many different templates. I don’t want others to access the snippets of code directly, so the hidden template feature will definitely come in handy.

Relaxed categories parameter. I will quote the changelog for this one:

Added new parameter relaxed_categories= to the Weblog Entries tag to allow use of category indicator in weblog entries tag pulling entries from multiple weblogs that do NOT share category groups

My first thought when I read this was, “huh?? What does that mean?” Then I realized it fixes something I ran into a long time ago. So, yay! It means shorter URLs and less templates to worry about.

Link to next/previous entry in the restricted by category. Two parameters category=”“ and category_group=”“ were added to the Weblog Module’s Next/Previous Entry Linking tag, which means we can finally restrict next/previous links for an entry to another entry in the same category, or any other specific category.

New Multi Site Manager Add-on. I’m not sure whether I like this. This is a new paid add-on (not a module/plugin/extension, but an add-on). With it, you can easily manage multiple sites under one installation of ExpressionEngine. This add-on was previewed earlier this month. When I first read about it, I was confused because I thought that you could already run multiple sites in ExpressionEngine – why did was there a new add-on to do it? Then I watched the video and saw how much more powerful this add-on is. Each site has its own separate settings, template groups, weblogs, and so on, but the member groups can be shared between all of them. The Multi Site Manager supports 3 sites, and if you want to add more you have to pay for each additional site.

The thing is that with the release of this Multi Site Manager, the old way of running multiple sites with ExpressionEngine will not be officially supported. I’m using this old method to run this website, my journal on a subdomain, and another weblog on another subdomain, all using the same version of EE. I’m worried that since this old method is not supported any more, one day as EE gets updated the old method will stop working. I don’t want to rely on an old method just in case something happens.

I could just purchase the MSM and forget about the old method. :p But I’m still trying to decide whether it’s worth it. (I am tempted to purchase just to try it out – that’s how I got the paid Forum module!!)

Other.

• There’s a new default theme, which matches the look of the new ExpressionEngine website.
• The Template Management page now shows different icon images next to each different template type. This will replace the lovely Template management with images extension that I had installed.
• “Modified default control panel styling of <h3> tags to no longer align text to the right.” Heh, this one bothered me although I never did bother to fix it in my custom CP themes.
• If you’re updating from there are some update notices to go through first.
• All the entries in the Multiple Rick Birthday Contest are quite funny!

I’m planning on playing with this new release even more over the weekend.