ExpressionEngine Pro Anna Brown and Testing Hero Chris Hartjes join Ben Edmunds and Phil Sturgeon to discuss the recent rumblings in the ExpressionEngine community and the new EE StackExchange site. We talk about Inversion of Control (IoC), what it is, why its useful and how it's done. We also talk a little bit about how PHP has been (and is continuing) to move towards a post-framework world thanks to independant framework-agnostic components - and of course we talk with Chris about unit-testing.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading it directly. You can also catch up on the two previous epsidoes covering PHP 5.5 and Composer/Laravel 4.

I'd like to give you an update on what's happening with CodeIgniter. 2.0's code has been stable and in use by ExpressionEngine and MojoMotor for many months [...] CodeIgniter has always been born from ExpressionEngine, both in terms of its code as well as its very ability to exist, since the commercial arm of EllisLab provides the resources necessary to maintain an open source framework and surrounding community. That is still the case, so to gauge what's happening with CodeIgniter, you can often look to ExpressionEngine.

They also talk about some of the recent posts to the ExpressionEngine blog (like these two) and some of the things they're doing (EllisLab) to improve not only the quality of their software, their interaction with the community and how the code for the framework is managed.

This popular Web development solution recently took another major step forward with the July 12 release of ExpressionEngine 2.1, the product's first major upgrade in several years. Version 2 sports a number of new features and significant improvements over its predecessor, many of which I'll highlight in this article.

He touches on a few of the updates in this latest revision:

• CodeIgniter Integration
• Redesigned Control Panel
• Improved Template Management
• Integrated File Manager and Image Editor
• Accessories (a sort of add-on feature)

You can find out more about ExpressionEngine on its site.

Indeed, I concluded that no solution effectively offered both the fundamental features of a content management system and the flexibility of a web framework. However , after working with ExpressionEngine (one of the systems I recently highlighted in my article "The Top Five PHP Content Management Systems"), my opinion on this matter has fundamentally changed.

He mentions the hundreds of features included in ExpressionEngine, how it handles content management, templates and includes a powerful member/user management system. He also talk briefly about the plugin system with over 140 offerings currently available and more and more being added all the time.

If you are enthusiastic and passionate about ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter, then EECI2010 US is the conference for you. With internationally renowned speakers and a packed social schedule, EECI2010 is bringing the best of the community to San Francisco's Fort Mason Center. Come with us, break new boundaries and meet new friends.

Speakers include several members of the EllisLab team (like Rick Ellis, Leslie Camacho and Derek Allard) as well as several well-known ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter gurus from all around the world. You can still get in on the Early Bird pricing for this three day conference (here's the schedule) and get in for $275 USD without the MasterClasses or $525 for the full conference pass.

To reserve your spot be sure and register today!

If you're a CodeIgniter developer I would say this: You WILL be able to develop ExpressionEngine addons, plugins, as if you were just coding away in a CodeIgniter development. And this is where the 3rd party ExpressionEngine market will start going crazy.

He suggests that, while the EE development market has been largely dominate by a select few companies, that could be about to change. Any development group that's already familiar with the CodeIgniter framework will be able to jump right in and get in on writing EE add-ons and compete with those companies.

So, what do we get from the competition? Well, the first thing to happen is a shift in quality. New developers will attempt to 'out-class' the competition with more features, better designs, and generally higher quality products. Once quality reaches a saturation point, it becomes inefficient to compete on quality alone. Then we see a shift in price.