Closing the chapter on ExpressionEngine

Last week, Ryan Masuga - the dude who built and ran devot:ee, the ExpressionEngine community add-on marketplace - posted on LinkedIn to mark the 16th anniversary of its launch on 1 May 2009. I’d thoroughly recomemend reading the post but in short, it recognised the incredible journey of what started as a side project for Ryan, and the impact it went on to have on the ExpressionEngine add-on community.

That post sent me straight to my Github account, for a nostalgic trip down memory lane, reflecting on the 52 ExpressionEngine add-ons that I wrote during my Nine Four years, all with that “.ee_addon” suffix, an unspoken add-on author standard that developed over the years.

ExpressionEngine was a big part of what made Nine Four a success for me - while I’d been exposed to a number of Content Management Systems over the years - it was ExpressionEngine, with it’s thoughtfully architected channel and entries model, it’s ability to store and edit page templates as files and it’s extensible architecture that really won me over.

This was a CMS that shipped with no opinions baked in, instead it gave you building blocks you could assemble into almost anything. It shaped how I worked and I really loved the culture which existed in it’s orbit and enjoyed the small part I played in contributing to that.

I don’t use ExpressionEngine anymore and the tools I do reach for now are different in almost every way possible, but I look back on this period with great fondness and appreciation. ExpressionEngine in particular taught me to think in systems, to write PHP that respected other people’s codebases, and to default to open-sourcing things.

Thanks for the reminder of simpler times Ryan. :)