Frustrated by Magento? Then you’ll love
Not exactly breaking news, but the other day I noticed ExpressionEngine’s core CMS project was relicensed with an OSL approved open source license (Apache 2) back in 2018, and that they released version 6.0 back in December of 2020.
Also, if Wikipedia is living up to its reputation as the source of all truth, it sounds like the company behind ExpressionEngine (EllisLab) has had some ups and downs before coming to rest. Specifically — it looks like the open sourcing of the project came right around the time EllisLab was acquired/bought-out by a company named Digital Locations — but was then bought back by EllisLab owner/founder around a year later. Then, EllisLab sold ExpressionEngine’s copyright to a services company named Packet Tide, which is the parent company of a well regarded ExpressionEngine extension company named EEHarbor.
ExpressionEngine is one of the original PHP based CMS systems. It’s where CodeIgniter came from and has probably influenced (in ways large and small) every PHP CMS and MVC system that’s come since. I doubt the platform will ever regain the momentum it once had or be fully part of a modern PHP ecosystem (ex. no composer support) but it’s nice to see software first released in 2002 still alive and kicking.