Publisher 2 Beta Now Available!

December 04, 2016

It has been a very long time coming, but it is finally here. Publisher 2 for ExpressionEngine 3 is now available for download.

The Publisher 2 beta is not a free download and is not free upgrade for existing Publisher 1 customers, however, until December 31st of 2016 you can use the promo code "publisher2beta" when checking out to receive 50% off of up to three Publisher 2 or Publisher 2 Lite licenses.

Any purchase of a Publisher 1 license for ExpressionEngine 2 will also come with a Publisher 2 license (this is not automatic, I will manually add the license to your account at the end of the month). This will allow you to start your site build now and upgrade when it is convienent for you.

For those upgrading to Publisher 2 from a Publisher 1 install there are a few things to be aware of:

  1. Please read the installation and upgrade docs. It should be an easy transition as long as you follow the required upgrade path.
  2. Not all features are implemented in Publisher 2 at this time, so please evaluate your installation before rushing into an upgrade.
  3. Publisher 2 is in Beta, which means there will probably be some bugs, however, I've done my best to mitigate them with a Behat test suite. Do not install Publisher 2 beta directly on a production site. Please test your development site thoroughly before going live. Just remember that you're launching with a beta product and support may be limited due to the holidays. 

So what is new in Publisher 2?

This is a migration from ExpressionEngine 2 to ExpressionEngine 3, so there are no new killer features in 2.0. This isn't to say that nothing has changed, because that would be quite the understatement. Publisher 2's development began almost immediately after the first ExpressionEngine 3 developer preview July 2015. The long development period for Publisher 2 was mostly due to the fact that nearly all the underlying models and services were either re-written from the ground up or underwent heavy refactoring. ExpressionEngine 3 introduced an entirely new model layer (how the application talks to the database), which Publisher heavily utilizes. The control panel admin pages were a complete re-write, there is hardly a trace of the Publisher 1 code to be seen in the settings pages. Lastly, Publisher 2 has tests. Every method in the model files are tested with Behat. Wait, that sounds like unit tests you say? Well, it basically is, however, Behat allowed me to bootstrap EE under the hood, so while they aren't true unit tests, they are still pretty grainular. I like to call them "unitish tests." I'm also using Behat to test the control panel itself. In fact most of the content in the demo site is created with the tests. The demo site itself is deployed with continuous integration. This means that every commit to the Publisher 2 codebase that passes the tests yields a successful build on CircleCI gets pushed to the demo site for instant gratification.

While we're on the topic of the demo site, feel free to login and take a peak at Publisher itself before you buy it. Eventually I will make the template files from the demo site available for download to aid in developing sites with Publisher. To be honest, there is very little Publisher specific code in the templates, and that is kind of the point. You shouldn't have to alter your template code or development processes to support a multi-lingual site. 

Publisher 1 end of life

Starting January 1st 2017 Publisher 1 will no longer be for sale. In an effort to speed up the transition of Publisher 1 to Publisher 2 purchases of Publisher 2 will include a copy of Publisher 1 to allow you to upgrade from ExpressionEngine 2 to 3. If January 1st, 2017 you start a new ExpressionEngine 2 site with Publisher 1 and report an issue BoldMinded reserves the right to charge an hourly rate for addressing the issue, or requiring an upgrade to ExpressionEngine 3 and Publisher 2.