ExpressionEngine 2.9.0 Released

ExpressionEngine 2.9.0 has been released and includes new features and bug fixes. Discussion Forum 3.1.16 and Multiple Site Manager 2.1.7 are also available as maintenance releases. Here’s a look at what’s new.

New Conditionals Parser

The main story for 2.9.0 is the new conditionals parser. With this new parser, we’ve been able to boost performance, ensure conditionals behave more consistently when written in different ways, and added more power. Here’s a quick summary:

• Conditionals evaluate when ready. This means you should no longer have tags executing inside conditionals before the conditional is evaluated. Existing sites may even get a performance boost here.
• No more “simple” vs. “advanced” conditionals. Use any operators or variables, use as many {if:else} or {if:elseif} statements as you like, write conditionals without worry.
• New math operators: +, -, *, /, ^ and **
• New comparison operators: ^=, *=, &=, and ~
• String concatenation: {if segment_1."/".segment_2 == "site/index"}
• Better error handling. Make a typo? Leave off a } or a {/if}? The lexer will tell you what’s wrong and give you a line number to find the problem.

Many more details can be found in the Conditional Tags documentation.

There’s More

Here are a few more highlights in 2.9.0:

• Template Routes can now be reordered for a custom parse order.
• New template editor.
• Added the {cp_edit_entry_url} variable to the Channel Entries tag to output a URL to edit the displayed entry.
• Improved license management.
• Upgraded the Markdown parser to Markdown Extra.
• New Template Language Overview page in the documentation for easy learning of ExpressionEngine templating.
• Fixed a security issue that could result in arbitrary script execution in certain circumstances.

With this release, ExpressionEngine now requires at least PHP 5.3.10.

As always, you can get a full list of the changes included in ExpressionEngine 2.9.0 in the changelog, and you can find 2.9.0 itself along with Forum 3.1.16 and MSM 2.1.7 in your download area.