Canals, bikes, bridges and beards. It can mean only one thing… EECI has rolled into Leiden again for the annual European ExpressionEngine extravaganza. The geek-ometer here in the Netherlands is at max, as some of the World’s top EE developers swap stories, tips and insights for 3-days.

Yesterday EllisLab released ExpressionEngine 2.1, marking the end of the public beta period. The new version boasts improved performance, some exciting new file management features, and a sexy new control panel. DesignKarma is thrilled to be able to start releasing EE2-powered websites this summer, starting with a major website for Northern Ireland football.

One of the biggest (if not the biggest) surprises to come out of the recent EECI Conference in San Francisco, was the unveiling of MojoMotor—Derek Allard’s (EllisLab) new pet project. MojoMotor is “The Publishing Engine that Does Less”, or a kind of micro CMS with no control panel, you simply edit pages at the front end.

One shortcoming in ExpressionEngine 1.6.x was the fact you couldn’t do recurring Paypal payments (using the Simple Commerce Module). However, the new 2.0 release supports Paypal subscriptions and recurring payments. Using recurring payments, you can offer your users automatically recurring subscriptions.

Christmas comes early today with the much-anticipated public release of ExpressionEngine 2.0. The new release is built on top of CodeIgniter, EllisLab’s open-source PHP framework. The two communities combine to supercharge an already hot app.