EECONF Toronto Agenda

Pick up your bag and t-shirt, grab a coffee, and get settled in!

Get an inside look at ExpressionEngine 8 and what comes next. Tom Jaeger will walk through what’s new, how EE8 can improve the way you build and manage sites, and what the future holds for ExpressionEngine beyond the 8.0 release.
 

Modern image delivery is one of the biggest contributors to page weight, layout instability, and perceived performance, yet many ExpressionEngine sites still rely on habits rather than informed decisions when generating image output. This session offers a practical guide to optimising images in EE, covering the behaviour of the `img` and `picture` elements, `srcset` and `sizes`, modern image formats, and the often-overlooked role CSS plays through rules such as `object-fit`, `object-position`, aspect-ratio control, and layout sizing. It will examine when CSS is the right tool, when responsive image markup is needed instead, and when editorial art direction calls for genuinely different source images rather than just different crop behaviour.

The talk will also compare the main ways of producing image markup in ExpressionEngine, including native EE file usage, JCOGS Image Pro, JCOGS Image Pro Field, Assets, and manual template construction. That comparison will look at ease of implementation, output quality, storage implications, and speed, with benchmark examples prepared as part of the session. Attendees will leave with a clearer framework for choosing formats such as JPEG, PNG, WebP, and AVIF, deciding when to rely on CSS, when to reach for `srcset` or `picture`, and how to build faster, more maintainable image output in real EE projects.

Your code lives in Git. Your database lives on the server. Most development tasks touch both - channels, fields, settings, even seeded content - and the database half has always been the manual, easy-to-get-wrong part.

Migrations fix that. Done well, an EE migration is a repeatable, programmatic package of your database changes that replays identically in any environment - as portable and reliable as the code already in Git.

Because each migration is scoped to a piece of work and ships with its MR, it deploys alongside the templates, add-on, JS, and CSS for that feature - no manual SQL, no five minutes of control-panel clicking to finish a launch.

Join Hop Studios developer Rowan Sentesy for a 60-minute walk through Hop's migration workflow: how we use it on real projects, our "ee-cli" wrapper, what belongs in a migration, and how to keep code and database changes tight and launches smooth.

Who likes to do QA testing? Nobody.
Who likes to use a site or an add-on that wasn’t QA’d? Also nobody.
Introducing EE Test Lab: a testing framework for EE sites and add-ons. AI helps you start; the framework keeps it honest — so QA isn’t a solo science project.

Every EE project is site a knowledge-base wearing a website costume. Channels, fields, entries — You've already built the important part. This talk explores how to turn that structured content into an AI that actually understands your client's business. Retrieval-Augmented Generation ("RAG") enables AI systems to answer questions or perform tasks using YOUR content. This presentation will demystify RAG, in familiar EE terms — from the basics, all the way to more exotic concepts like embedding, vector search, and ranking. Then, we'll walk through setting up a minimal retrieval layer on a real EE site. We'll compare some different search/indexing methods (Pro Search, Dexter, custom embedding). And we'll wire up a simple query-answer flow, all using tools that fit comfortably into an existing EE stack.

You'll leave knowing exactly where RAG fits into an EE project, what it costs (in both dollars and dev time), and most importantly, how to start pitching it to clients right away.

The possibilities are endless:

• "Ask this site" — Replace the dusty old search bar with a chat UI that actually answers questions in the client's voice, sourced only from their real content (no generic ChatGPT vibes or hallucinations).
• "You might also like..." — Retrieval-powered recommendations that leverage deeper meaning, not just keywords or categories.
• FAQ generation — Automatically surface answers to common support questions by retrieving straight from product pages, docs, or blog archives.
• Research assistants — For content-heavy projects (law firms, universities, nonprofits) — Let site visitors query years of published articles, case studies, or policy docs, conversationally.
• Product catalog Q&A — E-commerce or catalog-driven sites get a natural-language assistant grounded in product entries and spec sheets. ("Do yall have that little red thingamabob that fits on my whatchamacallit?")
• Automated content audits — Find outdated, contradictory, or duplicate content across hundreds of entries; A killer upsell for your "we haven't touched this site since 2019" rescue client.
• Multi-language support, without a full editorial rebuild — An LLM can answer questions in a visitor's language, while pulling from a single-language content source.

Does your deployment process involve multiple approvals, change windows, and red tape that slow down even the smallest content updates? You’re not alone - there’s a better way!

In this session, we’ll walk through a developer-friendly deployment workflow built around GitHub Actions and Ansible AWX, designed for teams that need audit trails and formal approvals. Within this structure, we use a CMS as a content management layer that allows non-technical teams to safely make content updates without waiting for the full deployment pipeline.

We’ll show how CMS packages can be versioned and deployed through GitHub and AWX, and how separating content from code allows developers to focus on infrastructure and features while marketing or communications teams manage live content safely. This approach has helped streamline CI/CD processes, reduce deployment overhead, and maintain flexibility even in high-governance environments.

If you’re navigating tight deployment controls but want to stay agile, this session will give you a practical roadmap for using automation tools and a CMS to deliver speed, compliance, and sanity.
 

More details coming soon!