Nerding-out in Toronto with the ExpressionEngine developer community at EECONF 2026

It was a real pleasure to be involved in helping bring another successful ExpressionEngine Conference to the community, in Toronto, Canada.

Old friends and new EE nerds

Being part of the EE Community Association which runs the annual EECONF event, means IC360 is in constant contact with the a small sample of core EE devs on a weekly basis, but the actual event means we all get to meet old friends (as well as new EE nerds) face-to-face.

It's also great that we get choose a new city to host the event in every year - something I really enjoy as it's nice to explore cities around the world. This year's event was held in a dedicated event space at Oakham House (which is linked to the Toronto Metropolitan University) in Toronto, Canada. The staff were very helpful and the catering there was excellent too - highly recommended if you're looking to host an event of your own.

Toronto itself was also a delight. Very clean and welcoming and easy to navigate. We enjoyed some great after-conference socials at various pubs, bars and eateries in the city in the evenings, and some of us also did some touristing on the Friday… which is a 'must' in my book, when visiting somewhere new.

EECONF 2026 Toronto

EE Talks & Presentations

The conference as whole this year, was well attended by some very well known faces in the community - add-on developers, EE Partners, the Packet Tide development team and direct EE users/devs as well.

The presentations were very information and often eye-opening, showcasing new methods and add-ons; showing success stories of system upgrades from EE1 to EE7 (!!); open panel discussions and obviously lots of talk about the AI ‘elephant in the room’.

The recorded videos for the presentations will be available soon, and I'll post a link here as soon as they are online.

Round Table discussion

EE8 - Big release coming soon

The headline reveal for this year - amongst others - was for the latest big update to EE itself, in the form of EE8. Tom Jaeger from Packet Tide - the company who owns and maintains the ExpressionEngine CMS platform - talked about the upcoming philosophy for the new 8.x version(s), as well as teasing us with some visuals of new screens and tools.

Tom will publish info about EE8 in more detail soon, but some of the main features will be:

a more regular update cycle to keep the platform moving forwards.
better architecture / tools to allow more AI Agent control and integration.
theming (yes I know this has been announced before, but it's really coming this time).
Portage - a better way to get your site updates from dev/staging to the live server.