Today we’re happy to release the beta of something we’ve been working on for a long time. This beta release marks a significant milestone for the development of Coilpack, as it is now ready for testing and feedback from the community.

Coilpack

What is Coilpack?

Coilpack is a composer package that brings a decoupled architecture to ExpressionEngine. It’s installed alongside ExpressionEngine and Laravel, ultimately allowing you to harness Twig, Blade, GraphQL, REST, and even more through the Laravel ecosystem.

Overall, Coilpack represents a huge step forward for ExpressionEngine development, and we are excited to see how the community will put it to use. We encourage anyone who is interested in trying out Coilpack to download the beta release and give it a test drive. If you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement, please don’t hesitate to contact us, we’d love to hear from you.

What does it do?

That really depends on what you want it to do.

If you’re simply looking for Twig or Blade support, you can install Coilpack and continue to use ExpressionEngine as you always have, but now you can set your template type to Twig or Blade accordingly.

If you’re looking to take it a step further, you can use Coilpack to support GraphQL and even integrate your content within Laravel through extension hooks translated into Laravel Events. You also have access to the ExpressionEngine container, the ability to retrieve ExpressionEngine authenticated members natively, and MUCH more.

How can I use it?

To get started using Coilpack we recommend taking a peek at our Getting Started Guide, or to jump right in:

composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel project-name && cd project-name
composer require expressionengine/coilpack:0.x-dev
php artisan coilpack

Where do we give feedback?

If you have a feature request or run into a bug while using Coilpack, we’d encourage you to open an issue on the repo.

If you’re looking to chat with others while you get up and running, or are looking for a pointer join us in slack and jump over to the #coilpack channel.

Timeline

We’re currently on track for a first-quarter 2023 release of version 1.0.

Before closing out this post, we want to give a great big THANK YOU to all of our alpha testers. Your feedback has had a significant impact on what Coilpack is and what it will become.