Watch a sneak preview of ExpressionEngine 2.0!

EllisLab has just posted a sneak preview of ExpressionEngine 2.0’s control panel, and it looks even better than before. It’s great to see things in action, and already, the gears in my head are a-whirlin’ with the possibilities.

A few observations from the preview:

• The new CP was indeed designed by Veerle Pieters — or at least, the displayed theme was. However, several other themes will be made available when EE 2.0 is released. I like Pieters’ theme alright, but I’d also like to see something a little more streamlined and Web 2.0-ish.
• EllisLab’s attention to detail is really great. The new CP layout is very flexible, both in terms of screen and text size.
• Weblogs are now called “collections”… for now, that is.
• Members do indeed have their own dedicated interface, which should hopefully make it easier to manage.
• The AJAX/jQuery implementation — dynamic filtering, table column sorting, pagination, etc. — is teh awesome.
• I’m not sure if I like the way the submenus work. I wouldn’t mind seeing some sort of Suckerfish-esque dropdowns, rather than the multi-click necessary. But from the looks of things, it’ll be easy enough to update the admin area to get that.
• Templates, message pages, and themes are all consolidated into one area! Yay! And I love the in-line template preference editing.
• The revamped “Publish” screen officially blows my mind. I’m not even really sure what all of the implications or abilities are, but I can’t wait to try it. The “Write Mode” could be very nice. And what are those checkboxes doing there? Could that mean that EE 2.0 supports more field types for custom fields? I certainly hope so.

More discussion can be found in the EE forums.