Hello, guest. Welcome!
Before starting EllisLab Rick Ellis was a musician, audio engineer, and sound designer in Los Angeles working on feature films, television, and interactive projects. Rick's specialty was computer-based audio, which would later serve as natural segue into computer programming.
When the web emerged in the mid 90's he fell in love with the new medium and immediately immersed himself in it. Soon he was building sites for himself, then for others, as his hobby grew into a web development business.
In 2001, while in Japan mixing some shows for Disney, he began developing an application his client could use to maintain site content without the need for technical expertise. When he returned from Japan he had a working prototype, which he installed at Nancy Sinatra's (daughter of Frank Sinatra) website, one of his web clients at the time. She loved it, and Rick decided to call his program "pMachine" (Publishing Machine) and make it available to the public.
In 2002 pMachine was released. Within a few months it was featured in major magazines like Mac World and Mac Addict, and in a book about Blogging published by McGraw/Hill. Excited by the success his program was enjoying, Rick took a leap a faith and quit his audio career to focus on software full-time. Within six month he would hire his first employee.
In 2004 we released our next-generation publishing system, ExpressionEngine, offering the ease of use of a blogging tool and the power of a full-featured Content Management System.
In 2005 we release a discussion forum module for ExpressionEngine, making EE the perfect platform for community sites.
In 2006 we released CodeIgniter, a web application development platform for PHP developers.
In 2007 the name of the company was changed to EllisLab, Inc., to better reflect its growing range of products and services.
In 2010 ExpressionEngine 2.0, built on CodeIgniter was released.
