Today, we’re thrilled to announce the immediate release of Playa 4, the next major version of our premiere relationship machine for ExpressionEngine.

The update packs some new UI goodness (as always), plus a ton of big under-the-hood changes that make Playa more powerful than ever!

Translucent UI

Playa now sports the same translucent UI styling that we pioneered with Matrix 2, making your Playa fields look stunning regardless of which Control Panel theme you’re using.

Autocomplete for Single-Selects

We’ve written a new single-select UI with autocomplete, for the times you only want to allow one selection. This is especially useful if you’ve got hundreds or thousands of entries to choose from – no more scrolling through a list of entries a mile long!

New Database Table

We know this isn’t quite as sexy as the UI stuff, but it’s a very huge part of this update. Playa has outgrown EE’s native exp_relationships table, and has moved into its own exp_playa_relationships. This has enabled us to significantly simplify parts of the code, while making Playa more powerful at the same time.

Playa Converters

We’ve made it much easier to convert Relationship fields and even relationships created by Solspace’s Related Entries module over to Playa.

Seriously Powerful Templating

We’ve added tons of new templating tags, and even enhanced the ones that were already there. With Playa 4, you’re free to do what you want.

Dropping EE1 Compatibility

Now that ExpressionEngine 2 has been out for over a year, we decided it’s time to stop worrying about EE1. So starting with Playa 4, all major new Pixel & Tonic releases are going to be for EE2 only. We do realize that some people still need to use EE1 though, so for the time being we’re bundling the latest release of Playa 3 in with the download.