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We have a special episode of today’s EE Podcast. Leslie Camacho and Leslie Doherty of EllisLab will be our guests and they will share some announcements and news about ExpressionEngine and spend about 30 minutes hanging out and chatting with me and Lea.
The show is recorded live in front of an Internet audience at 1:30 PM Eastern and you can listen in here: http://5by5.tv/audio
This week’s episode is kindly sponsored by Playa 4 by Pixel & Tonic. They released Playa 4 earlier this month with a new look, a single-select UI with autocomplete (I’ve used it and it’s awesome) and new template tags. Playa 4 is a free upgrade for existing Playa customers. Pick up your copy at PixelAndTonic.com.
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We’re continually amazed and impressed by all of the great sites being built with EE and submitted to Show-EE! Here are two we want to highlight this week:
Feel Good
I’m no Canadian, but this site is very nice. It’s an educational site about Canadian wood and pulp. Built with EE 2.x and a nice, clean design.
Visit the site
454 Creative
This neatly designed portfolio site has attention to detail in every corner. PLus, who doesn’t love a good parallax effect from time to time. (mouse over the home page header). Built on EE2.x and using such popular add-ons as Matrix, Freeform and Wygwam. For more info, read their post on what went into the new site.
Visit the site
Keep the great sites coming!
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The guys over at Director-ee launched a job board today. It’s still in its infancy but if you’re looking for help with your EE site (or looking for work), you’d be wise to bookmark the site and visit it regularly.
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The latest episode of the award-winning, international, action-packed, star-studded, top-rated, highly-controversial and uniquely unique* ExpressionEngine Podcast is available at 5by5.
In this epsiode, we have a conversation with Ryan Masuga of devot:ee about his experience upgrading a site from EE1 to EE2 and some of his thoughts on the world of ExpressionEngine add-ons.
The podcast records live every Thursday at 1:30 PM Eastern and posts to the 5by5 site within a day or two afterward. This Thursday we’ll talk to EllisLab about their plans for 2011. It’s a show you won’t want to miss.
*most of these descriptions are completely false
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Ryan Battles put together a nice round-up of the ins and outs of ExpressionEngine 404 pages. And it’s all because of this:
In ExpressionEngine, if someone types in an incorrect page address, by default they are sent to the homepage. If they have typed in a proper template group name, but an invalid URL segment, they may see a working page and not know that they typed in an invalid URL.
Read through the entire write-up (which went through an extensive rewrite after great contributions in the comments) and don’t you dare skip the comments! There are a lot of great ways to handle 404s and we’ve all built a site that could use better handling of missing pages and incorrect URLs.
Related: Rob “Papa” Sanchez’s HTTP Header plugin.
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This is a on-going series of entries where I highlight EE experiences.
ExpressionEngine is garbage. Use #Wordpress.
Ryan Haylett via Twitter
Follow the link for the well thought-out, detailed analysis…oh wait nevermind.
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- EntrEE Edit (for EE1) by Bulldog Creative Services
The EntrEE Edit plugin allows you edit the contents of your weblog entries without having to use php or query strings.
- Panel ($, for EE2) by Addict Add-ons
Easily create and edit settings and then use them in your templates as global variables. Create settings that are text fields, on/off or yes/no switches, text areas, drop downs, or even entries from a channel.
- PM Monitor ($, for EE1 & EE2) by IntoEEtive (Yuriy Salimovskiy)
This is a tool for admins to track private messaging. We all respect privacy, but… sometimes you just need no know what people are telling each other.
- Multi Relationship Checkboxes (for EE1) by Trevor Davis
A modified version of Mark Huot’s ExpressionEngine Mutli Relation Extension that uses checkboxes instead of a multi-select.
- CP Default Tabs (for EE2) by Trevor Davis
Add in default tabs for new members
- Easy FPO (for EE2) by Jeremy Madrid
Easy FPO is an ExpressionEngine 2 plugin that allows you to generate FPO images on the fly using simple template tags.
- Facebook Link (for EE1 & EE2) by Ron Hickson
A simple plugin that displays wall posts from a specified Facebook Page. Weave your Facebook Page activity into your site in a seamless way.
- Stay Up Forever (for EE2) by John D. Wells
Stay Up Forever: take control of EE’s session limit.
- TweetMeme Retweet Button (for EE1) by Rob Sanchez (Barrett Newton)
Adds a button which easily lets you retweet your blog posts. A port of the official TweetMeme Wordpress plugin.
- Auto Collapse Empty Custom Fields (for EE1) by Cocoaholic (Elwin Zuiderveld)
This extension collapses empty custom fields in publish form.
- Expresso ($, for EE2) by PutYourLightsOn
Expresso is an ExpressionEngine add-on that provides you with a WYSIWYG editor fieldtype for channel entries. Its main aim is to allow intuitive content editing for your users while respecting your site’s design. It also has a built-in file manager that allows users to upload and manage images and files on your site.
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If you haven’t been following along, the next ExpressionEngine & CodeIgniter Conference takes place in Brooklyn, New York. Today (Feb 17 2011), the early bird tickets will go on sale. There are 200 tickets available at a cost of $250 each (which is a steal for a conference).
The conference website is still sparse as of this posting but it should be updated soon with a list of speakers and topics.
Learn more at the conference website or by following their Twitter stream.
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EE Insider contributor (A Primer on Relationships with EE) and friend of the site Noah Stokes wrote up a nice summary of how to do a slideshow in jQuery.
I’d like to talk about what is behind a simple slideshow in the hopes that you can learn a bit about thinking like a programmer. If you’re a designer, this will be simple and easy to consume…
Rather than do a step-by-step copy-and-paste-my-code tutorial (wherein you learn nothing and get carpal tunnel syndrome), Noah breaks down the code and explains exactly what is going on.
Read the entire article: The Anatomy of a Slideshow
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EllisLab employee (and, sadly, Kansas basketball fan) Greg Aker drops a knowledge bomb on using custom queries with the ExpressionEngine Query Module instead of a standard Channel Entries tag pair.
The Query Module in ExpressionEngine is one of my most favorite, and I think one of the most underutilized gems of the product. As I have previously discussed, it’s almost always better to use a Plugin or Module rather than turning on PHP in your templates. If the weblog/channel module is overkill, the query module is where it’s at.
You need to know how to write MySQL queries, and need to study the ExpressionEngine schema a bit. After getting that under your belt, you’ll have a new weapon in your arsenal to attack content layout issues with.
Last week I released a new one hour training video covering the basics of MySQL and ExpressionEngine. Aker’s tip is a great follow-up on that primer.
Read the whole article: Greg Aker: Get your SQL on
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EE in the Wild is brought to you each week by our friends at Show-EE. Thanks to Marcus and Jeff for putting together these highlights each week.
Neon Skates
The first is Neon Skates by Pablo Boerr of Flia Web Design. When this one hit the #eecms twitter stream everyone was blown away. Clean, fun, bright accent colors on a dark foundation. This one really feels right. The textures are awesome. And the fact that it is for a Roller Derby team just makes it that much cooler. And Jen, their photographer, did a great job capturing some personality of the team.
Mekonta
The second is Mekonta, a site by John Cowen. This site has a lot going on but when you take a step back you really begin to appreciate it. Everything from the retro woman that highlights John’s 7 Step plan to John’s use of different typefaces to illustrate a point. I also like how he adds a “want to know more” area under each of his services that link to his portfolio, about and contact pages. Nicely done John.
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<pulls back the velvet curtain>
Hi folks, it’s me, Brian Warren. Remember me? I came in to help Ryan while he was taking some time getting to know his beautiful, brand-new new baby girl. I’m afraid that this is going to be my last post on EE Insider for a little while. Now it’s time for Ryan to take the reigns back for a bit.
It’s been a really fun past four or five months. I’ve gotten to really immerse myself into the ExpressionEngine community more than I ever had in the past, and of course, the community lives up to it’s high reputation of being knowledgable, welcoming, and, all-in-all, a fun place to be.
I’m not going far, in fact I have plans to continue to make the clicky sound of the keyboard while writing about EE, perhaps in longer form.
Thanks everybody, I’ll see you around!
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Nick Snyder tweeted call for help about an EE comment form that keeps filling in his name.
My comment form keeps spitting out my name when I put {name} in the {exp:comment:entries} tag pair. Anyone smarter than me out there? #eecms
This is mostly likely because you’re logged in to the site’s Control Panel. As a logged-in user, ExpressionEngine automatically populates the form. This happens because you’re using the {name} variable in your input field value parameter.
So, no worries, ExpressionEngine is just trying to help you out!
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EE Insider would like to congratulate Marcus Neto on his new job at EllisLab. The new hire was announced in a recent blog post:
This week we’re proud to announce Marcus Neto is joining our team here. He’s working in a large part with the upcoming Enterprise solution. More of this information is forthcoming. Are you starting to drool? We are.
Marcus is one of the guys also behind Show-ee, which just happens to have a new weekly feature here on EE Insider.
Congrats, Marcus!
Update: Leslie Camacho wrote up a formal announcement about hiring Marcus for the Director of Enterpise Services position.
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Rob Sanchez (@_rsan) went off the deep end and gave the community five new add-ons this week, on his birthday. Usually when you become a new dad you work less, or you might take it easy on your birthday and have a few beers, but Rob once again proves he’s basically a selfless EE Superman. Thanks Rob, and to everyone else who contributed new and useful add-ons this week.
- APStylee (for EE2) by Micky Hulse
APStylee plugin converts a timestamp into an Associated Press style formatted date and time.
- Mo’ Variables (for EE2) by Rob Sanchez (Barrett Newton)
Add more early-parsed, global variables to your EE installation.
- BN Short Names (for EE2) by Rob Sanchez (Barrett Newton)
Displays the short names of your custom fields on the publish/edit page.
- BN Edit Menu (for EE2) by Rob Sanchez (Barrett Newton)
Displays your channels in the Content > Edit menu.
- Segment Search (for EE2) by Rob Sanchez (Barrett Newton)
Search URL segments for use in conditionals.
- Template Code (for EE2) by Rob Sanchez (Barrett Newton)
Display a template without parsing its tags, and converting html entities; useful for showing off template code. It’s like embedding a template without processing it.
- Solspace Update Advisor (for EE2) by Solspace
Checks for updates for your currently installed Solspace Add-ons.
- Simple Registration ($, for EE2) by Bjorn Borresen
Simple Registration simplifies the ExpressionEngine member registration process. It’s a stand-alone registration form which you can output anywhere in your templates - so you don’t need to edit the “member templates” to get a signup form (ie. the /member/register template). You can also select which elements that are required in the signup form, and you get the form code generated so it’s all plug’n'play.
- Stash (for EE2) by Mark Croxton
Stash allows you to stash text and snippets of code for reuse throughout your templates.
- GET and POST Variables ($, for EE1 & EE2) by Laisvunas
This plugin outputs variables from GET and POST arrays.
- Feb 08 2011 9:05 MX Auto Password (for EE2) by Max Lazar
MX Auto Password helps you generate secure password for members during member registration and CP member registration.
- Price Format (for EE2) by Steve Abraham
Formats a supplied price (decimal places, thousands separator, decimal point separator) and adds or displays tax amount (percentage supplied as an optional parameter).
- CP CSS & JS (for EE2) by Pixel & Tonic (Brandon Kelly)
This extension for ExpressionEngine 2 allows you to add custom CSS and Javascript to the Control Panel pages.
- BK Editor (for EE1) by Pixel & Tonic (Brandon Kelly)
Editor adds little Edit buttons next to each of your entries, right on your website. Click on one of them, and that entry’s Edit page will open in a new window.
- Loggr (for EE1) by Pixel & Tonic (Brandon Kelly)
Log PHP variables in the browser console using `Loggr::log($var1, $var2);`
- Shoutout (for EE1) by Pixel & Tonic (Brandon Kelly)
Link to entries using {{url_title}} or {{“Custom Title”:url_title}} syntax.
- Number Snob (for EE1) by Pixel & Tonic (Brandon Kelly)
Converts numbers 1-9 into words (“one”, “two”, etc.)
- Config Variables (for EE2) by Trevor Davis
Access everything in the $config array without using PHP.
- Easy Page Links (for EE2) by Daniel Grieve
An Accessory for ExpressionEngine 2 which extends the functionality of the default link HTML formatting button. The link button will now open a modal window which lists the current pages from the Pages module and also has a text input field for custom URLs.
- Stand-Alone Member Edit ($, for EE1 & EE2) by IntoEEtive (Yuriy Salimovskiy)
This module allows you to display a profile editing form within your EE templates. Your users can edit all their profile info, including username, password, email and custom profile fields on any page!
- Twitter Comment Parser (for EE2) by Barry Cogan
Parses twitter tags and users.
Blog Entry
There is a wide range of ways to pitch ExpressionEngine as a CMS. Some people use EE as a differentiator, saying they are an EE-only shop, and clients choose them partly for that reason. Others will wait to pitch EE until after they’ve landed the gig, maybe letting the client choose from among a few different options. And there are plenty of other scenarios in between those two extremes.
My question for you is: How do you pitch ExpressionEngine to your clients? Is it an easy sell or sometimes a challenge? Does it figure into your initial pitch to land the client? Give us your thoughts in the comments.
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This is an on-going series of entries where we highlight EE experiences we find around the web.
Every time I buy an ExpressionEngine license I get a personalized, handmade thank you card from @gaker. Oh you don’t?
Kenny Meyers via Twitter
No, I don’t! I actually get a hand-packed fruit basket with chocolate and coffee from none other than Leslie Camacho, but that might just be a coincidence.
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The EE Help Chats are a great way to spend an hour talking shop, getting help figuring out something you’re been working on, or just spending time with the ever-so-helpful EE Community.
European EE Help Chat
Our European EE Help Chat takes place at 19:00 GMT. If you follow @eeinsider on Twitter, you’ll find a reminder tweet about 15 minutes before. Visit this URL at the time of the chat to gain access to the room: http://mijingo.com/europe-chat
EE Help Chat
The original chat still takes place at the regular time of 9 PM Eastern at http://mijingo.com/go-chat. As with the other chat, we typically post a reminder on Twitter about 15 minutes before.
See you there!
Instructional Video
You
Get the Video
Blog Entry
Video Player 2 for ExpressionEngine 2 packs some pretty nice new features making is a snap to add videos to your entries. The latest version adds matrix support and a pretty cool new video search functionality, which searches several video sites for clips to add. You can also supply a video URL of your own.
The new version provides HTML5 video compatibility too:
The new version of Video Player now supports HTML 5 with compatible players, and makes your videos accessible from an iPhone or an iPad. You do not have any thing to do to benefit from this improvement, your existing videos will be automatically updated. HTML5 video playback from an iPhone or an iPad is currently supported by YouTube and Vimeo.
Video Player 2 costs $39 and is available at Devot:ee .
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