Blog Entry
EE Podcast #36 is up and while Ryan is on paternity leave, Lea and Dan discuss various ways to customize the ExpressionEngine experience for your clients before hand off, as well as what to do when you finally do. There are lots of great tips in here about how to make the site management experience more friendly for your clients.
Listen and subscribe: EE Podcast #36: Customizing EE for Handoff on 5by5
Blog Entry
As if the folks at Mountee aren’t busy enough, they’ve created what they’re calling the ExpressionEngine Developer’s Toolkit:
Building ExpressionEngine sites on a Mac? We’re gathering all the resources you need to make your ExpressionEngine development as stream-lined as possible. Whether you use Mountee or not, these tools should transform your workflow. And they’re all completely free.
Some of these are created by the devs at Mountee, such as the ExpressionEngine Syntax Mode and the Mountee plugin for Coda, but they also list, with credit, tools created by other developers, such as the ExpressionEngine Sugar for Espresso and the EE 2 bundle for Texmate.
It will be interesting to watch this page grow as more tools get added, but I for one didn’t know about the Coda add-on, so just might have to try it! All in all it looks like a nice little resource for those of us using a Mac for our EE work.
Blog Entry
Last week was a bit of an anomaly, what with the folks in the US cooking turkeys and giving thanks, but this week we are back to our regular, twice Wednesday, EE Help Chat Schedule.
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!
Blog Entry
The speaker lineup for EECI2011 in New York was published to the ExpressionEngine blog this week. These are the results from the Call for Papers that EllisLab issued in early November. I’m very excited to be a part of this list. Here’s the full list of speakers:
As you can see this is a great mix of people. EECI2011 is October 19-21 in New York City. On her blog post, Leslie mentioned the full website for the conference, with speakers, topics, and details will be up in January of 2011.
Blog Entry
Over the weekend, DevDemon released the latest version of their Channel Images fieldtype and I have to say we here are pretty impressed with it.
Channel Images takes image management in ExpressionEngine to an entirely new level. Somehow it makes the task of uploading and working with your images both simpler, yet more powerful. I’ll try to sum up what I mean:
If you just need to upload one image with a channel entry and that’s pretty much it, well, you can get by just fine without Channel Images. However, if you’ve ever wanted to have an image gallery with an entry, or just want to upload several images, add a caption to each and move them around a bit, then Channel Images definitely deserves a look, because it makes these kinds of things a piece of cake.
If you already know what I’m talking about because you’ve used Channel Images for awhile, then you might be interested in knowing what is new with 3.0:
- Re-use of Previously Stored Images
- Reprocess Previously Uploaded Images
- Watermark Your Images with Text Or Images
- Adaptive Cropping
- Simplified Setup
- New Streamlined Design
- New Static Template Tag
- Image Pagination
- Improved Upload UI
- Improved Memory Management
- Improved Resize Quality
- Original Upload Storage Choice
Channel Images is a $45 add-on, works with both EE 1.7 and 2.x, and is available at DevDemon’s own site or Devot:ee.
DevDemon: Channel Images
Channel Images on Devot:ee
Blog Entry
Are you or your clients itching to use a desktop blog editor with ExpressionEngine 2? Well MarsEdit 3 (Mac only) is a great solution, and the folks at Antidote Creative wrote up a great step-by-step post on how to get everything set up.
Because ExpressionEngine is so customizable (with all its custom fields, channels, etc), it’s not as simple to set up as it would be if you were using a lesser CMS, but not to worry, it’s absolutely doable. If you’re wanting to try a desktop editor, I recommend giving this tutorial a go.
Blog Entry
Just like years past, the publisher of my ExpressionEngine book is running their Black Friday sale. What does that mean? A whopping 40% off almost all of their books and other learning materials. This includes my ExpressionEngine 2: A Quick-Start Guide. From their announcement:
Get your wishlists ready! This Friday is BLACK FRIDAY, and we’re having a store-wide 40% off sale for 24 hours only (midnight to midnight PST) on this Friday, November 26, 2010. Use the coupon code “turkey.”
It’s a great deal on so many well-respected learning materials and too good to pass up!
Blog Entry
The weekly EE Help Chat that takes place at 9 PM Eastern on Wednesdays will be not take place tonight because of the Thanksgiving holiday tomorrow in the USA. This is a week off we take every year but we’ll be back again next week.
However, the European EE Help Chat (3 PM EST) will take place as usual, so people who need help can always pop in. No EU citizenship required.
Blog Entry
Andy Johnson from Shaping the Page did a great writeup on how to make a tumblr-style site with EE:
Part of the appeal of a Tumblr-style blog are the variety of dedicated post types for entries, making it quick and easy to post a snippet of information or a link, vs. committing to a full blog post. For our Journal we decided we’d be using five different post types: a full entry, a link, a photo, a quote, and a video post type. Like with most things in ExpressionEngine, there are multiple ways to accomplish this.
Andy’s writeup includes step-by-step instructions and even some template code to get you started. I’ve long considered doing something just like this, but Andy’s post saved me all the hard work. Nicely done! Check out his post to see how Andy did it:
Shaping the Page: How to Build a Simple Tumblr Blog with ExpressionEngine
Blog Entry
Remember earlier this month when we told you about the Call for Papers for EECI 2011? Well the deadline is here, and if you have been putting off writing up a proposal, you need to get on it and submit that brilliant idea today. Robert Eerhart tweeted yesterday that he’s received a lot of good proposals, so it sounds like there is some great fodder for next year’s EECI.
If you want yours in the mix, you better act fast! Check out Leslie’s post for the details.
Blog Entry
Happy Cog’s Mark Huot wrote an interesting article on Cognition entitled “Responsible Development”. He talks about trying to strike the appropriate balance between ultimate configurability and striving for simplicity and ease of management.
Unfortunately, we don’t all live in that dream world where everything is possible. In the real world we all know publishing platforms can be more confusing than the HTML they output. As you add functionality to your publishing platform you also add complexity.
I’m sure we’ve all been guilty of adding an extra field or two that we didn’t need to, all in the name of making things more dynamic and manageable. ExpressionEngine makes this so easy! But sometimes this makes the entire system less client friendly and even more prone to bugs.
What do you guys think? How do you strive for “responsible development”?
Blog Entry
Presenting this week’s small batch of EE add-on goodness:
The 2010 AcademEE Awards are on! Vote for the top ExpressionEngine add-ons and the Developer of the Year. We have a short news item about it, or you can jump right in and vote. Thanks to all ExpressionEngine developers for their hard work over the past year!
Blog Entry
This is a on-going series of entries where I highlight EE experiences.
If at first you don’t succeed try adding dynamic=“off”
Justin Long via Twitter
Sage advice! Of course it’s dynamic=“no” with EE2, but the spirit of the message is still very valuable!
Blog Entry
It’s Wednesday, and that means we have some EE Help Chats today!
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!
Blog Entry
ExpressionEngine 2 brought some great customization capabilities to the publish page, including the ability to save different publish layouts, but Brian Litzinger’s Blueprints takes that a pretty big step further.
Blueprints lets you take control of your Publish Layouts and take Member Groups out of the equation. It is designed let you create Publish Layouts based on templates, not Member Groups.
No longer will you have to tell your client “Ignore this custom field, it won’t display in Template A, but works in Template B” or, “Ignore all these templates in the drop down, just use Template B or Template C for this Channel”. Nor will you have to create different channels for different page layouts. You can create a single “Pages” channel, assign it custom fields, and use that one channel for all your page types.
Sounds pretty clean and simple, but if you watch the video on Devot:ee you will see some other nice features like enhancements to the Edit menu and having a searchable structure list in the control panel sidebar. Another feature is the ability to limit the templates that the user can select for a page, along with thumbnails for those pages. Handy!
Check out Blueprints on Devot:ee or on Brian Litzinger’s add-on site, Bold Minded.
Blog Entry
Michael Boyink is bringing his Train-ee classroom training to Atlanta, GA. This time it’s called “ExpressionEngine on my Mind” and looks like it will be a great program.
The dates are January 11-14, 2011. Early Bird registration price is $1195. The price after Friday, December 10th, 2010 is $1495. Registration isn’t open yet and the venue hasn’t been announced, but if you’re in the Atlanta area, definitely keep your eyes peeled for the rest of the info. For schedule and more information, check out the details at the Train-ee site.
Blog Entry
Garrett Winder posted a new version of Chris Ruzin’s ExpressionEngine TextMate bundle, with updates for EE2.0 tags and syntax. This is a handy thing to have if you’re an EE developer, and TextMate’s phenomenal bundle support is what keeps people sticking with it.
But wait, there’s more! Garrett also linked to Wes Baker’s ExpressionEngine 2 TextMate Bundle on GitHub, saying it’s even “more feature-rich” than his own.
Hey readers, which one’s the best? Are there more that I don’t know about? Post up any ideas you have in the comments.
Blog Entry
EE Podcast #35 is up where Ryan and Lea discuss some recent EE news and share their thoughts on the Better CMS gimmick. Join them for 30 minutes of news and maybe a rant or two.
Listen and subscribe: EE Podcast #35: News Roundup, Better CMS on 5by5
Blog Entry
Greg Aker posted on the ExpressionEngine blog that the next ExpressionEngine release “will mark the end of PHP 4 support in ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter”.
I know many add-on developers have stopped supporting PHP 4, and I wasn’t alone in being surprised that EE2 supported it at all. Now mere months after EE2 has been out of beta, they are dropping PHP 4 support.
Do you see this affecting you? I know it won’t change anything in my world. I imagine we’ll see some indirect benefits as the EllisLab developers won’t have to spend as much time on backward compatibility.
Read the rest of Greg’s post as he outlines a few things you might want to be aware of, and if you’re worried at all that your server might not support the next release, check out the server wizard, which he links to from his post.
Blog Entry
New add-ons this week for everyone’s favorite #bettercms, known to all of us on Twitter as #eecms:
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