With the help of a friend (*cough* me *cough*) he remembered that he had blanked out the max length when he created those fields (no value at all) and apparently EE just makes the value 0 (instead of a usable default like 128).
Yesterday I posted a link to a post on Design Litmus about creating screencast user guides for your clients. That got me thinking: I wonder what other people do for user guides? I’ll bet others wonder this too, and what better venue to find out than making an Ask the Readers post!
The options for user guides are myriad. Some people create rich PDFs, like the ones from Headspace Design. Others, like Matt at Design Litmus, shoot screencasts and include them as accessories in the control panel. Then again, David in the comments from yesterday maintains that you’re “doing it wrong” if your client needs anything more than a well-organized site with simple inline documentation.
I’m sure there are more ideas than these, so today’s question is simple: How do you equip your clients to use the ExpressionEngine site you built for them?
My buddy Matt Crest at Design Litmus posted a great article about how to create screencast user guides for your clients. In the past, as I’m sure is the case for most people, he created written documentation or did in-person training to help clients get the hang of managing content on their brand new website. Neither of these solutions is particularly ideal, so he tried something else:
A better setup, however, is to create simple screencast videos of each capability or action a client would use. This way, they can see every hover, click, and keystroke so they know exactly how to do something. You can’t leave out a step in a video demo.
I think this is a stellar idea. I even mentioned this during our EE 2.0 talk at SXSW this year. Imagine a client who only needs to do a couple simple tasks on the site once every month or two. How annoying would it be for them to have to consult their notes or your long-winded how-to PDF just to try to re-remember how to do these things? A simple screencast is definitely the better option.
Matt goes on to explain his setup for doing screencasts, followed by a clever “Choose Your Own Adventure” feature in his post, letting you chose which way you want to embed the screencasts on your site, either in the front-end templates, or as an EE Control Panel Accessory. Your choice determines which tutorial you get. Awesome.
In ExpressionEngine it is easy to move entries between channels. But unless you have your Channel Assignments set up properly, it just won’t work! Watch this short (1m16s) video to learn how to move entries between channels in ExpressionEngine 2.
For more ExpressionEngine video tutorials, visit Mijingo.
Leslie Doherty posted on the ExpressionEngine blog that they are already gearing up for EECI2011. They are taking a different approach to getting speakers than they have done in the past:
We’re taking applications for speaking topics. You’ll have the chance to give us input in what topics you’d like to hear as well as offer to speak, or suggest a speaker, and help shape the ExpressionEngine/CodeIgniter event of the year!
She includes a list of suggested topics and encourages submitting your own. If you have some good ideas and a bit of speaking chops than definitely apply. If you have some ideas about what should be talked about, then send them in!
Information about how to submit your ideas is all in the post.
Rob Sanchez released a plugin for EE2 that lets you use the CodeIgniter Active Record pattern in your templates the same way you use the standard query module. The syntax is pretty dang elegant, and if you’re at all used to active record I imagine you’ll find this a welcome improvement over the query module. I’d even say if you don’t use ActiveRecord at all and want something that feels more like native ExpressionEngine template tags, you should check this out.
Our fearless leader Ryan just sent me a great tip that Lisa Wess wrote on her blog about Member Profiles:
One of my favorite new features of ExpressionEngine 2 is that the member templates are run through the full template engine. This means you can use add-on tags, channel entries tags, etc. Anything you can use in a template, you can use in your member templates.
So, someone asked if one could use nofollow links automatically in EE. Yes, you can, using the NoFollow plugin.
I love tips like these. It totally makes sense, it’s easy to implement, and it makes me wonder why this didn’t occur to me before. Check out the rest of Lisa’s post for details about how to implement it.
As usual, there is a whole slew of new stuff this week. To my mind, one of the most interesting items is NDG Flexible Admin which allows you to fully customize the control panel menu per member group. You can rename, re-order and remove menu items in order to create a more intuitive menu. Sounds pretty interesting if you’re using EE2.
We’ve also heard that people are fond of Beech, which is a simple extension for ExpressionEngine 2.x that closes the CP sidebar by default for all users.
I feel your pain Evan. I’ve lost more than my fair share of posts to crashing browsers and lack of auto-save. I’ve lost enough stuff that I’m pretty paranoid now: Nearly everything I write for the web, including Basecamp and EE posts, is jotted down in a little app called Notational Velocity first.
The Latest EE Podcast about Multiple Site Manager got me thinking that MSM would make a great topic for an “Ask the Readers” feature. I remember when EllisLab debuted MSM and it kind of blew my mind. What a wild idea, being able to run lots of websites from the same installation. What a dream! Over time, though, I have only had the opportunity to use it once or twice.
My questions to you the reader: Do you use Multiple Site Manager? How is it working out for you? Anything in particular EllisLab could do to make it better?
The latest EE Podcast with Ryan and Lea has been posted, and it’s an interesting one about the use of Multiple Site Manager. They have a guest, John Rogerson, Director of Web at Sewanee, who currently manages over twenty sites at Sewanee, all using MSM on a single installation of EE.
If you’re at all curious about using Multiple Site Manager, or have used it for awhile and are just looking for some more insight from a pro, I recommend taking the time to listen!
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 amazing EE Community. We have not one but two chats today:
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.
Continuing their goal to communicate more openly with the community, EllisLab today launched Forecast, a webpage that gives updates on what the team is currently working on.
The goal is to keep you informed of what’s coming soon, so that you have an idea of some of the things that will be in a future release, or that we have an ongoing project for.
Each item includes a brief description of what’s being worked on, where it sits in queue, who is involved, and the title will link to a topical discussion in the forums when available. The items include features and plans that we are preparing to deliver in the very near term, perhaps one or two updates out.
EE Insider applauds this new feature of the ExpressionEngine.com website! Check it out for yourself: ExpressionEngine Forecast v0.1
If you love ExpressionEngine and helping people, then you might want to consider applying for the new customer support position at EllisLab:
The Customer Support Specialist is the first point of contact for all technical support requests and focuses on ensuring an excellent technical support experience for ExpressionEngine and MojoMotor customers. The Customer Support Specialist’s primary responsibility is to champion our customers: beginning with their technical support journey, escalating as necessary, following the issue to resolution, and ensuring a positive support experience.
If being nice to people is a dealbreaker, I’d recommend not applying, but for the right kind of person this is a dream job! You get to work at home while spending all day immersed in the ExpressionEngine community. For all I know, some of you may do that already!
Have a client who is in the Super Admin member group
Said client uses the Edit area of the EE control panel a lot
Said client has a deathly fear of robots
...then read on:
EE2 has a killer robot easter egg. If you’re running the latest build, there’s an easy way to disable it. Just use the following line of code in your config/config.php file:
$config['kill_all_humans'] = 'disable';
I happened across this thread in the forums where someone found the easter egg and Derek Allard from EllisLab shed a bit more light on how it came to be and how rare it is to find this robot. If you like spoilers, you can even see a video of the robot in action.
I don’t think I’ll ever disable it, but I can’t think of any time I’ve had a client who fears robots who is also a Super Admin (It’s usually one or the other).
Greg Aker wrote an interesting post about PHP in your templates called With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility. He builds a really nasty, PHP-intensive template and runs some tests against it to see how such a template would impact the server.
PHP directly in the templates is fantastic for small chunks. I do want to illustrate the kind of issues that may arise if you are putting too much PHP into your templates, and show alternatives.
If you make it through Greg’s post and are a little befuddled, check out Greg’s comment at the bottom where he sums up the results nicely.
They announced this previously, but the official job posting for a Software Engineer position at EllisLab is now up on Authentic Jobs. This job is the opportunity for you to use your coding skills to make ExpressionEngine and MojoMotor better.
We are looking for a talented, experienced developer that loves code and people equally, a person who understands that the human impact of coding decisions is the key to helping people do great things through software. You must take an enormous amount of pride in the quality of your code, but have the humility to work well with a team.
You’ll work to make life online better with a small, talented, friendly, team from the comfort of your home or coffee shop or wherever you prefer to work.
[...]
The Software Engineer will have responsibilities covering many aspects of software development, from maintaining and improving the current code base for ExpressionEngine, MojoMotor, and CodeIgniter to developing new tools and applications under the direction of the CTO. The Software Engineer will also be required to help keep documentation for products up to date.
This sale is now over. Thanks to all the ghosts and goblins for checking out the Mijingo learning materials!
Today Mijingo is offering a special sale on ExpressionEngine learning materials. It’s the 10/31 sale: 10 hours of 31% off. But it’s only for today from Noon eastern to 10 PM Eastern (9 AM - 7 PM PDT).
The discount is good on anything in the store, but don’t wait too long! To get the 31% off, use the coupon code TREAT when you checkout (add it to the coupon code field and click “Update Coupon”). You should immediately see the discount on your order. Get your discount now.
Thank you for supporting Mijingo and Happy HallowEEn!
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