Over a series of 8 videos, watch and learn as Ryan builds an entire ExpressionEngine website from beginning to end. Get started now.
This is a on-going series of entries where I highlight EE experiences.
Had my first experience of using Drupal today. Nice reminder of why I love ExpressionEngine so much
Kerry Gallagher via Twitter
Ouch! I can’t say that’s the first time I’ve heard that.
Posted on Oct 28, 2010 by Brian Warren
Mike at Feisty Goat posted a quick tutorial (based on his talk at last week’s ExpressionEngine Camp) on their blog about forcing SSL in ExpressionEngine.
What’s SSL?
The savior of data in motion everywhere, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is the answer in protecting credentials and other sensitive information to and from the browser. Let’s talk about what SSL is not. SSL is not patched software, valid form input, nor up-to-date hosting. SSL is all about data in motion encryption, client/server verification. This ultimately leads to the protection of eavesdropping, a man in the middle attack.
I know, SSL sounds scary, right? Certificates, hours of server configuration and calls to tech support. Actually, all you need is a valid SSL certificate and the ability to modify the site htaccess file.
Read Mike’s entire article for the full set of instructions: Force SSL in ExpressionEngine
Posted on Oct 27, 2010 by Ryan Irelan
In the past seven days there have been no less than two conferences devoted to ExpressionEngine: ExpressionEngine Camp in Denver and Engine Summit 2. And less than a month ago EECI took place.
ExpressionEngine has a thriving community who doesn’t seem to hesitate to organize conferences, big and small, in person or online. My question for you today is actually three questions: Have you ever been to an ExpressionEngine conference? Do you prefer one conference style over another? Do you have plans to attend any in 2011?
Posted on Oct 27, 2010 by Brian Warren
It’s Wednesday, also known as EE Help Chat Day. 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.
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
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!
Posted on Oct 27, 2010 by Brian Warren
Leslie Doherty, EllisLab’s Community Architect, has been publishing these great little round-up posts on the ExpressionEngine blog. Monday Morning’s post was the best yet with lots of good info and links to community happenings. I recommend reading, not scanning, these posts. You might find some juicy details like this little bit:
We have a press release coming early this week as well as announcement for EECI2011.
Exciting!
Read the rest and make sure you subscribe to the entire ExpressionEngine blog. It’s definitely worth your time.
Posted on Oct 26, 2010 by Brian Warren
Ryan Burney from the 3 Roads Blog posted a helpful tutorial about how to integrate categories and Structure with dynamic URL segments.
...Structure will only load a URL if one has been defined for it. This means that unless you want to create a new Structure page for each of your categories, you’ll need to be creative.
It’s a nice, detailed tutorial with lots of screenshots. It involves just a tiny bit of PHP, but worry not; it doesn’t look too challenging. If you’ve had this sort of problem in the past, then I imagine this tutorial will be very helpful.
ExpressionEngine with Structure and Categories
Posted on Oct 26, 2010 by Brian Warren
Just last week Chris Brauckmuller published an excellent how-to on EE Insider called Edit SAEF in EE 2. It’s a great guide on how to create an edit SAEF, complete with image uploads and all the various field types you’d need to get your standalone entry form working.
Well, you couldn’t ask for better timing, because Greg Aker posted an article on the ExpressionEngine blog asking Will the Real SAEF Please Stand Up?. There he writes that they at EllisLab are taking a new look at the SAEF and they want the community’s input.
He listed some goals, including third-party field type support, editing entries, and easier customization, but what they really need is your input.
What obstacles do you find when trying to ‘skin’ the SAEF? How do you typically use CSS to style a form? Do you prefer more required template tags or more predefined markup? How do you feel about adding your own javascript interactions? Have examples of complex issues where the SAEF (1.x or 2.x) lets you down? Lay them out. The more information we have the better.
I’m excited that EllisLab is looking at this area of EE and planning some big improvements. If you have any input at all, I suggest reading Greg’s post and adding your own feedback.
Posted on Oct 25, 2010 by Brian Warren
This past Friday, Ryan and Lea hosted a very special episode of the EE Podcast. They spent the entire show doing a Q&A with Leslie Camacho, Derek Jones, Leslie Flinger and Lisa Wess from EllisLab. If you submitted a question for the Q&A you might hear yours asked.
I think it was a good show and it was nice to hear more about how EllisLab makes decisions and is trying to figure out the best way to deal with their growth. What did you think? I’m sure lots of our readers have questions that weren’t answered, but how did you feel about their answers to the questions that were asked?
Listen and subscribe: EE Podcast #33: Q&A with EllisLab from 5by5
Posted on Oct 25, 2010 by Brian Warren
We’ve been in full-on optimization mode at devot:ee this month and hope you’re seeing the speed increases. One thing we learned is that simple conditionals are hard to come by in EE, and advanced conditionals can cripple your site in a hurry.
Two add-ons I’d like to point you to if you’re interested in speeding up your site are both by Mark Croxton (@croxton). One is Switchee which I use all over the place, and the new one this week is Ifelse. You would do well to read and understand the descriptions of what these two add-ons do. Both of these are available free for both EE1 and EE2, and Mark officially supports these through the devot:ee support forums. Thanks to Mark for his work!
Here are this week’s newest ExpressionEngine add-ons:
ExpressionEngine Camp
Both of us devot:ee guys (The devot:eem, if you will *ahem*) will be at ExpressionEngine Camp in Denver, CO tomorrow, October 22. Jacob Russell (@jacobrussell) will speak about optimizing and speeding up your EE sites and will then be available for questions in the Experts Lounge. Your truly (@masuga) will speak about using Git for version control when working with EE, then will be available in the Experts Lounge for questions or general chit-chat. After that, I’ll sit in on the Business Panel at the end of the day with Mitchell Kimbrough of Solspace and Paul Burton of 16toads. Should be a fun time hanging out all day with an ExpressionEngine crowd.
Posted on Oct 21, 2010 by Ryan Masuga
This is a on-going series of entries where I highlight EE experiences.
Spent the day in the deep end with ExpressionEngine - verdict - I like it. As a platform for building commercial websites, it works well.
@bbmatt via Twitter
Posted on Oct 21, 2010 by Brian Warren
This Friday at 12:30pm EDT, part of the EllisLab team will be appearing on the EE Podcast and they will be taking your questions. If you have any questions, make sure you get them in before 6pm PDT today, October 21, 2010. We’ve mentioned this before, but I want to make it perfectly clear: They will not know your questions if you do not ask them.
Sure, rumors have gone around about Leslie Camacho’s near-Carnac-level psychic abilities, but they’re not true. He will not be able to magically answer your questions before you ask them. Leslie is a mere mortal like the rest of us, and any extra sixth sense he had was lost when he cut his hair.
All joking aside, if you do have some questions you want to ask, this is the way to do it: Head on over to the 5by5 contact form, make sure to select “EE Podcast” under the “Topic or Show” menu, and ask away! Your deadline to submit questions is 6pm PDT today, October 21, 2010.
Posted on Oct 21, 2010 by Brian Warren
EllisLab posted a new build for ExpressionEngine yesterday, providing a workaround for a bug that was introduced with EE 2.1.1. This bug prevents any third party add-ons from saving data on the publish page. That’s kind of a big deal if, say, you have a few Matrix or Playa fields in a publish form and, I don’t know, were thinking about entering some data into them and clicking Submit.
EllisLab has posted a new build for 2.1.1 which disables autosave, the source of this regression. While a bug this big is particularly egregious, it’s nice to see EllisLab being so responsive and getting a fix out the door so quickly.
If you’d like to see more about where this bug came from, check out Pascal Kriete’s post on the ExpressionEngine Blog. I also recommend taking a peek at the changelog. There are a couple more bugs that got fixed with this build. Lastly, if you updated to 2.1.1 this week, make sure you get the latest build.
Posted on Oct 21, 2010 by Brian Warren
Greg Aker posted on his blog about how to plan ahead for managing static resources and planning ahead just in case you have a big web traffic day coming up:
Picture this, you’re a day out from an extreme traffic event and you have notified your hosting company (please, notify your hosting company). What will you do if they say, “Let’s get static resources moved over to a CDN.” .... ExpressionEngine makes it really easy to plan for this ahead of time.
Check out Greg’s solution on his post: Make No Assumptions With Asset Management
Posted on Oct 20, 2010 by Brian Warren
It’s Wednesday and that means today is EE Help Chat Day. It’s a fantastic way to spend an hour. You can meet some EE users, talk shop, and get help.
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
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!
Posted on Oct 20, 2010 by Brian Warren
This Friday, October 22nd at 12:30 EDT, part of the team at EllisLab will be our guests on the EE Podcast and they want to take as much time as possible to answer your questions.
We will broadcasting part of the podcast live (we only have 30 minutes of live time available due to other shows on the 5by5 schedule) and continue to record for as long as is needed. The entire conversation will be available in the downloadable podcast.
But this episode we are depending on your questions. What do you want to ask EllisLab? Do you have questions about how they work as developers? Are you itching to know their long term plans for ExpressionEngine?
You can submit as many questions as you like, but we only ask that you use the contact form at 5by5 to submit them. Don’t forget to choose “EE Podcast” under “Topic or Show.”
Posted on Oct 19, 2010 by Ryan Irelan
Earlier this year, Ty Wangsness wrote a great article over at EMarketSouth which established the basics for enabling members of a site to edit channel entries outside the EE 2 control panel. While it was an excellent primer, his article only included instructions for enabling text input and text area fields, which left a lot of us wondering how to make richer fieldtypes work. Additionally, there were some sections which might have been unfamiliar for those of us who don
Posted on Oct 19, 2010 by Chris Brauckmuller
When I saw that EllisLab was going to add {last_segment} to EE 2.1.1, I thought that would surely make obsolete any add-ons developers have made to pull off the same trick. I headed over to Devot:ee and found Bjorn Borresen’s free Last Segment add-on to take a look.
When I compared Borresen’s add-on to the new built-in functionality, I saw that Borresen’s Last Segment appears to do quite a bit more with additional options, such as showing the last segment with or without pagination.
I have to imagine that Borresen will update his Last Segment add-on to work with EE 2.1.1. Since they both use the {last_segment} variable, I’d shy away from using them together. And if you depend on some of the features of Borresen’s Last Segment add-on, wait till he does update it before upgrading to 2.1.1.
Posted on Oct 19, 2010 by Brian Warren
Wow, when Derek said ExpressionEngine 2.1.1 was coming this week, I didn’t realize he meant Monday! There’s a nice big batch of changes to peruse in the changelog so ready your fine-toothed combs. Greg Aker published a blog entry announcing the release.
The Comment Module, Channel Module, and Moblog Module have all benefited from significant improvements, and we’re really excited about Pascal’s new subscription library. The subscription library has allowed us to add the oft-requested ability to subscribe to an entry without commenting, and have smart notification settings apply to comments.
As Derek mentioned in his post, the 2.1.1 release is touted as fixing over 50 bugs as well. A nice long list of bug fixes is definitely a welcome sight.
Posted on Oct 19, 2010 by Brian Warren
On Friday, Ryan and Lea hosted a new episode of the EE Podcast. They discussed their favorite add-ons of 2010 so far.
Do you have a top five add-ons list of your own? Let us know in the comments!
Listen and subscribe: EE Podcast #32: Favorite Add-Ons of 2010 from 5by5
Posted on Oct 18, 2010 by Brian Warren
This week, EllisLab will be releasing ExpressionEngine 2.1.1. In a blog post from friday, Derek Jones outlined the enhancements and bugfixes we will be seeing:
- Improved version update notification, to indicate normal vs. high priority releases
- show_empty= parameter of the Channel Categories tag is now ::drum roll:: channel specific!
- Added a {last_segment} global variable
- The Comment Module has a number of improvements, including it’s own control panel with better comment moderation, new variables and parameters, built-in inline editing for commenters, and smart notifications.
- Moblog module now works with POP3 over SSL (hello, GMail!)
- Improvements and bug fixes to the Channel Entries API, primarily for third party developers
- Over 50 bug fixes
Derek also gave us a behind-the-scenes look into why the date bug they had hoped to include wont be making it into this release. While I’m sure it will disappoint some people that fix isn’t included, I have to applaud their transparency in explaining why it’s not there. I’m also very glad they’re not delaying the release of 2.1.1 to finish fixing it.
With my work on Cognition, I’ve been spending lots of time in the comments module, so I’m definitely eager to get my hands on that. More than anything, though, I’m most interested to see what bugs were fixed. How about you? Will anything in this release being some welcome change in your world? Let us know in the comments.
According to Derek, EE 2.1.1 will be coming this week, and a full changelog will be posted in the usual place.
Posted on Oct 18, 2010 by Brian Warren
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