Blog Entry
After the community reaction to Kenny Meyer’s Plea to EllisLab, Leslie Camacho (EllisLab President) posted a quick blog post to the company blog letting everyone know they are definitely listening. In fact, a lot of what Kenny raised is already known to them.
Historically its no secret that we’ve been bad at communicating with the Community during times of growth and the stress that goes with it. That’s precisely why I hired Leslie Doherty.
Additionally, Leslie has requested that a few people from their team come on to the EE Podcast and answer questions from the community.
Instead, we’re going to ask Dan, Lea, & Ryan to bring us on the EE Podcast so we can actually talk about what’s going on with EllisLab. Anybody who has talked with me in person knows that I’m very open about the state of EllisLab and I think an interview will bring that out in a way that a blog post simply can’t.
We wanted to have them on for Episode 32, but as Leslie mentioned in the blog post he had to travel for family matters. Right now we are scheduled to have them on the show on Friday, Oct 22 at 12:30 PM Eastern. I’ll post more details here on EE Insider early next week.
The Plea
I was traveling when the Kenny’s blog post hit the interwebs and spread through Twitter so I didn’t have time to do a proper write-up about my thoughts and reactions.
First, there aren’t many things in Kenny’s post (from the seven items) with which I disagree. I have a few quibbles here and there (I disagree that EE 2 didn’t solve problems from EE 1. It didn’t solve every problem but it did solve some), but I understand the need to brush with broad strokes when writing an article like that . The goal Kenny had was a good one: get EllisLab to listen, react and hopefully change things. He succeeded at the first two. We’ll see about the last one.
Kenny wrote what a lot of us have been thinking for a while. I know I expected a much more aggressive build release schedule, especially since EE 2.1 was not at all a clean release. Slow release cycles are perfect for a mature, critical bug-free product, but EE 2.1 isn’t that. I taught a 3-day training in September and was fighting against a lot of 2.1 bugs and issues. The weird publish tabs bug was the most annoying.
The Reaction
Kenny’s article triggered a tsunami of feedback across Twitter and in the comment thread. 156 comments and many more tweets. It was quickly obvious: nearly everyone agreed with the article.
It is important to note that never was the reaction unproductive, extremely negative or hateful. EllisLab should feel fortunate to have fostered and help build such a caring community. Almost everyone that posted genuinely cared about the state of EE 2 and wanted to express their “+1” to Kenny’s article. Even former EllisLab CTO Paul Burdick chimed in with his take on the situation, which included a blunt take on the company’s leadership and management.
Some of the commenters decided to mix questions about communication and bug fixes with feature requests. I think we should keep them separate. Whether or not certain third party add-ons should be built into EE isn’t the issue here. In fact, it’s not even important. What is important is whether we can continue to put our own reputations behind EE 2 and sell it to our clients and customers.
Also in reaction, Veerle Pieters, who designed the original concept for the EE 2 control panel interface, posted an explanation of her involvement in EE 2 and the constraints under which she was working. She wrote that she wanted to clear the air about her involvement, the challenges and the surprisingly short timeline (about a month) she had to deliver the design. Veerle also only designed the major screens, leaving EllisLab to create the rest of the Control Panel from those designs.
Another important thing I should bring up is that I designed only a few of the major pages of the Control Panel. Those who know EE2, will also quickly realize that there are a bunch of pages. EE2 isn’t what I would refer to as small. Considering the limited timing I only got to help the team, it’s impossible to design them all.
The Questions
There are still a lot of unanswered questions, but we did get some information in a recent blog post by Derek Jones.
As I mentioned earlier, we will be doing an episode of the EE Podcast where EllisLab will answer our questions. We will announce more information about submitting your questions early next week.
I brought this up in episode 31 of the podcast, but I would like to see the control panel get refined and toned down. Less jQuery wizardry and more attention to small details like usability and form design (the category checkboxes in the publish are an abomination).
Get your questions and concerns ready. We will be fielding them all and asking them directly to the EllisLab team.
Blog Entry
Like last week, EE developers are busy cranking out new add-ons for our favorite CMS.
While they’ve been busy doing the add-on thing, we’ve been busy optimizing and speeding up devot-ee.com in numerous ways. The biggest help has come from Solspace’s Template Morsels module which allows us to cache large chunks of each template in the database. Another great help has been the fantastic Switchee plugin from Mark Croxton, which helps ensure that unmatched conditions are not parsed before being removed from the template.
Blog Entry
Mountee is a new app which mounts your ExpressionEngine templates as a drive on your desktop. When I first saw this, I thought, “Big deal, I have other apps that let me edit my templates by turning an FTP server into a mountable drive”. Then I watched the video on the Mountee website. It turns out Mountee doesn’t do that at all, but in fact does something far more interesting.
Give Mountee your ExpressionEngine site’s login details and like magic, you see all of your templates as files on your desktop. Notice that you didn’t give it any FTP information. This tells me that Mountee is interacting directly with the database. In fact, you can edit template preferences, create new groups, etc; all without launching a web browser.
Mountee will be available November 1st, 2010, and if you sign up before launch, you will get a special discount. Learn more at http://hellomountee.com
What do you think? Is this something you could see using in your day-to-day ExpressionEngine work?
Blog Entry
Editor emeritus, Kenny Meyers, posted an impassioned plea to EllisLab on The Nerdary, yesterday afternoon. He offers seven grievances toward EllisLab, offering pretty specific changes they could make to turn things around. The overarching theme to Kenny’s letter is that he feels EllisLab needs to focus more on transparency and change and less on talking about how they feel the community’s pain.
The community has responded, too, with over 100 comments mere hours after posting. Kenny definitely struck a nerve here. Many of the commenters are calling themselves “cosigners”. I don’t believe anybody from EllisLab has responded in the comments, but I did see they tweeted about it.
Some people might look at Kenny’s post and think he is just hating on EllisLab. I don’t think that’s the case at all. Kenny took the time to write that because he cares. Just like you and I, he loves this platform and wants to see it succeed. Speaking personally here, I can identify with every one of those grievances. I know the folks at EllisLab are watching and listening (Hello!), and I’m hopeful they are already on their way to making some noticeable changes for the better.
Check out Kenny’s post on the Nerdary, and by all means leave a comment there with your thoughts.
Blog Entry
Is it Wednesday again already? That must mean it’s time for our weekly EE Help Chats. It’s a great way to spend an hour getting help, talking shop and meeting some other EE users.
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
Packt Publishing released Leonard Murphy’s new book Building Websites with ExpressionEngine 2. Mr. Murphy had previously written a version of the book for ExpressionEngine 1.6, so it’s great to see a new edition written for version 2! You can pick up Building Websites with ExpressionEngine 2 from Packt Publishing today in a variety of formats or from Amazon.com.
From the publisher:
Written for ExpressionEngine version 2.1 and later, this book will give you clear, concise, and practical guidance to take you from the basics of setting up ExpressionEngine to developing the skills you need to create ExpressionEngine websites to be reckoned with.
Building Websites with ExpressionEngine 2 from Packt Publishing
Blog Entry
This is a on-going series of entries where I highlight EE experiences. Here’s a new spin on it, with two opposing views. What do you think?
Got my head around ExpressionEngine and…. i love it!
Mark Parsons via Twitter
…and here’s someone having a bit of a different experience:
I think I want to blow ExpressionEngine to smithereens. Templating system is driving me insane.
Eric Carl via Twitter
Blog Entry
Friday brought us a brand new episode of the EE Podcast where Ryan and Lea talked about their own “ExpressionEngine 2 Wishlists”.
What’s on your own EE2 Wishlist? Let us know in the comments!
Listen and subscribe: EE Podcast #31: ExpressionEngine 2 Wishlist from 5by5
Blog Entry
This past Thursday, Happy Cog, the design studio that both Ryan and I work for, launched a new blog, Cognition.
We had a lot of fun building this site. Usually we’re building websites for clients, but when the client is your own colleagues, it’s a nice change. The most unusual thing about this project was the way we did comments. Mark Huot built an add-on to transform traditional EE commenting into a module that can do so much more. It posts your comment to Twitter (with your permission, of course). It also searches for and aggregates tweets based on a custom short URL. Pretty clever, that Mark Huot.
You can see it in action along with an explanation of why we’re trying this out at Jeffrey Zeldman’s inaugural post on Cognition.
Other add-ons we used:
- Textile
- Milan Topalov’s Time Ago
- Logiq Pagination
- Solspace Super Search
- Solspace User
- Low Replace
Cognition
Blog Entry
We’ve posted a couple times about ExpressionEngine Camp in Denver, but details about the event were a bit scarce. Since then, a lot more information such as speakers, sponsors and giveaways has been posted, and it’s looking like a great event.
Here are a few highlights:
- The speaker list has grown to include Ryan Masuga and Jacob Russell from Devot:ee, Mitchell Kimbrough from Solspace, Paul Burton from 16 Toads, and many more from the thriving local EE community.
- Quick-EE: A series of lightning round presentations. Speakers will get five minutes to give a tip, share an experience or show something off.
- There are loads of giveaways, including an ExpressionEngine 2 license, five CartThrob licenses, five SafeCracker licenses, and lots more to be found at the giveaways page.
- Speaking of free, this event is at Casselman’s Event Venue which has a bar, and who better to sponsor the bar tab but Pixel & Tonic?
ExpressionEngine Camp in Denver is shaping up to be a really fantastic event, and the more I hear about it the more I wish I could come.
ExpressionEngine Camp is Friday, October 22nd and registration is just $50 (only $25 for students). If you live anywhere in the Mountain time zone, shame on you if you miss this killer event!
ExpressionEngine Camp, Denver Colorado
Blog Entry
If there’s one thing I learned at EECI in Leiden last week, it’s that devot-ee.com is slow. Fortunately that doesn’t rub off on you EE developers, who are busy as bees churning out new add-ons at a record pace. Here are this weeks’ additions:
I’d like to announce that this week Travis and Jack made the popular Structure module available for purchase on devot:ee. If you haven’t yet built a site using Structure, you might want to check out this incredible add-on.
And now back to optimizing devot:ee…
Blog Entry
If you use the brilliant do-all application Alfred on your mac, you’ll be every excited about the following tip from Tony Geer. Using the custom searches feature of Alfred, Tony shows you how to set up a search for ExpressionEngine’s documentation. I did it in all of 60 seconds after seeing his tip. Do yourself a favor: Download Alfred, read Tony’s tip, and set this up!
Blog Entry
Some clients can’t live without a Microsoft Word toolbar in every text field, some prefer to write all the HTML themselves, and others live and die by Textile or Markdown. Maybe you quote all your projects with a WYSIWYG editor for text formatting, or maybe you train clients that What You See is Not Quite What You Get.
Now that there are some really good options for text formatting in ExpressionEngine, what do you prefer? Do you always use a WYSIWYG for your projects or do you prefer some other option like XHTML or Textile?
Share your text editing strategy in the comments.
Blog Entry
It’s Wednesday and that means it is time for the weekly EE Help Chats. It’s a great way to spend an hour getting help, talking shop and meeting some other EE users.
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
Environments for Humans is hosting Engine Summit 2 on October 26, 2010 from 9am to 5pm ET. Engine Summit 1 was back in March and from all accounts was a great success. Engine Summit 2 looks to be an equally great, if not better, experience.
Our very own Ryan Irelan will join Mark Huot, Fred Boyle, Lea Alcantara, Erik Reagan, Chad Crowell, and Leslie Flinger for an all-day extravaganza covering a wide range of topics. Check out the Engine Summit 2 page for details on all of the talks and to register.
Use the discount code EE2RYAN to save 10% on your registration for the online conference.
Blog Entry
Andy Johnson posted in the Community News forum that he just launched his first EE2 site for his own design studio, Shaping the Page.
Andy mentions a bit about their experience:
It was a good testing ground before we start moving our client projects from EE1 to EE2, which we’re now confident to do. Just a few add-ons used for the site:
- Pixel & Tonic Matrix
- Solspace Freeform
- Low Reorder
Shaping the Page
Blog Entry
Adrian M from the ExpressionEngine forums posted that he needs some beta testers for his RSVP module which allows members to respond to events similar to how people RSVP to events on Facebook.
We are looking for a few beta testers who could use this on a live EE 2.x website, and provide feedback to us. Once this is complete we will be offering the module for sale in the Devot:ee store.
This could be an interesting module that could help fill out ExpressionEngine’s somewhat lackluster events support. If you have a site that you can test this on, send Adrian a PM or respond to the thread he started in the forums.
Blog Entry
CodeCanyon, a website that sells scripts and add-ons for a number of different platforms, has opened up an ExpressionEngine department of their store. All of their add-ons are compatible with ExpressionEngine 2.1, and as of this writing, they all appear to be made by Phil Sturgeon.
The current list of add-ons includes Mapper, Text plugin, HTML plugin, Widgets and Multi Language Support. They are all pretty inexpensive, ranging from $7 to $27. The Widgets module looks particularly interesting!
The comparisons to the venerable Devot:ee are unavoidable, but hopefully CodeCanyon will grow and the EE add-on marketplace can enjoy a little healthy competition. Check out CodeCanyon’s ExpressionEngine Add-on store to learn more.
Blog Entry
It’s the first Monday in October and that means it is Brian Warren’s first day as Guest Editor at EE Insider. Welcome, Brian!
Brian is a Senior Designer/Developer at Happy Cog (in the Philadelphia office) and moved there last year from snowy, sunny, mile-high Denver, Colorado. He writes on his personal site Be Good Not Bad and is a beer and coffee connoisseur. Reliable sources tell me that he likes to don a kilt from time to time. Brian, kilts are not proper work attire here at EE Insider World Headquarters. See your company handbook for further details.
Having already contributed one how-to article (Simplifying How Content Works) to the site, Brian isn’t new to EE Insider. He will be trying his hand at posting news and updates from around the community. Keeping you informed and updated during the week is his goal, so if you have news tips or announcements, please let Brian know by emailing tips@eeinsider.com.
Please welcome Brian to the site!
Blog Entry
This is a on-going series of entries where I highlight EE experiences.
With a little refinement, this publish layout thing could blossom from something good into something of a game changer.
Andy Harris via Twitter
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