In an unusual blog post, Derek Jones (CTO) from EllisLab addressed issues with the last few releases of EE 2.
I’d like to take a moment to speak about the speed and quality of the past few release cycles. There’s no point in mincing words: it’s been less than what you and we have come to expect from EllisLab. If this has concerned you, double or triple that concern, and that’s how we feel. And we have a plan in motion to fix it.
I don’t think it’s a big secret that the EE 2 Control Panel feels slower than EE 1 and that there have been plenty of bugs in releases. Expectations were high for EE 2 so every issue is magnified tenfold. It was, however, surprising to see the EE 2.1 release go out the door with the date bug but it didn’t strike me as outrageous. I didn’t think EE 2 was doomed. If you’ve written software 1/100 as complex as ExpressionEngine, you know how easily bugs can work in— especially bugs that surface after changes and are not caught during regression testing.
Derek didn’t give specifics about plans but did say that they need to scale the company to keep up with the growing community.
Right now our biggest challenge is scaling our internal structure concurrently with the new growth we’re experiencing while sticking to our roots (no “going corporate”, no VC money). We want to keep the same spirit that EllisLab enjoyed when there were just three or four of us, while making adjustments to staff and work practices that will allow us to succeed alongside this significant growth (which we are thankful for).
I truly hope that part of this scaling includes adding “enterprise” support that gives people implementing for large corporations a dedicated support line that isn’t the EE Forums. If I or my clients could have an account manager or dedicated support person, it might ease the apprehension we sometimes see when pitching ExpressionEngine as a CMS solution.
Derek mentioned that they’re focusing now on hiring another developer to help maintain and improve EE 2. This is definitely a good thing but please don’t forget about scaling support!
I’ll keep it short and sweet; I’ve had eight hours of sleep in three days because of the time change, attending EECI conference sessions and meeting a ton of great people from the ExpressionEngine community. Enjoy this week’s new submissions!
I’ve been beta testing a new iPad app and have been using it to create and publish collections of tweets from Twitter. The collection I’ve been working on today is one for EECI 2010 in Leiden.
Throughout the day I’ve been going through Twitter and adding new tweets to the collection. I’ve been mostly relying on hash tags and searches to get started. This is the first time I’ve tried to curate collections of tweets and it’s definitely a lot harder than I anticipated; however, having a good tool is making it easier.
So, if you’re interested, please check out my EECI 2010 Tweet Library. I’ll be adding more throughout the three days of EECI, so check back often. If you’d be interested in more EE-related tweet collections, let me know!
EECI Leiden Day 2 gets started in a few hours. I heard a lot of great feedback from attendees both directly and through Twitter. The talks from Day 1 looked fantastic and I’m looking forward to seeing the slides and related materials. Day 2 is looking like it also will not disappoint. Here’s the lineup for today.
Jamie Pittock (Erskine Design): Opening Keynote
Fred Boyle (nGen): Abstract to Absolut(e)
Greg Salt: Spam-Me-Not (I wish I could be there for this one. I’ve been talking to Greg about member spam for a while and if there’s an authority on it, Greg is the one).
Matt Weinberg: Ecommerce and ExpressionEngine: Moving Past PayPal
Veerle Pieters: Polish your design with CSS3
Brandon Kelly: (unknown)
Chad Crowell: IsEEforMe? The Business Case for ExpressionEngine
Travis Schmeisser: UI Principle & Tips
This is the last day of conference talks. Day 3 is the DevDay event.
I was still sipping my morning coffee but Ryan Masuga had already delivered his talk on the Git version control system at EECI in Leiden. His talk, subtitled “Everyday version control for ExpressionEngine using Git,” walks through the basics of Git and then how to apply it to ExpressionEngine. He also covered the workflow they use to manage changes on devot:ee.
Ryan’s slides are well annotated, so even if you weren’t able to be there (like me) for his talk, you should get a lot of out them.
Just released is a new accessory from the folks at Made by Hippo. Snippet Files “[a]llows you to create snippet files (*.snip) in the same way that you generate template files and sync them back to the database for a much more streamlined and rapid development cycle.”
This is a great way to edit your snippets in your favorite text editor and use them inside a version control system while developing a site. The snippet files will sync back into the database. I’m looking forward to trying it out.
EECI 2010 in Leiden, The Netherlands takes place this week from Wednesday to Friday.
The conference gets underway while most of us in the US are still sleeping but here’s the schedule for Day 1:
Stephen Lewis: Add-on Development Grows Up: Pain-Free Unit Testing in ExpressionEngine
Leevi Graham: expressionengine-addons.com - a case study in selling, supporting and marketing third party software.
Greg Wood: Editorial design on the web
Ryan Masuga: Let’s Git It On: Version Control for ExpressionEngine with Git
Wil Linssen: Safe Sex with Git
Joel Bradbury: Tuning your Engine
Jonathan Longnecker: Customizing EE 2’s Publish Area
Day 2 has a lot more great talks scheduled. The third day is dubbed “DevDay” and is a 12-hour event where attendees can “learn how to successfully design, build and market ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter driven websites and webapps.”
I’m not in attendance for this installment of EECI but EE Insider will still try to bring you as much coverage as possible. Have photos, feedback or information from EECI? Get in touch.
If you’re thinking of attending ExpressionEngine Camp in Denver, you might want to register in the next day or so. On September 30th the early bird ticket price ends. At $40, it’s a steal for an entire day of EE nerdery and bunches of prizes and giveaways.
The registration includes the full day sessions, lunch, beverages, free wifi, parking and a happy hour afterward. You’ll also have the chance to win some cool prizes, like the Mijingo bundle (Learning ExpressionEngine 2 screencasts series and the Securing ExpressionEngine 2 ebooklet by Mark Huot), an EE 2 license, CartThrob licenses and more. I’m also sending over about 20 EE Code t-shirts for them to distribute.
I wish I was able to attend this event, so I hope you don’t miss out. One-day conferences are a great way to spend time with like-minded people, learn a bunch and, most importantly, better than raking leaves in the yard all day.
At the BostonEErs meetup (Boston’s ExpressionEngine meetup group) this past week, they gave a presentation on the basics of performance tuning your EE website. Ruthie BenDor emailed to let me know about the presentation and said that it “[m]ight be useful for folks running EE sites under small or medium loads who want to make sure their sites don’t slow to a crawl.”
The popular Mac text editor TextMate may never see an update but at least people are still creating useful bundles that make using the abandonware even easier.
Ed Finkler (affectionately known as “funkatron” on the Twitters) created a TextMate bundle for MojoMotor templates and markup. Version 0.1 was released back in June and you can grab the bundle from GitHub. (Psssst, Ed, make a proper download under the Downloads section on GitHub. It’s easier for non-GitHubbians to grab the bundle). I still use the original TextMate bundle for EE template code and add-on development. Has anyone created EE 2 version of those?
It’s always nice to add your own touch to a login screen. From basic branding, to something a bit more complex. With this basic modification, you can make the login page something unique.
The technique described in the tutorial does require hacking some core EE files, so proceed with caution and understand the risks involved (broken upgrades, no support from EllisLab, etc). But in the end, you get a really nice, customized login screen that makes your client feel right at home when they log in to manage their website.
There’s a free download available at the bottom of the article that contains the theme files you’ll need to get up and running. Read the whole tutorial: Customising your EE2 CP Login
Ryan “I’m Short” Masuga and his Devot-ee team released a new feature today: Add-on Support. That’s right. Now add-on developers have the option of offering add-on support right from their Devot-ee page.
Every single add-on on devot:ee now has its own support forum, where you can ask questions and offer help with issues, offer new feature ideas and talk about implementation. You can also post files and images to help illustrate an issue or offer a solution. The best part? While spam posts or other objectionable material might disappear, the support topics are here forever, so you’ll always be able to find the answers you need.
There’s a forum for every add-on but those that don’t have official developer support are clearly marked as such. Great addition to Devot:ee!
Remember that EECI 2010 in Leiden, The Netherlands is next week! I (that’s Ryan Masuga, not Ryan Irelan…you know, the shorter, cooler Ryan) am speaking on Day One right after the lunch break, so fatten yourself up like a pig and come hear me talk about working on ExpressionEngine sites with Git version control. I’ll be followed immediately by Wil Linssen, who will carry on the subject of working with Git in even more detail. This should be a great 1-2 punch for anyone interested in this subject, and should inspire some great conversation afterwards.
The conference is next week, but EllisLab is giving away a ticket to one lucky person.
Want to go to Leiden for EECI but don’t have a conference pass? Able to get to The Netherlands next week? Here’s your chance! You have 24 hours to get your comments in before polls close 9/22 at 06:00 PST. ( -8 GMT)
You get a free ticket to EECI, a small travel stipend (enough for a train ticket) and a free t-shirt so you can strut your stuff in Leiden.
The tutorial assumes you’ll be running ExpressionEngine 2 but I didn’t see anything that wouldn’t let this work on EE 1, too, provided you have the proper add-ons.
Ever since Derek Allard left EllisLab there’s been a light buzz in the community wondering what will happen to MojoMotor. After all, Derek was the public face of the app; he introduced it at EECI, posted to its blog and handled all of the beta tester communications. This left the impression that he was the guy driving the boat. When he left EllisLab it was hard to not wonder what that means for MojoMotor.
In the MojoMotor Forums, EllisLab President Leslie Camacho, clears the air and gives a little history along the way.
MojoMotor has always been a team effort from EllisLab. It was originally the brainchild of Rick Ellis, myself, and Paul Burdick back in 2006.
Rick Ellis, Paul Burdick, and I were having lunch at PF Changs when I casually said something to the effect of “what if we built a minimalist blogging tool with no CP?” We spent the next two hours brainstorming that concept in a number of ways and walked away in love with the idea of a small tool with no traditional CP. The idea never died and we revisited it in one form or another over the next three years.
There’s a lot of EE training going on. I was in Boston last week doing a 3-day private training and Mike Boyink was doing another Train-ee event in Holland, Michigan. Mike usually posts images from every event but this time they did a cookout at sunset and as a result we get to see some amazing sunset photos.
Gorgeous stuff and congrats to the class of students who learned EE. Welcome!
Not directly related to ExpressionEngine but Entitifier, a tool that will “escape any nasty characters that should be entities,” is a nice tool to tuck away in your EE developer toolbox.
This is already possible is several different types of tools (like TextMate and even Wygwam makes available the “paste from Word” feature from CKEditor) but a web-based tool might be easier for your clients or content editors.
The purpose of this survey is to gauge the current state of third_party ExpressionEngine addon development.
I’ll be using the aggregate response data as part of my EECI2010 conf preso.
You can remain anonymous if you choose however I encourage everyone to add their full details so I can contact you with more information. I won’t make any personal data public without your permission first.
And just in case you were wondering, Leevi plans to divulge Newism’s sales data as part of the process:
I wouldn’t ask you to do something I’m wouldn’t do myself. So I’ll be divulging all of our sales data, marketing and other experiences as part of the conference presentation.
If you are interested is submitting your data as part of this, it will only take a few minutes to fill out and submit the form.
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