On Friday, Mike Boyink of Train-ee released the PDF of his new EE 2 book about building a small business website.
Meet Building an ExpressionEngine 2 Site for Small Business - a 362-page, 148 screen-capture bundle of development joy lovingly written with the sole purpose of getting you up to speed on ExpressionEngine 2 as quickly as possible.
We’ve gotten a lot of requests for a show on e-commerce with ExpressionEngine. I’m not an expert on e-commerce on EE so I never felt comfortable leading an entire show on it. Matt Weinberg, however, is well-versed on this topic and he kindly accepted the invitation to be on the show.
In this episode of the podcast we spend 30 minutes talking to Matt about best practices and a couple of solid ways to implement e-commerce on your EE-powered website.
The people that brought you Cartthrob have another trick up their sleeve and they need your help. Barrett Newton built a new EE 2.1 add-on called SafeCracker. No, it doesn’t allow you to rob banks or find the secret treasure hidden in grandma’s attic; SafeCracker is a new way to create Stand Alone Entry Forms (SAEFs).
From Chris at Barrett Newton:
We’ve made it so that you can create an entry / edit form with the simplicity of a standard channel entry loop. In the past, people found it easier to use FreeForm to capture data than the built in SAEFs. FreeForm is great, but unlike FreeForm, all the SafeCracker data is stored as weblog entries, not as part of a module’s settings. Since that’s the case, entry notifications, statuses, and other standard EE systems work with SafeCracker, making it dead easy to build a contact form, or a sign up form, or job application form. The new custom field also makes it so that you can use 1 weblog to store lots of completely different types of data without having to pre-plan or pre-create new custom fields.
According to Chris, SafeCracker also allows non-logged-in users to submit content via SAEF, which isn’t possible with the standard EE SAEF. It also adds edit ability and outputs errors as JSON, so you can use it with AJAX.
I’m learning all of this from information from Barrett Newton. I haven’t yet tried the software but the description is definitely appealing.
Help Beta Test
Barrett Newton is in need of 10 beta testers with experience building EE sites and time to work with the add-on. They want you use to use it real world situations, not just running on a local sandbox site. You will be able to help shape the add-on; in addition to vigorous testing, they are looking for input on features, documentation and pricing.
This week we’re Dribbbling (or is that Dreebbbling?) all over ourselves about two add-ons that utilize dribbble’sAPI: Dribbble (for EE1) and Dreebbble (for EE2). Almost sounds like we have Trouble with Tribbles. If you are into the Dribbble scene and want to display shots on your ExpressionEngine-powered site, consider trying out either of these new free add-ons.
The CodeIgniter workshop is a high-level overview of CI and takes place over the course of 3 hours. At the end of the session you should be able to build a very simple CI application. Thomas wrote a great book on CodeIgniter (it’s the one I bought and sits on the bookshelf in my office), so you couldn’t ask for a better teacher.
The second session covers MojoMotor development. This isn’t about how to build a website with MojoMotor but instead how to developer extensions (add-ons) for it. This class does ask that you come with an “understanding of CodeIgniter and OO PHP in order to get anything out of this class.”
Today Derek Allard posted to the MojoMotor blog with his thoughts on the warm welcome that his little CMS has received. In response to the myriad of add-ons and resources available, he wrote:
Stunning. Believe me when I say that I know how good we have it. Let me re-iterate here. MojoMotor isn’t even a week old. And like any new product, you expect a few bugs to get found. Mojo is of course not exempt, but what is telling is the reaction. People wanted to help fix them, and help make MojoMotor better. Videos were made, code was examined - it makes me proud to be involved.
In case you haven’t heard, MojoMotor is a “publishing engine that does less” and was launched last week. It is available for $49.95 per site license and a great way to manage small sites that don’t require a blog or larger CMS (like ExpressionEngine). Last week, I posted a video of MojoMotor and showed how it runs my book marketing website.
In my book, Custom Fields are ExpressionEngine’s strongest feature. They’re right at the core of what defines EE. And they’ve been bustling with innovation lately, from the add-on community as well as EllisLab.
But I don’t think we’ve seen their full potential yet, and I think Field Groups are partly to blame.
Brandon then launches into a history of custom fields (including some great quotes from Mike Boyink, Rick Ellis and Ryan Masuga) and how we go to where we are now: custom fields, organized by groups, which are assigned to a single channel.
The future of custom fields, according to Brandon, is that custom field groups “lose relevance” and the emphasis is put on allowing you to collect different fields into a publish layout. You could pull from any of the fields in the system, freeing you from having to re-create the same fields in different custom field groups.
I’ve been chatting with Brandon about this for several days and I couldn’t agree more. While I do like to organize fields into groups because different channels may need slightly different field settings and instructions (and I reject chaos and embrace order), we shouldn’t tie all fields down into this convention. In fact, there’s almost nothing stopping someone from implementing an idea like this right now. The fields and field groups aren’t bound in the database; you can create any associations you’d like.
I decided to put this site together after making the decision to take WYMEditor for ExpressionEngine, and my latest release Blueprints, commercial. WYMEditor started off as a donation only add-on. This was because I wanted to keep costs down and provide a competitive alternative to the other WYSIWYG editors for EE. Then I realized how much time I had actually put into it’s development and support, and rethought my plan. I believe going commercial will actually make it more competitive because I will be obligated to provide better and quicker support as well as spend time on new features to make it the best WYSIWYG editor for ExpressionEngine.
As noted above, Brian is going to start selling add-ons and is moving his WYMEditor from donationware to commercial. This includes his Blueprints add-on, which is “designed to bring a visual representation of Structure templates to the Publish Page, and easily show the user what fields are available in each template.”
And for those of you looking for a Gypsy replacement in ExpressionEngine 2, check out Brian’s Drifter add-on.
Brian was nice enough to send over copies of his add-ons for EE Insider to try out and I hope to have a post about them in the very near future.
There are a couple of upcoming ExpressionEngine training opportunities, I wanted to let you know about.
First, there’s the classroom training by Mike Boyink of Train-ee. The next installment of Mike’s 4-day intensive class on building websites with ExpressionEngine takes place September 13-16 in Holland, Michigan. This is also the first class Mike will teach exclusively on ExpressionEngine 2. The class takes place at the City Flats hotel, which is also where you will be staying while in Holland.
Mike has been doing these trainings for a while and has a well-formulated plan for helping you learn all about EE in four days.
Second, is a webinar class by Creat-ee, which is offering an 8 session (twice per week for four weeks), online-only class on ExpressionEngine. The class is taught by Jae Barclay and costs $499 for the 8 sessions. You can learn more about it at the Creat-ee website.
This is the 108th installment of the Weekly Devot:ee. Wait, no it’s not, but it is the first installment where Ryan Irelan has given Ryan Masuga access to post these all on his own. Thanks!
You may have noticed that in addition to the list of newest add-ons, I’ve started doing a brief Featured Add-on to bring a little attention to those add-ons that are either extra cool or may have been overlooked. With that, on to this week’s entries:
An interesting free add-on that may have been overlooked last week for EE1 is Tim Kelty’s Field General, which “lets you assign multiple field groups to any weblog/channel”, thereby allowing you to “reuse and share sets of fields, rather than having to duplicate them for each channel.” This sounds a lot like Brandon Kelly’s Gypsy, but it allows you share fields between MSM sites, and you can control the order of fields per weblog (with drag and drop goodness!). Check it out as an alternative to Gypsy.
It’s been a couple of weeks since the release of ExpressionEngine 2.1 and we’ve all had time to play with the latest version of our favorite CMS. This week Lea, Dan and I sat down and talked about our thoughts on using EE 2.1. We covered some of our favorite features and the different between Snippets and Embed Templates.
Carl Crawley had a recent project that required the username be checked before the member registration form was submitted by the user. We’ve all seen this (Twitter is a good example) before but Carl made it happen with jQuery and the Query module.
Carl uses the Query module to do the actual check and jQuery to submit the data for processing. Very nice!
It’s a shell script so it might not fit everyone’s tool belt; for those that are handy with the command line, you might find this useful when setting up new EE 2 installs or even moving a site between servers.
:nth allows you to dynamically generate a class name at specified intervals on Expression Engine elements. Perhaps you have a list that is being dynamically populated from an EE weblog and you’d like to create a grid layout, but the last column items need to behave differently than the rest of the items. Simply wrap the whole mess in a pair of nth tags and set the class and interval parameters to your desired class name and interval.
I’ve always used some PHP in the template for situations like that (and these situations happen frequently) but this seems like a nice way for non-PHP coders to achieve the same functionality in a straight-forward way or even for PHP coders who want to limit the amount of PHP they have to write in their templates.
EE 2.1 has been out for a couple of weeks and we’re starting to see a lot of new add-ons released. It’s exciting to see developers coding some great stuff that will make using EE 2 just as great as using EE 1.
At this early point in the life of EE 2, what is your favorite EE 2 add-on? Is there one that wasn’t available for EE 1.6 that you like?
Last week RED When Excited launched a new iPhone app that allows you to publish to your EE-powered website right from your phone: iExpression. This is a native iPhone app, which you need to purchase and download through the Apple App Store (store link).
RWE sent me a promo copy of the app to test out. I would best describe it as a EE-focused version of MarsEdit (which I use to publish this blog) for the iPhone. Like MarsEdit, it also works using the Metaweblog API (there’s a module that ships with EE 1 & 2) and inherits all of its limitations. While you can use custom fields (you match them to basic Metaweblog API-supported fields), you cannot use specialized fields like Relationships, Playa, Matrix, checkboxes etc. This limitation is in the Metaweblog API implementation; even MarsEdit doesn’t support this functionality.
The app itself mostly uses the standard interface of an iPhone app. It supports multiple sites and multiple channels; you just have to set each one individually through the interface. I tested EE Insider on the app and it just took a few minutes to set up (I already had the Metaweblog API module in EE configured for MarsEdit).
Features and Function
iExpression lets choose images from your Photo Library or take a new photo to include with a new entry. The image uploads when you post the new entry and uses the upload destination you specify in the Metaweblog API configuration. It worked flawlessly for me but the iExpression did include some junk markup with the post, wrapping my image in a div and a br tag with a clear in it.
Whenever you post new entries from your iPhone app, you can have iExpression automatically tweet an announcement on your Twitter feed. This functionality doesn’t yet use OAuth, so I’m suspecting it’ll break within the next month when Twitter switches off their basic API authentication. I haven’t tested this part but the app claims to also track “tweet-backs” and click-throughs.
Additionally, iExpression will let you create offline drafts (on an airplane, for example) and then post those entries when you have a data connection again.
Requirements and Cost
The app works with both EE 1 and 2 (because the Metaweblog API module is included in both) and will run on any current iOS device (3.1.3 or later). Their website includes a photo of the iPad version of the app but that is not yet released as it is waiting on approval from Apple. It will be a free upgrade for existing customers.
As noted above, the app is only available through the Apple App Store and currently costs $9.99.
Final Thoughts
If you run a blog without the need for a lot of custom fields and like to publish on the go, this seems like a nice choice. EE Mobile Admin (a mobile web interface for your control panel) has better support for EE 1.6 fieldtypes (it doesn’t support EE 2) and, I think, a nicer interface. It may be because of the screen size but I found iExpression hard to use at times, especially when trying to switch between fields while posting an entry. I had one or two other UI niggles but nothing that made the app unusable.
I don’t think I would use the iPhone version of iExpression very much simply because it’s too uncomfortable to write on the phone in portrait mode (iExpression doesn’t currently support landscape mode). If I did need to post something in a pinch, the EE 1.6 control panel works fine on Mobile Safari.
However, I am looking forward to trying out iExpression on the iPad. I spend a lot of time on my iPad reading and writing and it would be nice to have a dedicated app for drafting posts and articles for this website.
Today I got an email from Whoooz! Webmedia about the first batch of session videos from EECI 2010 in San Francisco. The videos available are talks from Lodewijk Schutte, Greg Wood, Lea Alcantara, Simon Collison, Leevi Graham, Jamie Pittock, Jamie Rumbelow, Thomas Myer, Travis Schmeisser, Adii Pienaar and Matt Weinberg.
It looks like the videos are only available for attendees (or maybe also purchasers of the DVD, it isn’t clear) but there is the option to share the video page with up to three friends or colleagues. This is a nice way to share your EECI experience with some of your officemates. There are other restrictions to the videos: your personal URL can only be used in up to three locations and the videos are not downloadable.
The email notes that this is only the first part of the videos and the second wave will be posted online next week. If you attended EECI in SFO, check your email!
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We’ve gotten a lot of requests for a show on e-commerce with ExpressionEngine. I’m not an expert on e-commerce on EE so I never felt comfortable leading an entire show on it. 
EE 2.1 has been out for a couple of weeks and we’re starting to see a lot of new add-ons released. It’s exciting to see developers coding some great stuff that will make using EE 2 just as great as using EE 1. 
RWE sent me a promo copy of the app to test out. I would best describe it as a EE-focused version of