When ExpressionEngine 2.1 is released, ExpressionEngine 1.x will no longer be available for purchase. EE 1.x will officially become a legacy version.
So, you will no longer be able to purchase EE 1.6 licenses separately. However, EE 1.6 will still be available for people who own licenses and EE 2.1 purchasers will still have access to EE 1.6 (no longer bundled in but as a separate download).
Technical support for EE 1.6 will continue as long as necessary but EllisLab considers EE 1.6 a legacy product and you should expect them to encourage upgrades whenever possible. They also promise to give 6 months notice before discontinuing official support of EE 1.6. EllisLab expects this to be “throughout 2010 and a good deal into 2011 at the least.” I assume the forums will always be there for people who need 1.6 help a year or more from now.
The next iteration of the EECI conference was announced yesterday with the initial launch of the website. It takes place from Sept 29 to October 1 in Leiden, The Netherlands (same city as last year), which is just a short train ride from the Amsterdam Schiphol airport.
The conference will feature a new venue and a refreshed list of speakers (I’ve long said that Greg Salt is the quiet master of all things EE and I’m glad to see him listed as a speaker). Also different is that lack of a CodeIgniter track. EECI has always been heavy on the EE (in terms of content and attendees) but now it seems the CodeIgniter piece is gone altogether.
On the site, Robert noted:
You CodeIgniter lot are an astute bunch, so you have probably noticed there is no separate CI track this time. There will of course still be plenty of CodeIgnited talk, but it will all be ExpressionEngine related. If that’s just not enough CI for you, there is the 100% CodeIgniter-only conference “CICON2010” in Britstol, UK this August, with some more fantastic speakers.
From what I can gather the first two days will be the standard conference lineup and then on day 3 there’s something called DevDay:
On Friday October 1st we’ll have a 12-hour DevDay planned for you. A team of highly experienced coders and designers will guide you on this day whilst developing stuff for EE. In between we have small sessions that will cover specific topics. Of course we won’t forget to feed you and serve you some drinks.
Yesterday evening Kenny Meyers pointed me to the results of feedback cards distributed after each SXSW session. The good news? Our ExpressionEngine 2: Total Domination panel ranked #8 overall with a score of 4.87.
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scoring system, with 5 being the most favorable rating and 1 being the least favorable.
Only sessions that received more than 10 comment cards and a score greater than 4.50 are included in this post.
Let’s hope this means the SXSW organizers will be more willing to have panels on our favorite CMS and not just the same old panels on WordPress and Drupal.
(A huge thanks to Kenny Meyers for not only putting the panel together but for also fighting for the panel with the SXSW people during the early stages.)
You might have been toying with the idea of developing your add-ons but you’re not really sure where to start. Maybe you tried and didn’t succeed and are looking for more guidance. Well, here’s your chance to influence what this series of articles will cover.
You might have noticed over the last couple of months that we’ve published severalnewfeaturearticles. This is thanks to a group of EE professionals who had great article ideas and were willing to contribute those to the community.
As part of my goal of making the site even more useful, I’m re-investing some of the ad revenue into full-length original how-to articles. But I’m looking for more ideas and articles. Do you have one?
What it takes
If you think you have an article you’d like to contribute to EE Insider, please get in touch (tips@eeinsider.com) and include a short (one paragraph) description of the article idea. There are some rules: the article should not have been previously published and should be something that is general enough to appeal to more than just you and your cat (or dog, if you prefer) or that one client site you built last year. At this time, articles can cover both EE 1.6 and EE 2.
After selection, articles will be taken through a editorial process starting with a first draft. I (Ryan) will act as the editor. If your article idea is picked, you’ll get more details on the editorial process.
Small Token of Thanks
If your article idea is selected and published, you will receive a $100 thank-you gift for sharing your expertise with the community. I realize that this won’t pay for all of the time and effort you put into the article, but I hope you find this small gesture helpful.
Additionally, you will have a permanent bio on the site on our Contributors page.
In episode 20 of the EE Podcast, Dan and Lea (I was absent due to illness) discuss tips for moving from design to implementation into EE. Be sure to check out the show notes for links to some great resources.
ExpressionEngine used to have a database backup tool in earlier versions but it was stripped out when problems were discovered with the reliability of backing up large databases. Since then—in EE 1.6 or EE 2— there hasn’t been an easy way to back up your database from within EE. Until now, of course.
CodeIgniter guru, author and EECI speaker Thomas Myer released a new module for EE 2, Backup, that allows you to easily backup your MySQL database.
The Backup module allows ExpressionEngine site admins to easily and quickly generate a SQL backup file for their entire database. This file is automatically downloaded to their Mac or PC and can then be stored in an off-site location, such as a Dropbox folder, FTP site, or other file repository.
Another one of my favorite talks (and not just because of his dry humor) was Low’s presentation on using PHP in templates. Before the presentation I went up to Low and told him I know the answer: Pain. I’ve used a lot of PHP in templates when it was needed. However, I’ve always found PHP code in templates a lot of work to maintain going forwards&emdash;especially weeks or months later.
Low, however, showed some smart ways of using PHP, how the EE parse order works and, finally, how you can use both to make PHP in your templates pleasure, not pain.
On Wednesday afternoon, Matt Weinberg of Vector Media Group gave a information-packed talk on everything (and I mean everything) you need to know about doing e-commerce and doing it on ExpressionEngine.
Matt didn’t talk about Simple Commerce Module or how to use PayPal but instead focused on more robust implementations of e-commerce. He talked about payment gateways, merchant accounts (including suggestions for merchant account providers), PCI Compliance and some EE-specific solutions.
We missed last week because of the EECI conference but the devot:ee team is back this week with a list of the latest additions to the World’s Greatest Index of ExpressionEngine Add-ons.
One of the highlights of the EECI conference for me was Jamie Pittock’s (Erskine Design) presentation on “How Erskine Rolls” when developing websites on ExpressionEngine. His talk was packed—from beginning to end— with great EE development tips and a bit of the funny for which the Erskine crew is known.
Jamie made his slides and materials available for download; he even included a sample path.php file, config.php file and some template components. There could be a book written on the material Jamie presented, so it’s worth your time to go through the slides and follow along (even better, you should buy the EECI 2010 DVD that should include Jamie’s talk).
On the second day of the conference, Leevi Graham gave a one-hour talk on how Newism plans, builds and maintains ExpressionEngine websites. Packed full of insightful information and handy tricks, Leevi showed us how to plan sites better, develop them faster and…profit!
Leevi has posted his slides and some assets (his Paper Plan) from his presentation. Grab them using the links below.
In the Solspace CodeShare Corner at EECI 2010, Matthew Krivanek gave me a demo of his new, kick-ass accessory: Template Variables.
This accessory was born out of my frustration for forgetting what I name my custom fields, snippets and global variables. Now, you have an accessory to use as reference for building your templates. Just click on the EE variable you want to use and it will copy it to your clipboard.
Even with namespacing of custom fields, I still often forget what I named this one or that one. This is a great one-click reference of all of your field, snippets and global variable names.
Train-ee is again hosting the world’s only public ExpressionEngine classroom training back where it all started in Holland, Michigan. Enjoy 4 days of hometown hospitality, great scenery and tasty food while learning about EE elbow to elbow with other like-minded folks.
Days will be spent in an informal yet informative learning environment, and evenings we’ll get out on the town and see the sights.
Mike taught a condensed version of his class during an EECI 2010 master class. The full class runs four days from 9 AM to 5 PM and cost $1495 (which includes breakfast and lunch each day). In my experience, these intensive, immersive learning environments are a great way to quickly get up and running with a new skill.
Soon, I hope to have an interview about MojoMotor with Derek posted but until I can get him the questions and his responses, we’ll settle for this interesting nugget from his personal blog:
Mojo is something that I’ve been working on since around Christmas last year, and its been nearly everything I’ve been up to professionally for 5 months. Anyone who’s watched my keynote at EECI2009 knows that I’m a “social coder”. I crave community; and I consider nerding-out with other people to be foundational to the way I work. Keeping Mojo under wraps for 5 months has been killing me! I want to share, I want to say “hey, check out this cool thing I’ve been doing”, but we decided very early on that we wanted Mojo to come as a total surprise. Now that its out there, I’m glad we did.
Response to the news of Mojo has been overwhelmingly positive. I’m really hopeful that people will end up loving it as much as they love CodeIgniter and ExpressionEngine. I few secret tidbits that not many people know about MojoMotor:
MojoMotor was a name that Rick grabbed years ago. He just liked the sound of it. As I was developing MojoMotor it started out with a much different name, but it was quickly apparent that “MojoMotor” was the right name for the little CMS.
“The publishing engine that does less…” and the concept for the logo both came about in less then 3 minutes during a Skype call between me and Rick.
Other parts of the software that I expected to come quickly took WEEKS. Funny how that works.
The graphic artist who helped us along was Ilina Simeonova. She did stellar work, and her dedication to a project that she had little invested in was inspiring.
As I posted previously, there is no release date set and the final product will cost $49.95 US per license.
On the first full conference day, Adii Pienaar gave a one hour talk on economics, entrepreneurship and making money in the world of ExpressionEngine. Adii is relatively new to EE so it was interesting to hear his take and observations.
On Wednesday afternoon Mike Boyink held a session on how to successfully hand a project off to clients. He posted his notes and resources from the talk. Bookmark this as a great reminder of what you should do to make client handoff as painless as possible.
One of the talks I unfortunately missed (Wednesday afternoon was packed with great talks and I chose to attend Mark Huot’s informative talk on debugging) was Erskine’s Greg Wood’s session on Editorial design with ExpressionEngine.
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