Blog Entry
So, yesterday everyone was anticipating an announcement about EE 2 (which we got) but there was a big surprise, too: MojoMotor.
This new, lightweight content management system from EllisLab places them squarely in the same space as offerings like Perch. During the initial announcement EllisLab’s Derek Allard didn’t offer many details other than a preview video (which you can watch on the MojoMotor website) but later held an impromptu in-between session to answer more questions and share more information.
So, here are some details:
- MojoMotor will cost $49 US per license
- PHP 5+ is required
- Can run on either MySQL or SQLite3 databases(great news!)
- Requires a “modern” browser: Firefox 3+, Safari 4+, Chrome and Internet Explorer 8.
- You can import a MojoMotor site into EE 2 if you need to upgrade to a more robust solution.
- Uses a similar tag syntax as EE
There is still no word on when the new CMS will be available as beta or final release. Hopefully EllisLab will be releasing some more information soon.
To learn more about MojoMotor, you should check out the MojoMotor User Guide.
Blog Entry
Yesterday during my talk at EECI 2010, I announced a new way to get EE Insider content: a native iPhone app.
This was possible because of a collaboration with my team Happy Cog and our work to create a streamlined process for our clients to make their site content available in a custom branded iPhone app.
The iPhone app is easily hooked into ExpressionEngine 1.6 and 2 using a custom module we built that allows the site admins to control which sections of the site appear in the app, what icon they use and more. The visual look of the content areas is also customizable from the server. We’ve made it simpler to go from EE to iPhone.
While the application is customized by Happy Cog, clients will still need to create a $99/year iPhone developer account so they can distribute the application under the company name or brand.
EE Insider is excited to offer this new app and to take part in the first launch of this new Happy Cog offering.
Let us know how you like the app!
Blog Entry
Jamie Rumbelow kindly wrote up this summary of the EllisLab announcement of Community Partners:
—
EllisLab announced at the EECI conference today that the company will be opening up the community platform to provide support, technical help and financial backing for third-party comment sites.
EllisLab announced Official Community Partners for ExpressionEngine; third party sites that will receive official support from EllisLab to provide services to the EE community. Leslie Camacho, the president himself listed the first three sites to take advantage of this platform:
- Devot-ee, now the official add-on repository.
- Show-ee, the official showcase for EE sites
- ...and of course EE Insider, the official news site for EE
We are really happy about these new developments and hope to see more official community partners in the future.
—
Thanks, Jamie!
Blog Entry
I’ve already posted two announcements from the EllisLab keynote this morning at EECI 2010, but I also want to share my notes. I quickly jotted these down on my iPad and have only done a cursory proofread and editing.
Rick Ellis opens up with a science lesson. Butterfly effect. The things we do now can have an affect later on down the line. He’s talking about his first content management system, pMachine and later ExpressionEngine.
Here’s some of the history:
- pixelbuzz site was his first site
- used 9 frames served dynamically using JavaScript
- highlander tv show site was his first site
- Nancy Sinatra was his next site
- lots of JavaScript used
- Nancy needed a way to manage her content, so Rick wrote a little scripting engine initially called “Power Trip” (audience laughs)
- this turned into pmachine (publishing machine)
- now we have ExpressionEngine
Paraphrasing his closing remarks:
The work we do on the web is important to human progress and human communication. Each one of us is a part of the process with our contributions. “It’s only when you combine the bricks that you have structures that have strength, beauty and purpose.”
Leslie Camacho:
“Community, community, community”
Leslie wanted to talk about e-commerce for EE.
- Foxee
- CarthThrob
- shopigniter - SaaS have major funding and EE 2 integration is in mind for the team
These three solutions give you everything you need for almost all of the implementations situations you’ll face.
Official Community Partners:
- EE Insider is the official community news outlet.
- devot:ee official community add-ons site
- Show-ee is the official showcase site of expressionengine sites
Leslie Doherty (@mrsflinger) is the new Community Architect at EllisLab. Hooray!
Derek Jones
EE 2.1 will be the next build of EE 2m. Hooray!
Derek Allard
Derek announced EllisLab’s latest product MojoMotor: “The publishing engine that does less.”
I wrote some more thoughts about MojoMotor in a recent post.
Blog Entry
Today at the EECI 2010 conference EllisLab announced a new product: MojoMotor. It is a simpler, lightweight content management system which allows you to easily edit and update your site right from the front-end.
Derek Allard played a demo video that quickly ran through all of the functionality of MojoMotor. You can watch part of the video from the EE Insider Twitter feed.
There were no details shared on when MojoMotor would be available but hopefully we will get more updates soon.
From my view, MojoMotor looks like it could be a great solution for blogs and other small content sites. I’m already eyeing as a CMS to replace the EE install powering my small, simple and rarely updated personal site. It’s also a nice solution for those client projects that don’t require a larger application.
Learn more about it at the new MojoMotor website.
Blog Entry
Today at the EECI 2010 conference in San Francisco, EllisLab CTO Derek Jones announced that the next build of EE 2 will be the EE 2.1 release. This will mark the end of the public beta and the official release of ExpressionEngine 2.
Derek didn’t give a date of the release but did say that it would be “soon.”
Blog Entry
The first day at EECI was a smaller group of attendees who opted to take the master classes. Today, however, is the beginning of the main conference event that will be attended by all registrants.
The day will kick off at 9 AM with the keynote by EllisLab. Hopefully we’ll hear some news about the availability of EE 2.1 and any updates they have planned. Although I’m hearing rumors that they will announce that they’re moving expressionengine.com to WordPress. Stay tuned to find out.
After that we move into regular talks for the entire group. First, Simon Collison talking about Subconscious Design then EE entrepreneurship with Adii Rockstar. Later on in the day the EE and CI tracks start with a handful of presentations in each. On the EE side we’ll hear talks from Jamie Pittock of Erskine Design, Lea Alacantara, Leevi Graham and myself.
Stay tuned to the special EECI 2010 coverage page for updates, tweets, photos and videos.
Blog Entry
To keep up on the latest information from the EECI 2010 conference in San Francisco, check out our special EECI page. We will be posting updates, photos, videos and tweets.
EE Insider EECI 2010 Coverage
Blog Entry
The Structure guys announced last week that the’ve begun private beta testing for Structure for EE 2. While the private beta is full, they did mention on Twitter that there will be a public beta “soon after.”
Here’s a screenshot they shared on Flickr:
Even if you’re not in the private beta, the good news is that Structure for EE 2 is coming soon. It is one of those key add-ons that is keeping people from making the switch.
For EECI attendees (and DVD purchasers), Travis will give a 2-hour talk on “Building Sites with Structure.”
Blog Entry
EECI in San Francisco gets underway this morning with a full day of master classes. This optional day of training and learning (separate ticket from normal conference badge) consists of two full-day sessions and 4 half-day sessions. The full day sessions are:
- Building websites with ExpressionEngine (Mike Boyink)
- Start Developing with CodeIgniter (Burak Guzel)
If attendees would rather have some more variety, they can choose two of the four half-day classes:
- The Power of EE’s Dynamic Templates (Jonathan Longnecker)
- Versioning and Maintenance (Solspace)
- Advanced CodeIgniter Programming (Jamie Rumbelow)
- Building add-ons for EE 2.0 (Solspace)
So, that’s what is queued up for today. I’ll try to pop in to as many sessions as possible but I’m personally looking forward to Jamie’s CodeIgniter class and the Versioning and Maintenance class by Solspace.
You can keep up-to-date on the EECI happenings, including videos and photos, on the special EE Insider EECI page.
Blog Entry
Next week is EECI 2010 in San Francisco and EE Insider will be there covering as much of the conference as possible. We’ve set up a special EECI page to make it easy to follow our EECI-related blog posts and the @eeinsider tweets, photos and videos.
Until the conference starts, the page is pulling in previous EECI 2010 blog posts and the entire @eeinsider tweet stream. If you attended the EE 2 panel at SXSW, you are probably familiar with the setup I’m using to “stream” live event content using Twitter as the main vehicle of delivery.
Everything on the page is running through ExpressionEngine but I’m using Twit-ee for the tweets (filtering out the twitpic and twitvid tweets), Magpie plugin for the twitpics and my Twitvid plugin for the videos.
Bookmark the page and come back next week to get updates, photos and videos from the conference!
(Special high-five and thank you to Joey Pfeifer for his awesome design of the EECI page. Joey will be at the conference, so be sure to say hello.)
Blog Entry
It’s Thursday and time for the latest additions to everyone’s favorite EE add-on index: devot:ee.
My thanks to Ryan “Is this mic on?” Masuga for supplying this list to EE Insider every week.
Blog Entry
Wouter Vervloet posted a new plugin to the forums this week for ExpressionEngine 2: Timetravel. It “makes navigating through entries by day, month or year a breeze. It behaves similar to the default pagination, except that it uses dates in the URL instead of page numbers.”
Timetravel lets you flip through site content by date and appends the month, day and year to the URL. Wouter has a nice write-up on the forums with some example code or you can jump right to GitHub and download the plugin for yourself.
Timetravel is currently free and available only for EE 2.
Blog Entry
Today I spent about 30 minutes talking to Dan and our special guest Lea Alcantara about mistakes we’ve made while creating websites in ExpressionEngine. We discussed improper hosting, making the Control Panel easy for your clients to use, setting up proper 404s, not piling add-ons on top of each and more.
Subscribe, download, listen or watch: EE Podcast 18: The Mistakes We’ve Made
How-to Article
When building a website it’s easy to get focused on the stuff that’s under the hood. You want to minimize database queries and find smart ways to use your markup and styles. Those things are absolutely important, but what’s also important is to make sure the site makes sense for those running it. With this article, I’m going to dive into one way to simplify how content works in ExpressionEngine by expanding the use of the Pages module to contain not just static content on a site, but a centralized hub for all those other bits of content that one might need to edit.
When I first started using the Pages module, I looked at it as a handy way to gather “static” pages in their own separate area in the Control Panel. This was an excellent solution for About pages, Privacy Policies and the like. The Pages module filled a gaping hole in how ExpressionEngine works.
Then I started using it for some slightly more non-traditional ways and the usefulness of the Pages module for me elevated to a new level.
Read the Article
Blog Entry
If you can’t make the EECI 2010 conference next week in San Francisco, you won’t miss out entirely. A few weeks after the conference, Whoooz! will be making 19 sessions, interviews and extra material available in DVD format.
The 2-disc DVD set is available now for pre-order and only cost $99 (attendees get this included with their ticket). This would make a great reference set for anyone interested in CodeIgniter and ExpressionEngine development.
Blog Entry
SugarEE is a new module that allows you to easily display SugarCRM, a professional (with an open source option) customer relationship management web application, information in your EE templates. On the website it is described thusly:
The SugarEE module keeps CRM-related information where it belongs, in SugarCRM, and allows you to easily display exactly the information you want on your website.
The features list show some example uses of SugarEE, including pulling case records based on status, support of standard EE conditional statements and all of the supported parameters.
If you use SugarCRM and ExpressionEngine, you might want to check it out.
Blog Entry
Bjørn Børresen had an itch and scratched it.
I’ve spent the last 8 months developing modules (and templates) for EE 2.0. Pretty early I got annoyed by some of the redundant manual tasks I had to do over and over again .. so I started creating some addons to help me out. Now I’ve bundled (some of that) functionality in this thing I’ve named DevKit for EE 2.0
This looks like a great tool to get started on an EE 2 module and save yourself from the mundane task of re-writing the same bits of code over and over. EllisLab has available an Accessory Generator that does something similar: gives you a shell of an accessory to get started. Maybe they should adopt Bjørn’s DevKit and put it on the site, too?
DevKit 2.0 is a free download on GitHub and available now. Read Bjørn’s write-up for all the details: Introducing DevKit for EE 2.0
Blog Entry
One of the best things about doing the podcast is all of the email we get. The email comes in with corrections, show topic suggestions and how-to questions. We’re not able to do a show on every suggested topic, but I keep them all for future reference. And the future is today.
In the latest episode of the EE Podcast, Dan and I go through emails from listeners and answer their questions. This podcast episode was also broadcast live online, so we also answered some questions from the live chatroom.
Subscribe, download and listen (or watch): EE Podcast 17: Listener Mailbag
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