My talk will cover moving from EE 1.6 to EE 2 and what I learned about the process. I’ve been working through different upgrade situations and have been using EE Insider as a test site. Come hear me talk about what I discovered while upgrading and some things you should consider.
Mark Reeves posted a beta version of a new module he’s working on that allows you to easily A/B test variations of your templates.
A/B Testing is a method of presenting variations in content or design around calls to action and tracking which perform better. Variations could be subtle: “Click Here!” vs. “Click This Link”, or “Learn More” vs. “Buy Now!” Variations can include drastically different color schemes, design elements or imagery.
A/B Test makes it easy to create test cases in ExpressionEngine simply by wrapping your variations in a few tags. As those variations are displayed, and as users interact with links or forms within, activity is automatically tracked and results displayed in your ExpressionEngine Control Panel.
Mark is soliciting feedback from people who download and try out this new module. It is available only for EE 2 and currently a free download.
A lot of ExpressionEngine users also use CampaignMonitor to manage and send their email lists (using the wonderful Campaigner add-on from Experience Internet), so I want to highlight a new book from the folks at CampaignMonitor on HTML email.
Create Stunning HTML Email That Just Works is available in both print and ebook format (PDF, EPUB and MOBI) and is for web designers looking to design and create successful email templates.
We’ve put this book together for web designers to help them plan, design and build HTML emails that are attractive and render reliably. If you’ve been using Campaign Monitor or reading the blog for a while a lot of the content will be familiar, but there is all new content and a completely reworked structure to bring all that information together.
The book is published by SitePoint and is $29.95 for either the digital or print version or you can get both for $10 more. If you want to try before you buy, you can download two chapters of the book for free.
EE Insider has not yet read the book beyond the two free chapters. From a read through of the Table of Contents, this looks like a great primer for designers on email template design and marketing.
Yesterday, devot:ee launched a new add-on store. Now you can buy select add-ons right on the devot:ee site. I caught up with devot:ee creator Ryan Masuga to learn more about the new store.
Q. Congratulations on launching the devot:ee add-on store! Can you give us an overview of what the store is?
A. Thank you! Over the past year, devot:ee has consistently gained more visitors and repeat traffic to our add-on library, which is now over 800 entries. ExpressionEngine users are already on the site viewing, bookmarking, favoriting and rating the add-ons, so we thought it would be enormously convenient to just offer them for sale as well. Some developers can and do still sell items on their own sites - this is just another (and we hope better!) avenue for them. And it may be the only avenue for devs who don’t currently have a way to sell their work.
Q. This seems like a natural step for the site. Is it something you had planned all along or only after you saw how the site was received and used by the community?
A. This was not planned at all from the beginning. In the beginning it was just myself working on this, so I never, ever would have had to the time to manage commerce. A shout-out here to Jacob Russell for his hard work in help maintaining and improving the site.
I think the site has found its way over the last year, and that means “concentrate on add-ons and anything add-on related.” In that sense, selling commercial add-ons is definitely a natural step. A fire was lit to get this done when I started a new project a couple months ago and had to go to five different sites to purchase everything I needed. It would have been better to get all those in one place, in a single transaction.
Q. You started off with a nice list of add-ons. Are you planning to add more in the near future?
A. That’s really up to the developers. I certainly hope any devs who aren’t represented now will eventually see that it makes sense to add their items to the catalog. I, for one, would love to buy User, Low Variables, Bucketlist, Better Meta, and Playa/Matrix all in one place at one time. Boom, done.
Q. A central add-on store seems to lower the barrier of entry for selling your add-ons. How do you see this impacting the EE developer community?
A. I don’t see a downside. You could be a great developer with an awesome ExpressionEngine add-on that might never see wide release because you don’t want to give it away for free, but you also don’t want to spend time and effort setting up a store. One goal of the add-on store is to bring those people out of the woodwork. I think we may see a lot more commercial offerings, and possibly even conversions from free to paid (because it is so easy to sell on devot:ee), but developers will have to remember that even if their add-on fills a niche, if the support is non-existant and the add-on itself is buggy, no one is going to pay for it.
Q. How can an add-on developer get her add-on in the devot:ee store? Is it a similar model as the Apple App Store?
A. We are not policing the commercial add-ons other than asking for a little information before you can sell. The process to sell an add-on is really pretty simple. There are three steps:
Request that your member account be “hooked up” to edit your add-ons listed on devot:ee.
Fill out a few new form fields in your member area: Agree to terms, give us info so we can send you payments.
Update the info for the add-ons you’d like to sell: add a price, upload a file, you’re done.
A developer (Stephen Lewis of Experience Internet) added two items for sale a few hours after we opened the store, and I had no idea until I saw his tweet about it. You could literally write an add-on and have it for sale in a few minutes.
Q. Will you also host and make available free add-ons?
A. We actually do host many free add-ons now. For free add-ons a developer can either upload a file or provide a GitHub repository name which we use to construct a download link right on devot:ee.
Q. Finally, I see that you have Cartthrob listed as one of the add-ons you’re selling. Are you also using Cartthrob to run the store? If so, what was your experience using the new e-commerce add-on?
A. Yes, we’re using CartThrob for the store, and it was a great experience. We spent months messing around with another commerce add-on that just was not working out. I met a developer at SxSW this year who was in the CartThrob beta and we started talking about e-commerce. He said I had to contact Barrett Newton and get in the Beta for this add-on store. So I called up Chris Newton, told him what I wanted to do with devot:ee, got in the beta program, and didn’t look back.
E-commerce is not something I’m a fan of, if I have to execute it. I typically avoid any e-commerce in client work. However, I felt very confident using CartThrob, enough so that I might reconsider blindly passing on projects that involve commerce. The support from the guys at Barrett Newton was outstanding, from fixing my bug reports to implementing feature requests to offering helpful explanations and code samples. The add-on store would still not exist if CartThrob hadn’t come along when it did.
I have an interview with Ryan Masuga coming up that will shed some more light on this new feature of the devot:ee website and how this impacts add-on developers across the community.
Last month EE Insider asked the readers “What do you rename your system folder to?” The responses ranged from common dictionary words to random strings and everything in between. The responders are obviously concerned about security and doing what they can to ensure malicious users or bots cannot attack their Control Panel. Let’s take a look at a simple way to secure your ExpressionEngine 2 (EE2) installation.
I’ve been getting great feedback on my ExpressionEngine 2 book both in the form of suggestions but also (and most importantly) errata. Writing a book on software is always a challenge but writing on something so new and freshly baked can be, at times, a nightmare. I’m thankful to everyone who has submitted errata reports and suggestions. The book is getting ready to go into another round of printing and will include many of the items reported.
As a way to help celebrate the book, the upcoming EECI conference and…well, we don’t really need a reason to celebrate, do we? Right, didn’t think so.
In Chapter 9 I walk through some cool things you can do in your templates beyond just the standard use of Channel Entries tag pairs. The excerpt covers searching inside of custom fields and leveraging dynamic parameters to create a more customizable user experience.
Note: If you do decide to pick up the book directly from the publisher, you can get it as an ebook, which gives you a PDF version, an epub version for your iPad or iPhone and a mobi version for your Kindle. Lots of different ways to read the book!
Dan talked about his work setting up the company (he podcasts full-time and makes his entire living from it) and mentioned some of the shows he produces.
I share editing duties on The Ruby Show and The Dev Show with Jason Seifer, who co-hosts both shows with me. The same is true with Ryan Irelan, my co-host on the ExpressionEngine Podcast. But all of the other shows, like The Conversation, The Pipeline, Uptime, I record, edit and produce myself.
There are costs involved in running EE Insider and I accept a small number of highly relevant advertisers to help defray those costs and keep the site going. I’m grateful for the support of the advertisers, a couple of which have been with EE Insider for more than a year.
Thanks to:
Leevi Graham & Newism - Better Meta and other great add-ons (the original advertiser on EE Insider)
Pixel & Tonic - Brandon Kelly’s Wygwam, Playa and Matrix add-ons make EE more fun and productive (Brandon has been an advertiser for the last year).
Structure - Building with Structure gives you a different way to build ExpressionEngine sites. I’ve used it on several projects and clients love it.
Hambo Development - You design the site and they’ll implement it in EE. A great service for busy agencies or freelance designers.
Vector Media Group - SEO Pros who are also EE pros. Get their help to make sure you’re getting the most out of your site’s SEO efforts.
WooThemes - Quality themes for ExpressionEngine allow you to get up and running on EE while looking good.
This is an interesting move considering the time it takes to move add-ons over to EE 2. Will we see this from more add-on developers? (Pixel & Tonic is also not charging for EE 2 versions of add-ons. We regret the oversight. Let me know if there are others.)
Update: Travis and Jack sent me this when I asked why they’re making the EE 2 version free:
When we went commercial we were fairly close to the release of EE2, so we didn’t want people to feel locked into the 1.6.x branch. We also want to give people a chance to try out Structure for EE2 without having to pay extra. Ultimately, EE2 might not be the right choice for everyone at this stage of the game, so until future notice, Structure will come with a single license for either 1.6.x or 2.0 and the download will include both.
During the first Meetup the idea of “opening the books” and sharing our work in EE was discussed. We now have our first volunteer for what will certainly be a lively discussion and learning experience for all.
Eryan Cobham of Cobwebs Consulting will be subjecting himself to a “code review” by the group for a site he is currently building using EE, and facilitating a discussion on the proper way to do accomplish certain functions in EE. Some topics may include: using extensions, URL segments, and any other questions that people may interest people.
An interesting thread about caching embedded templates and, in general, how EE template caching works. There are a couple of important morsels of information here. First, from EllisLab TSS Ingmar Greil:
Caching is done on a per-URL level, not a template level: if you have the same template that is used to power each of your articles you will have a copy for each URL, same with embedded templates, if you embed the sidebar template into each page and you cache the sidebar template, you will have a copy for each URL.
Unless you actually are seeing a specific need, for a specific template, to be cached, I would highly recommend to not cache unless you have to. That goes for query caching, too.
The updated fieldtype now support EE 2 and EE 1.6. It features a new user interface using a “translucent” theme, a File celltype, column-specific instructions and its own database table.
A quick look at Pixel & Tonic’s new Matrix fieldtype for EE 2. I walk through adding a Matrix custom field to the Agile Records sample site that ships with EE 2.
This is a double feature of EE in the Wild featuring two author websites: Darren Shan and David Gilman. Both sites were developed by Frequency, a design studio in Cork, Ireland.
We finally convinced our long-time client, Darren Shan to convert to a CMS. He had been bravely managing his plain html site using Frontpage, Contribute and other tools completely unsuitable for managing this huge amount of content for the last ten years.
Once converted to Expression Engine we had to categorise and logically arrange this content. There are over 1200 entries on this site as Darren has almost 30 books published in over 30 countries. Almost every country has a different book cover variation. Add ten years worth of review and interviews and you can get an idea of the amount of content - which we are still in the process of porting across.
We’ve just launched a brand new site for British author, David Gilman. David is the author of a series of teen books called the Danger Zone featuring intrepid hero, Max Gordon. He is also the principal screenwriter for ITV’s “A Touch of Frost” a popular detective series on British TV.
This site uses add-ons like LG Add Sitename, Solspace Freeform and Fieldframe.
ExpressionEngine is often used to manage membership sites, something it excels at. To help you manage member functions on the front end EE includes a comprehensive set of member templates that can be themed. You can of course choose to not use them at all and there are at least a couple of 3rdparty member function options.
I want to show you how you can extend the functionality of the membership templates and/or change their default behaviour. We’re going to do that with a very simple extension. This type of extension will work in both EE 1.5.2+ and EE 2.x. The examples will use EE 1.x and the default site but you can find extensions for both EE versions at the end of this article.
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