Blog Entry
Today marks the one year anniversary of EE Insider. I started the site to share EE information and how-tos with the community. I like to think we’ve done that well over the last year.
I want to thank all of the advertisers who have supported EE Insider over the last year: Leevi Graham/Newism (the very first advertisers), Brandon Kelly, Solspace, Travis Schmeisser and Lodewijk Schutte.
Also, thank you to Kenny Meyers for his day-to-day work over the last several months in keeping the site updated with news. Kenny was also responsible for producing our popular EE 2.0 Week.
Of course, thank you for reading EE Insider. It’s been amazing to see the site grow and develop from this small idea I tossed around back in 2008.
More important than looking back, is to look ahead and make sure EE Insider remains a valuable resource for the EE community. If you have any suggestions, comments, criticisms or love letters for Kenny, please drop us a line.
Cheers!
Blog Entry
We missed this over the break, but 23rd World has a great article on fixing your ExpressionEngine RSS feed.
I began investigating the fascinating minutia of RSS when I couldn’t find a reasonable answer in the EE forums to why Google Reader was re-posting every updated post on my site even thought the entry dates hadn’t changed. As I went through the prevalent templates floating around the EE community line-by-line I noticed several things that could be improved upon. The only critical fix, in my opinion, is removal of seconds from the dates in the
section. If you want your feed to validate you’ll want to add the atom namespace. The rest are optional improvements.
If you’ve had these same problems, read this great article for knowledge and a solution!
Blog Entry
Adam Spooner has written a great little article on managing CSS & JS with ExpressionEngine.
ExpressionEngine, hereafter EE, has great built-in support for managing style sheets and JavaScript. Here’s one simple way to manage your style sheets and JavaScript files with cache-busting and gzip compression using EE’s templating system.
A great write-up on using ExpressionEngine’s built-in asset-handling.
Blog Entry
Wiseup studios has been on a bit of a kick lately. Their latest release MX Multi Language Labels follows suit.
The extension, which lets you create separate per-language labels for the CP for your custom fields, look excellent and well thought-out. Congratulations on the launch.
Blog Entry
A very cool new application, EE Calendar, has launched. It’s very slick looking and aims to be the Devot:ee of important ExpressionEngine dates. Here’s more:
The EE Calendar was created a simple project to provide a quick and easy to use resource for all events ExpressionEngine related. We found that while there were some varied resources for this type of information, something was missing. We’re hoping that you, the ExpressionEngine community, will help make this a great resource!
Check it out, and submit your event!
Blog Entry
Hurry up and get Structure for $51.94 on its website.
Structure 2 is the 2010 winner of Devot:ee’s module of the year, and a fine module it is. Travis, Structure’s creator, wrote an article for us on it.
Structure is an alternate method for building ExpressionEngine sites which focuses on pages to create hierarchy for your content. We recently released version 2.0, which is now a commercial module ($65 per site license) and includes several of the most highly requested features to date.
So quickly, get a license!
Blog Entry
Solspace is having a great sale: 30% off of everything!
Solspace have developed some of the best Modules for ExpressionEngine including FreeForm, User, and their entire performance series.
You can start shopping right here
Blog Entry
Devot:ee has posted its award winners for the 2009 AcademEE awards. While we would normally give you a teaser about who the winners are, we like Masuga and sending people his way.
Here, for your information, are the nominees. Head to Devot:ee to learn the winners:
2009 Plugin of the Year
- Image Sizer (David Rencher - Lumis)
- TruncHTML (Oliver Heine - silenz)
- EE Gravatar (Philip Zaengle)
- Edit This (Hop Studios)
- Splitter (Oliver Heine - silenz)
- Hop Inject (Hop Studios)
- BU Search Pagination (BridgingUnit - Aidann Bowley)
- FLV Player (vinnyio)
- Reeposition (Studio625 - Mr. Wilson)
- PD Fileformat (Pepper Digital - Andy Harris)
2009 Module of the Year
- User (Solspace)
- Freeform (Solspace)
- Structure (Travis Schmeisser)
- Deeploy Helper (Hop Studios)
- SL Developer Info (Stephen Lewis)
- Navigator (Cocoaholic)
- Low NoSpam (low)
- Tag (Solspace)
- Reeorder (Cocoaholic)
- Favorites (Solspace)
2009 Extension of the Year
- FieldFrame (Brandon Kelly)
- Playa (Brandon Kelly)
- nGen File (Fred Boyle, nGenWorks)
- LG Add Sitename (Leevi Graham)
- Wygwam (Brandon Kelly)
- Gypsy (Brandon Kelly)
- SL Google Map (Stephen Lewis)
- Publish Tweeks (nGenWorks)
- LG Better Meta (Leevi Graham)
- Edit Menu (Cocoaholic)
2009 Developer of the Year
- Brandon Kelly (Pixel & Tonic)
- Leevi Graham (Newism)
- Solspace
- Lodewijk Schutte (Low)
- Elwin Zuiderveld (Cocoaholic)
- Derek Hogue (Amphibian Design)
- Erik Reagan
- Jack McDade (SmoothFunction)
- Stephen Lewis (Experience Internet)
- nGenWorks
Blog Entry
It has been around a month since ExpressionEngine 2’s release, which leads us to ask you this question, readers:
What do you think of EE 2.0 beta so far?
Tell us your love, hate and fear, in the comments.
Blog Entry
Alright ExpressionEngine devs, Jason Ferell has contributed a great tip for using view files in 1.6.8:
With EE 1.6.8, we now have the ability to use view files in modules and that’s great news for add-on developers. Recently I wanted to use view files for an extension I was developing but the EE docs don’t contain a way to do that. Specifically, I wanted to use view files for the extension settings form and for the contents of the publish tab for the extension. Here’s a snippet of how to use view files in a custom extension:
$DSP->body .= $DSP->view(PATH_EXT.'ext_widget/ext_settings.php', $vars, TRUE);
I created a folder called ext_widget to hold my view files, keeping the view file separated from other extension files.
Thanks to Jason for the great tip, and if you haven’t, add your own tip!
Blog Entry
fabEE, a Facebook connect extension, is here! Now you can integrate Facebook Connect into your site, leveraging your social network synergy. The extension is compatible with the 1.6.x series of EE.
Here are its respective links:
This is a great extension, so congratulations to Purple Dogfish on its release.
Blog Entry
Fabee is on the way! The long promised extension, which allows you to connect to Facebook Connect with EE, is near release:
So, what’s been happening? Well, we’ve rewritten fabEE again (pretty much from scratch). This was due to the significant changes within Facebook in the past few months. The most obvious change is the way the publishing to Facebook now works; it uses the new(ish) Stream Publish method that now makes the whole process more straightforward. This method will also update a commenter’s Facebook status as well as post the content (as well as a link back) to their stream. This also means that your users now have to give specific permission to both receive email from your fabEE site as well as permission to post back to their stream – you’ll notice a little permission status under your login if you connect to this site using Facebook. The other significant change is that fabEE is now just an extension, there is no module component.
The extension will be release soon for $59.95. I hear rumors that a certain “owner” of a certain “Insider” may have been in on the private beta, so look for more news from this site on Fabee in the future.
Blog Entry
Wiseup Studio has release MX Custom Field Access. The extension “allows you to hide/show(from publish page) custom fields on member_group-weblog basis.”
While we haven’t tested it here in the lab, Wiseup Studios has a great track record for great little utility functions.
Blog Entry
Purple Dogfish has released a great new add-on called Member Utilities. The add-on, which looks fantastic, lets you do the following:
- Review Member Profiles – often spammers will sign up and post nothing, but their profiles contain spam links to whatever they’re promoting this week.
- Review Posts – you’ve identified that it’s possibly a spam sign up and you can see they’ve posted, but you have to search the forum to find it. Member Utilities allows you to find all forum posts from the control panel members list.
- Bulk move – select the members you want to move within the control panel members list and bulk move.
- Ban IP addresses – Option to ban the IP address if you’re moving into the banned members group.
- Ban email addresses – Option to ban email addresses if you’re moving into the banned members group.
- Delete all posts – Option to remove all posts if you’re moving into the banned members group.
The Extension is only currently available for 1.6.x and is available for $14.99. Congratulations to Purple Dogfish on the launch.
Blog Entry
When you install ExpressionEngine 2.0, you’re given the option of also installing a default site: Agile Records.
This site includes designed templates, basic content and setup. It’s a great way for newbies and oldies alike to see how someone else builds a website in ExpressionEngine. The site was designed by Erskine Design and built by the crew at EllisLab.
Agile Records is a fictitious record label whose site highlights some of the major components of using ExpressionEngine. If you’re new to EE 2.0, consider installing Agile Records as the default templates. The option is available when you run the installation wizard.
Read more about the Agile Records design in an interview with Erksine Design at the EE Blog.
Blog Entry
This is a on-going series of entries where I highlight EE experiences.
Finally digging into ExpressionEngine 2.0 and the new admin interface is a dream compared to the old one imo.
Brian Hefter via Twitter
Blog Entry
Just like we did this summer, the EE Help Chat will go on a short recess until the new year. There will not be a chat on either 12/23 or 12/30. Normal chat resumes on 1/6 at the regular time. As always, there is a 24 hour free chat available for anyone’s use.
Thanks to everyone for a great year of EE Help Chats and we’ll see you on the 6th!
Learn more about EE Help Chat.
Blog Entry
The holidays are here, as you can tell, by the lack of add-ons added to Devot:ee. I hope all of you are busy building something for the new year.
Here’s your weekly Devot:ee.
Thanks Mr. Masuga… and have a happy holiday.
Blog Entry
Structure 2.0.5 has been released. Changes include the following:
- [Bug] nav_sub: “conditional” state added to hide_if_no_children See knowledge base article
- [Bug] nav_sub: fixed current_class
- [Bug] nav_sub: css_id/css_class no space issue
- [Bug] nav_full isn’t marking Home “/” as here
- [Bug] nav_full: not closing a and last li
- [Bug] nav_main unique IDs have no opening quotes
- [Bug] Error logs: pre-defining index and suppressing the PHP Notice
- [Parameter] nav_main: current_class
Structure is $65 and available for purchase on its website.
Blog Entry
Leevi Graham has written a piece on enabling custom settings for the 2.0 FieldType API. Yes, since ExpressionEngine 2 is still in beta, some features are missing. But be cautious:
EE2 (builds 20091207 and 20091211) have custom field custom settings disabled so before you can add your own settings there are a few core hacks that need to be applied.
You will need to hack the EE Core, which may or may not break if EllisLab decides to go a different route. So choose carefully.
Comments (12)
Share on Twitter