Over a series of 8 videos, watch and learn as Ryan builds an entire ExpressionEngine website from beginning to end. Get started now.
8 characters have released a great publish button extension for ExpressionEngine. The extension makes it easier to save entries on long forms “by providing a Submit Toolbar that appears when the normal submit buttons are scrolled out of view.”
Here’s the video:
Posted on Oct 12, 2009 by Kenny Meyers
The illustrious Stephen Lewis has completed his final article on managing an EE site with Git. What does the final entry contain?
The previous post concluded with a brief overview of a typical Git workflow, and the promise of a more detailed description of the day-to-day usage of Git in the next installment. Ever a man of my word, that’s exactly what this article is all about.
Thanks to Stephen for putting this great article series together, and for his incredibly entertaining Twitter feed.
Posted on Oct 12, 2009 by Kenny Meyers
Every week, we feature the latest and greatest addons added to the Devot:ee database.
Posted on Oct 08, 2009 by Kenny Meyers
Will Linssen has posted a tutorial on creating an autocomplete search/jump menu with jQuery and EE.
This tutorial will show you how to build an text input that will give autocomplete / auto suggestions via AJAX straight from an ExpressionEngine template then redirect straight to the entry.
The tutorials is simple and easy to implement. May I also suggest using my tip to ensure that the results template isn’t visible to end-users.
Posted on Oct 07, 2009 by Kenny Meyers
For our friends living near or around the big apple, the first New York City EE meetup is happening tonight!
Here’s the info:
If anyone would like to report on the EE Meetup, or you have an EE meetup of your own coming, email us. In related news, ExpressionEngine.com is now posting meetup events on the home page.
Posted on Oct 07, 2009 by Kenny Meyers
Here is an extension that looks fantastic.
Each time you set up a website with ExpressionEngine you probably want to install several different modules, extensions, and plugins. Doing that usually involves downloading a .zip file for each add-on, then individually unzipping and uploading each file/folder to the corresponding modules/, extensions/, plugins/, language/, and themes/ folders. Then each time any add-on is updated, you have to repeat the process across all your websites.
With my module, installing other add-ons is basically a one-click process. You just visit the module page (shown below) and then either upload a .zip/.php file, or give it the URL to the source from the developer’s website. Hit one button and my module takes the source file, extracts, and searches through the files and determines where each file/folder goes.
We haven’t tested it, but let us know if you have in the comments and what you think. I’m hoping in the future Mr. Freo adds github integration for all the great addons that have made their way there.
Posted on Oct 07, 2009 by Kenny Meyers
In a very long and interesting blog post, Leslie Camacho has declared October ExpressionEngine month (No one has told Jack Skellington yet). The post, one of the best since EllisLab started posting weekly updates, goes into many of the changes and forthcoming news.
I can’t tell you how excited I am to head to Europe this month for EECI 2009. I’ve wanted to meet the community there for years. EECI 2009 is where we’ll start opening up the information stream regarding 2.0. My keynote is going to focus on EE 2.0 exclusively and pretty much put an end to the “silent mode” we’ve been in for a long time.
It looks like the long years to make 2.0 are coming to a close. We look forward to the end of the great silence, and what we hope will be a lot of new, great information being released at the end of the month.I highly recommend reading Leslie’s full post.
Posted on Oct 07, 2009 by Kenny Meyers
Esteemed colleagues Dan Benjamin and Ryan Irelan have released their second in a weekly podcast. What’s in store?
In episode two, Ryan and Dan discuss feedback on the first episode, the EE Roadshow conference, which took place last Friday in Seattle and some useful developer tools. Also, don’t miss Ryan quizzing Dan on EE trivia.
Enjoy!
Posted on Oct 06, 2009 by Kenny Meyers
I was hoping to post some updates to the site during the EE Roadshow on Friday but as is usually the case with conferences, I didn’t have the time to sit down and focus on writing that I thought I would. So, a short wrap-up post will have to do for now.
To get started, I have to say that Seattle was a great place to hold this conference. The main conference hotel was within easy walking distance to the venue and to a lot of restaurants and bars.
As warm-up to the conference, a pre-party was held at Office Nomads, a co-working facility. Featuring beer, snack foods and lots of conversation, it was the perfect way for me to catch up with people I know and meet some new faces. It was a true pleasure to have face-to-face conversations with people I had only previously talked to online, whether in the EE Help Chat, by email or IM.
The conference day started with breakfast and an informal gathering with Paul Burdick of Solspace about EE add-on development. I wish I could have participated in that but I was involved in a couple of other interesting conversations at the time.
We moved to the main room, found our seats (I found myself sitting up front) and got started with a presentation from EllisLab’s Leslie Camacho. He briefly went over some information about ExpressionEngine, EllisLab and the community and then jumped into a game show (emceed by Rick Ellis) where they gave attendees the opportunity to win $1,024. I think they ended up giving $3,000, which I’m sure helped the lucky winners cover some of the costs involved in attending the conference.
I’m sure some people were clamoring for more information about EE 2.0, but I think it was a nice change of pace to havea bit of fun, learn some EE trivia and, maybe, go home with a little cash.
That session was followed by Jenn Lukas, Mark Huot and Brian Warren (of Happy Cog East in Philadelphia) giving us an inside look into the process Happy Cog uses to nail down requirements before the development phase even starts.
After a lunch break, we learned about Git from Jason Hudnutt and from Matt Perry on his experience launching the Grist Magazine website. This included information and graphs on his experience of launching EE on a high traffic web property. He also shared some tips on how to get the best performance out of your own EE site.
When my talk on improving your EE development concluded, Brandon Kelly, Mark Huot, Ryan Masuga and Fred Boyle on developing and marketing EE add-ons. An insider look into how the four guys develop their add-ons, decide what to create and how much time they spend creating them.
As is usually the case with technology conferences, the highlight for me is meeting new people, especially those with whom I’ve communicated or did business with but had never met in person. There were also people who so kindly shared their experiences with me of learning EE using my EE Screencasts. There is nothing more gratifying than hearing about people who found something I created helpful. I always appreciate people who email me and thank me, but hearing it in person has a little bit of extra awesome to it.
A big thank you to Kevin Shoesmith and Travis Smith for organizing the conference and picking a great city and venue as the host.
I’m looking forward to traveling to the Netherlands for EECI 2009 in a few weeks to meet the international EE community and re-connect with people from the EE Roadshow.
Posted on Oct 05, 2009 by Ryan Irelan
Erik Reagan has released the initial version of his ER Developer Toolbar extension. Here’s the skinny:
This extension was born out of an embed template that I have used on nearly all of my projects. It started as just a div anchored to the top left corner of my browser window on the site front-end that gave me quick links to general site preferences, extension manager, plugin manager, etc. Then I read a tip on EE Insider by Jason Morehead about having the
elapsed_timeandtotal_queriesposted in a similar fashion. After marrying the two together I turned the box into a toolbar-shape and anchored it to either the top or bottom of my window depending on the front-end design of the site I was working on at the time.
This looks to be an excellent tool for the old toolbox, and I look forward to Erik developing it further.
Posted on Oct 05, 2009 by Kenny Meyers
Blis Web Agency has released the Chrome Frame extension. The extension uses the newly released Chrome plugin for Internet Explorer by adding the meta tag to the CP.
I was thinking that now Google has released Chrome Frame it would be great if we could use this for the EE Admin area. The main benefits are really just improved performance, especially in regard to Javascript performance.
Very cool little plugin, especially since many developers I know love the Webkit CSS rules.
Posted on Oct 05, 2009 by Kenny Meyers
Keith Muth of Viget has posted a great article on awesome EE tools. The article, like many before it, go over what addons and extensions Keith loves:
There are so many great ones out there (and new ones being released all the time) I thought it would be cool to share some of them in a blog post.
Articles like these are a great way to find a hidden gem, or shore up on best practices.
Posted on Oct 01, 2009 by Kenny Meyers
Every week we bring you the latest addons added to Ryan Masuga’s Devot:ee.
Thanks to Ryan “Buck Rogers” Masuga for putting this together.
Posted on Oct 01, 2009 by Kenny Meyers
Giveaways, quizzes, and now a sale. Solspace, to celebrate the 37th birthday of founder and charming young man Mitchell Kimbrough, are reducing prices by 37%. If you want to get great addons at a reduced price, you only have today to get it.
The sale ends tonight, October 1st at 11:59PM PST.
Posted on Oct 01, 2009 by Kenny Meyers
In addition to giving you free office supplies, EllisLab is hiring a technical support specialist. Here’s the requirements:
- You are a self-starter, able to learn and act independently, yet capable of interacting with a team on a regular basis.
- You have experience with ExpressionEngine. There is no way around this. It helps if you’ve built several sites in ExpressionEngine: the more the better.
- You have a presence within our community and a history of helping others.
- 100% of the job is written communication. You must be responsive and able to communicate well in the English language.
- Patience and good humor are practically requirements when engaging in support.
You can apply for the job here.
As far as the last two bullet-points are concerned kudos to John, Ingmar, Greg, Lisa and Sue for the fantastic job they do. I can’t tell you how many times even the best of us have required their help or been rude and are greeted with patience, kindness and a human being. Thank you!
Posted on Oct 01, 2009 by Kenny Meyers
EllisLab is giving away EllisLab field notes! In exchange for EllisLab quiz q’s you get a fancy-pants EllisLab branded dead tree. Here’s the info from el presidente himself:
Rick and I are working on a fun little project and need your help. We can’t tell you what the project is, just that we need EE quizzes. Here is what the quiz must include (please read carefully, all the way to the end).
- At least 10 Questions and Answers.
- Questions 1-7 should be easy to medium in difficulty.
- Questions 8-10 should be hard. If your quiz is longer than 10 questions, make sure the last several questions are the most difficult.
- Questions can be multiple choice, fill in the blank, or very short answer.
- Questions should have very clear, specific answers.
- Questions can be about EE (general or technical), EllisLab, and the EE Community (3rd party add-ons, sites, personalities).
- All quizzes must be emailed directly to me (Leslie) by 3pm Pacific Thursday (tomorrow) with the Subject line, “EE Quiz Submission”.
- Quizzes must not be made public.
You can find more about the competition here.
Oh, Mr. Camacho, with your clever tricks. You thought you could fool us with your deceptive headline.
Well, we here at EE Insider read at a 3rd grade level. Sure, it may have taken us some time to suss through your latest post, but we found the juicy information.
Each notebook winner also gets the chance to win one of five free upgrades to EE 2.0. Did I mention that in the title? No? Look, you’ve won a little info just by reading this far.
EE Insider: Not requiring you to read since 2008 (so what are you doing this far down in the post?)™
Posted on Oct 01, 2009 by Kenny Meyers
Prolific EE developer Leevi Graham has posted a Github gist (re: code-snippet) that explains how to add weblog tag parsing functionality to your code. Not only is this extremely useful to addon developers, but Leevi was kind enough to comment the crap out of it. Here’s the introduction:
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/**
The function below demonstrates how to use the weblog obect
to parse your own custom module / plugin tags
Usage {exp:my_plugin:use_weblog_object} ... {exp:my_plugin:use_weblog_object}
The tag will now behave like an exp:weblog:entries tag accepting the same params
**/
Leevi is the developer of some of my favorite extensions including LG Better Meta and NSM Publish Plus. I recommend both of these addons highly for your client installs.
Posted on Sep 30, 2009 by Kenny Meyers
Nicolas Bottari has released a plugin for Google Analytics. The plugin is very simple, but the end result is cleaner code. Why did Nicolas create it?
Basically I was tired of hunting down for that short but complicated GA code on the web every time I needed to install the tracking script. Was also tired of always having to remember the Web property ID, and having to paste it at the right place in the GA code.
Its implementation is very simple and examples are available on the aforementioned forum page.
Posted on Sep 30, 2009 by Kenny Meyers
I’m happy to announce the launch of The ExpressionEngine Podcast, a weekly audio show, presented in a partnership between myself and Dan Benjamin (Hivelogic, Playgrounder).
The ExpressionEngine Podcast is a discussion about EE news, development, and community. In our first episode, we cover the EE beta 2 phase, some new addons from Solspace, and offer some tech tips. We also go in-depth regarding caching and acceleration with Squid and varnish. Dan has experience implementing these tools on high traffic EE sites, so it’s a highly informative and interesting discussion.
A big thank-you to our sponsor, Brandon Kelly and his awesome Wygwam WYSIWYG Editor for ExpressionEngine. Thank you Brandon!
Don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed for automatic updates. Finally, please let us know what you think about the podcast!
Posted on Sep 30, 2009 by Ryan Irelan
Marek Foss has written about automatically tweeting posts. He wrote a plugin to make it much easier.
What my AutoTweet basically does is, when called, checks your timeline for the given message and if it doesn’t exist – it tweets it. AutoTweet is also immune to URL changes, as they are stripped while performing a regular expression match against the timeline – this way there are no problems if the URL somehow gets shortened differently along the way.
Tweet away!
Posted on Sep 30, 2009 by Kenny Meyers