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eeSiteKit, the “advanced website development framework for ExpressionEngine” is now at version 2.0. Back in January, I wrote about the first release of eeSiteKit and noted some of the features, like Nested Page URLs and dynamic site navigation. Well, eeSiteKit 2.0 now adds YAML (the CSS framework) integration to the mix.
We’ve integrated YAML’s “Simple Project” template into eeSiteKit for use with or without the YAML Builder for a quick, cross-browser, standards-compliant foundation for your next site.
One of the biggest selling points of eeSiteKit is that it was created using only native EE code.
eeSiteKit uses zero add-ons, works entirely by utilizing EE’s amazing template-engine, and requires no additional PHP, Java-Scripts, Ajax, etc., and no plugins, extensions, modules, hacks or custom queries; all you need is ExpressionEngine Commercial, Personal or Core and a copy of eeSiteKit.
I haven’t tested this version of eeSiteKit but after using an early release of the first version, I confirmed “that it does what it says it does and the installation couldn’t be easier.”
Blog Entry
On the ExpressionEngine blog today, Kevin Shoesmith talks about the ExpressionEngine Roadshow. Kevin makes an appeal to your imagination:
Imagine a bright, loft style studio filled with people who love ExpressionEngine. Really love it. They love it so much that they’ve built award-winning websites, incredible software, and highly recognized Web development businesses around it. Also in that room, are the creators of ExpressionEngine, the keepers of its incredible community, passionate enthusiasts themselves.
Our very own Ryan Irelan will be in attendance, as well as many respected and inventive ExpressionEngine developers. It comes highly recommended as the ExpressionEngine event to attend (in the states… or “colonies”).
Blog Entry
Last month, SmoothFunction released their first add-on. It’s called Boomerang and it allows you to handle email marketing right inside of ExpressionEngine. Now, with ExpressionEngine you can already send email to a group of members using the Email module. But Boomerang brings in some of the email marketing and tracking features that you can find in services like MailChimp, CampaignMonitor and Publicaster.
The Boomerang Dashboard
With Boomerang you can set up and manage email templates and email lists (using the built-in Mailing List module), view reports and, obviously, send emails. Getting setup is quick and easy with the Configuration Settings—you only have to enter in basic information about the email sender and some unsubscribe language.
The Configuration Settings also has some handy information for scheduling your email sends using a cron job. It’s nice to see that information right there in the module and not buried in some documentation; it’s an extra plus that it is customized for your setup.
Configuration screen for Boomerang
Creating a new email is a four step process. First, you input the newsletter content (HTML and Plain Text). This can be as simple as a few HTML tags or a fully-designed HTML email that contains images and styled with CSS. Unfortunately, Boomerang doesn’t ship with any sample templates. It would have been nice to have one or two rudimentary sample templates included with the module.
Creating an Email in Boomerang
The second step is to preview your email to make sure it looks exactly how you wish. There is the option to send a test email before continuing. If you don’t like how your email looks, you can go back, make an edit and then resume the process.
The third step is to choose which mailing list you want to use. Mailing lists are set up using the built-in Mailing List module in ExpressionEngine. You have the option to schedule the mailing in the future.
The fourth and final step is to send the email.
Choosing a Mailing List
If you’re looking for an add-on that will let you send to small- to medium-sized email lists, then Boomerang might be what you’re looking for. This is a great solution for small churches and organizations who only want to send out a hundred or so emails at a time. I don’t suggest you try to send large amounts of email from your own server (or that of your webhost) using any software. Leave that to the email hosting experts.
In my basic testing, the module works as advertised. I’m not completely sold on the UI, as it breaks completely away from the standard EE interface. The change from the normal EE Control Panel look and feel to Boomerang was abrupt. Because Boomerang uses the existing Mailing List module to manage email list, it’s even more abrupt when you access “Manage Lists” from the Boomerang Dashboard; you go away from the green Boomerang interface back into the standard Control Panel interface.
This is, however, just my opinion and preference. Because I develop almost all of my EE-powered sites for clients, I am always extremely sensitive to the user experience while managing the website.
Building an email marketing module for EE was, I’m certain, a huge undertaking. I applaud SmoothFunction for their ability to pull off this ambitious project. If your needs fit the features of Boomerang, you might want to give it a try.
Boomerang costs $95 per site and is available now at the SmoothFunction website.
Blog Entry
Every week, we bring you the latest and greatest addons added to Ryan Masuga’s lovely Devot:ee database. This week… is no exception.
If you have a moment, become devoted, and help Ryan maintain this wonderful resource.
Blog Entry
Continuing the excellent stream of add-ons released this week, Natural Logic has released the Geofinder module. What is Geofinder?
Geofinder allows you to quickly build and create store-locator type functionality, saving you time and adding extra value to your ExpressionEngine based site. Your clients will rejoice!
The description doesn’t do it justice, as this looks to be one of the coolest pieces of geo data handling created for ExpressionEngine. You can see a demo of it in action, here.
Blog Entry
ExpressionEngine guru Jack McDade has posted an excellent URI Prettify plugin. He “wrote a plugin to take any string, such as {segment_3}, and strip out the “_” or “-” delimiters and set words to title case.” This is an extremely useful plugin which solves problems I’ve encountered numerous times in development. Jack explains:
I whipped up this little plugin because I kept getting pinned into a corner when using Categories. For example, if an entry is part of more than 1 category, Blue and Red as subgroups of a Colors parent group for instance, and you’d like to list all entries in the Red subcategory… well good luck.
Thanks to Mr. McDade for making this.
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Development on the web is predicted to shift quickly to the mobile space. While this transition has already begun, ExpressionEngine currently doesn’t have a built-in solution. Enter the MX Mobile Detect plugin.
MX Mobile Detect is a small and simple plugin (to) detect (if the) template was request(ed) by Mobile Device or not…
This looks like an excellent short-term solution to what will be a huge growth area in the upcoming years.
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As promised, EllisLab has updated us on EE 2.0. This bi-weekly update comes with an against-the-grain refusal from the ‘Lab.
In summary some people are wanting us to go into more detail about EE 2.0. After thinking this through the last two weeks, our answer to that is no. We’re not going to do that until the beta process is complete and we have a concrete release date set.
So if you’re looking to find out more information on ExpressionEngine 2.0, you’re out of luck. While it’s refreshing to see a company refute the openness that the social-web has brought to us, it’s a bit maddening when it’s a product you depend on. Leave your thoughts in the comments.
Blog Entry
There’s a little feature on our site we’ve been trying to grow called Tips. If you subscribe to EE Insider via RSS you would miss them. We’re excited about how many have contributed and want this resource to grow so we can all solve those snags we get into.
Here, for example, are our most popular tips:
We work to bring you the best learning material here at EE Insider and would love for you to drop-in and leave us a tip.
Blog Entry
In light of recent happenings in the Wordpress community, this may seem like a time to champion ExpressionEngine and do a dance. While it’s true that ExpressionEngine developers are beautiful, kinder and live fuller lives than most other CMS developers, we are still subject to the same security risks. Do not ignore the update notification when you log into the control panel.
So please take a moment and ensure that you, your clients and friends have updated their ExpressionEngine copy to the latest version 1.6.8 and that your extensions are all up to date as well. If you encounter problems with an extension and the current version of EE, please file a bug report with the extension’s respective developer. Some add-ons will notify you of new updates; a handful of developers now use Leevi Graham’s Addon Updater. If you use Solspace add-ons, they have an updater, too.
Protect yourself now.
Blog Entry
Over on her blog, Veerle Pieters is giving away 5, yes five, tickets to the ExpressionEngine/CodeIgniter Conference (EECI), which takes place in Leiden, The Netherlands in October.
To enter to win the tickets, you need to only comment on Veerle’s blog post and tell her why you want to go to the conference. That’s it! With 5 chances to win, the odds aren’t bad.
I’ll be speaking at EECI 2009 on 10 Ways to Supercharge Your EE Development on Thursday at 5:30 PM. See you there?
Blog Entry
In the forums this morning, Janine (user “tidy”) posed a question about how to best set up sites in EE that are made up of mostly static pages.
I am still quite new to ExpressionEngine. While managing structured content (usually the tricky part) is a breeze, I struggle with how best to approach sites with many standard/static/information type pages along with a few more structured sections.
For example, say a site has a home page, an about section with a few pages, a services section with a few standard pages (not structured) and then news and events sections which are structured.
Janine goes on to list out a few approaches, but is seeking the advice of “a few seasoned developers.”
My first approach is always the simplest one (easy to build on simple, difficult to undo complex), so I’d start with her first option:
1) having one pages/general weblog for all the static/information type pages, with categories indicating the section the pages belong to.
I’d also give the Structure module a shot and see where that took me. I’ve not used it on a production project before, but it seems like an option Janine should consider.
Do you have some suggestions for Janine? Visit the forum thread and give your advice.
Blog Entry
Yesterday, we announced that I was jumping into the role of managing the official EE Wiki. I want to reiterate my call for help from the community.
We have a great resource in the wiki and it just needs a little more love and attention from the community to make it even better. I already have a list of ideas to make it better, but it’s not just what I want; tell me what you want the wiki to do (or not do). Even if you don’t have time participate in maintaining the wiki, your ideas for wiki improvements would be extremely helpful.
Here’s my pitch (as posted on the EE Blog yesterday):
The EE Forums are an integral part of our work developing websites with ExpressionEngine. It’s an invaluable resource when troubleshooting implementation issues and looking for unique ways to solve old challenges.
Because of the popularity of the EE Forums and EllisLab’s ability to foster such an excellent community in that space, one of the other valuable but often overlooked resources is the EE Wiki. And I’m onboard to help change that.
I’ve been asked by EllisLab to take the reigns of the EE Wiki and make a great resource even better. But, as they say, I can’t do it alone. I’m looking for a small team of individuals to help me keep the wiki up-to-date, weed out outdated pages and, most importantly, encourage others to add their content to the wiki.
Our sister community, CodeIgniter, is a great example from which we should learn. They have an actively mantained wiki and a small team of people that volunteer their time to keep it up-to-date with useful and relevant content. Now it’s our turn.
Read the entire post for more information and how to contact us to participate.
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It’s Thursday and that means your weekly Devot:ee. Every week we bring you the latest add-ons added to the finest ExpressionEngine add-on database out there.
Thanks, as always, to Ryan Masuga for his help in preparing this.
Blog Entry
Twit-ee, my favorite Twitter module, has been updated to 1.3.1. The updated now includes the home timeline tag recently added to the Twitter API. What is the home timeline?
Returns the 20 most recent statuses, including retweets, posted by the authenticating user and that user’s friends. This is the equivalent of /timeline/home on the Web.
Blog Entry
In a new post on the ExpressionEngine blog, EllisLab announces that they’ve added a new wiki editor. Who? The man, the myth, the legend, our very own Ryan Irelan:
Because of the popularity of the EE Forums and EllisLab’s ability to foster such an excellent community in that space, one of the other valuable but often overlooked resources is the EE Wiki. And I’m onboard to help change that.
A big congratulations to both EllisLab and Ryan for what will be a great partnership.
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Today Brandon Kelly, creator of Playa and FieldFrame released a new fieldtype for FieldFrame called Wygwam, which is based on the CKEditor tool. Brandon has taken CKEditor, with its slick UI and customizability, improved upon it and made it into a high quality FieldFrame fieldtype.
Using a drag and drop interface, you can easily set up multiple types of Wygwam toolbars based on need; one toolbar for the body field, one for the excerpt, or maybe even one for someone that needs some extra help in formatting text. Those custom toolbars are saved as presets, so you can reuse them as needed.
WYSIWYG editors aren’t new to ExpressionEngine; we’ve been jamming them into EE for a long time. It wasn’t always pretty and the installation wasn’t always easy. In fact, I’ve never used them for any projects because they always felt forced and created junk markup. The markup produced by CKEditor, on which Wygwam is based, isn’t perfect, but it’s better than most WYSIWYG editors out there.
Wygwam is a commercial product and costs $29. It requires FieldFrame 1.3.1 or later, PHP 5 or later and ExpressionEngine 1.6+. It’s available now at Brandon’s website.
Watch Wygwam in action in my demo video.
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The end of Summer is drawing nigh and we shall celebrate with a sale on the remaining EE Code t-shirts.
The high quality, syntactically-correct American Apparel t-shirts will keep their good looks through many washes and impress your friends and family*.
A sweet shirt made sweeter by a sale price of only $14 US.
Visit the EE Insider Shop
*Impressed friends and family is not a guarantee and your experience may vary. But, still, it’s a killer t-shirt.
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It’s Thursday and time to see what delicious morsels of add-on goodness Ryan Masuga has put in the oven at Devot:ee.
Thanks again to Mr. Masuga for his help with this list.
Blog Entry
A new add-on has been released by the lovely people at Solspace. Much like Brandon Kelly’s FieldFrame lets you build custom fieldtypes, Hermes is a module dedicated to building add-ons.
The Hermes expansion for ExpressionEngine is a collection of PHP and JavaScript classes and functions that will standarize and improve your building of Add-Ons for ExpressionEngine. Developed by Solspace and used by many of its most popular Add-Ons, it will transform the way you develop.
Sounds interesting! Dear readers, let us know in the comments if you’ve had success with this new addition to the group.
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