How-to Article
Recently, I found myself needing to tweak how the ExpressionEngine Control Panel displays the list of comments for an entry. The editors of a website I help maintain wanted to get a more complete overview of the comments on an entry, so they could quickly tell which are spam comments and mark them to be deleted.
In the Control Panel, there is the View Comments/Trackbacks page, which you can access by clicking the “View” in the “Comments” column of the Edit entry listing. But in order to see the entire comment, you have to click on the comment link, view the complete comment text and then go back to mark the comment as spam or delete it. When each entry receives dozens of comments, this quickly becomes a lot of clicking and tremendous wasted effort.
Learn how, through a process of discovery, I found a solution to my problem that required no code, but just a couple of config.php settings.
Read the Article
Blog Entry
As promised, the EE Help Chat will return this week. After the two-week hiatus, the chat will resume on Wednesday July 29 at 9 PM EDT (GMT -4).
What’s the chat all about? You can learn more on the EE Help Chat page, but here’s a quick overview.
Do you need help with ExpressionEngine or have a question and want expert, realtime answers? Bring your EE questions, problems and issues and I’ll do my best to help you out. I enjoy helping other people solve their EE problems and now I want to try doing it in a weekly one-hour chat.
The EE Help Chat is all about answering your questions and helping you learn more about ExpressionEngine.
Be sure to read the whole EE Help Chat page for more information and guidelines.
Blog Entry
This is a on-going series of entries where I highlight EE experiences.
Damn you #ExpressionEngine! Why have you an answer for everything! Love it.
KJ via Twitter
Blog Entry
David Hall at Deliciously Creative posted a tutorial on creating an image gallery using FieldFrame.
Creating an image gallery in ExpressionEngine can be a bit of a headache. The Gallery Module is just far too clunky and awkward to use to be a satisfying solution. I needed a way of giving my clients an easy and flexible way of uploading images to numerous galleries on their website. Note that this method does not include a batching facility, but I am looking into this.
I am using Brandon Kelly’s brilliant FieldFrame extension in conjunction with FF Matrix, which is bundled with Field Frame, nGen File Field and Image Sizer extensions.
Read the whole article for the details on how David made it work: Creating an image gallery using Brandon Kelly’s FieldFrame extension in ExpressionEngine
Blog Entry
Sage advice from Noah Stokes:
If you want to grow as a developer and expand your skillset, then take on a challenging project that is over your head.
Learn to embrace and thrive on being slightly uncomfortable and over your head. Done smartly, the benefits are tremendous.
Blog Entry
The Erskine crew has been publishing some great how-tos and releasing some helpful add-ons of late. Their latest offering to the EE community is the Text Truncating Plugin:
A while ago I posted, on my personal site, a plugin that truncated text in ExpressionEngine without breaking words - it removed html, wrapped it in a specified tag and added some optional link text on the end. It has been revamped and released here under the “Erskine” banner.
There are some great features, like the ability to wrap the truncated text in a markup wrapper, class that wrapper and displaying a “read more” link.
The plugin is PHP 5 only, so be sure to check your PHP version before installing and attempting to use it.
Read Glen’s entire write-up: Erskine Text Truncating Plugin
Blog Entry
I don’t remember how or where I came across this, but SlickMap CSS is a handy way to create visually-pleasing sitemaps from an HTML unordered list.
SlickMap CSS is a simple stylesheet for displaying finished sitemaps directly from HTML unordered list navigation. It’s suitable for most web sites – accommodating up to three levels of page navigation and additional utility links – and can easily be customized to meet your own individual needs, branding, or style preferences.
SlickMap CSS was built by Matt Everson of Astuteo. It’s a free download from the Astuteo website: SlickMap CSS — A Visual Sitemapping Tool for Web Developers
Blog Entry
John Donovan of (the newly redesigned) 5pieces posted an update (version 4.5) to his FLV Media Player plugin. If you’re not familiar with the plugin, here’s how John describes it:
This plugin manages the JW FLV MEDIA PLAYER 4+ and makes it easy for you to put music, videos or flash movies onto your ExpressionEngine posts and pages.
The FLV Player Plugin supports streaming video format ( .flv or .swf), sound files as MP3 and JPG, GIF or PNG grafic files.
The plugin page has three different usage examples (with sample code): single entry, YouTube and playlist. It’s a free plugin and available for download from the 5pieces website.
Blog Entry
I don’t think I’ve featured a music site before, so this is a nice change of pace.
Joe Dakroub of Strut Studio announced the newly-launched site for concert saxophonist Timothy McAllister, who Joe describes as the “finest concert saxophonist on the globe.”
The site took advantage of a whole host of EE add-ons (see Joe’s EE forum post for the entire list), including the Structure module, Playa 2, FieldFrame and Publish Improve.
Very nice!
Blog Entry
For quite a while now, the team at PHP (UK) has been working on a huge undertaking: eecommerce Pro, a Magento-enabled commerce solution for ExpressionEngine. And now they want you to kick the tires.
The public beta is now open, which means anyone can download and beta test both the eecommerce Pro module and the associated Mammoth WebServices software.
Learn more from this announcement forum thread on the eecommerce website.
Blog Entry
Tom Kiss published a new extension today that makes it very easy to get the last segment of the URL.
This little extension creates a new global variable which renders the fetches the current last segment in a URL.
The addition of a {last_segment} variable can be extremely useful for a number of reasons. The main benefit is that it allows you to create the appearance of sub-templates and hierarchical page structures. For example, you could have a ‘pages’ weblog and by setting the url_title parameter of the weblog:entries tag to {last_segment}, create a structure of: /head/shoulders/knees/toes/
Why use this when you can fetch the segment using {segment_x}? Well, because this way you can fetch the last segment without even knowing the segment number. This is handy for embedded templates that are shared across site templates and where the segment count will vary.
All in all, a handy extension that should help you make your templates even more reusable.
I briefly tested this extension in my local sandbox and it worked as expected. The extension is a free download and available now: Last Segment by Tom Kiss
Blog Entry
Just like we took a break at the end of last year during the holidays, we’re going to do the same this summer. For the next two weeks there will not be an EE Help Chat.
But don’t worry! This isn’t the end of the Help Chat, not by any means. I’ve been doing the weekly help chat for about 10 months and plan to continue doing it after this short, 2-week hiatus. The EE Help Chat will return again on July 29th at the regular time.
In the interim, take the one hour each week you’d usually spend chatting EE and step away from the computer and do something different!
Blog Entry
Jason Morehead offers up a good process tip when starting a new EE website. He suggests you first set up your member groups:
Several aspects of EE, such as weblog category groups, statuses, and file upload directories, have assignments for member groups. (For example, you can determine if a particular member group has access to add/edit/delete categories for a specific group).
Read Jason’s entire Tip: Create member groups first.
Blog Entry
Leveraging a couple of jQuery plugins and adding in some PHP, John Donovan walks you through how to create chained selects for ExpressionEngine.
This tutorial is based on the instruction provided for the Simple chained combobox plugin for jQuery by Ziadin Givan.
While merging it with ExpressionEngine we also learn about the weblog:categories tag, PHP in your templates the Input Class.
(What are chained selects? A select menu whose selection determines what options are available in another select menu, etc.)
Excellent tutorial and a technique that will surely come in handy for a future EE site.
Be sure to read John’s entire article: Chained selects for ExpressionEngine.
Blog Entry
Today, I received an email welcoming me to the ExpressionEngine 2.0 Beta. I don’t really have much more to share than that. Until the NDA on the ExpressionEngine 2.0 Beta is lifted, I won’t be posting (as I didn’t during the Developer Preview) about the beta, other than information made public by EllisLab.
See “EE 2.0 Beta Imminent” for more information about how the beta process will work.
Blog Entry
Last week, Paul Cripps of Nine Four posted to the EE Forums about a new site they launched: Kew College.
And it looks like they’ve built in some nice features:
We installed, configured and deployed ExpressionEngine allowing us to provide parents, pupils and staff with varying levels of access to content using the Users Module.
Event, term and sports calendars allow parents and pupils to keep in touch with what’s going on.
Parents can register (using the freeform module) for SMS alerts, to receive a prospectus and to gain access to a gallery of photos from school events. The Gallery is built using the standard Gallery module with a few custom pages and a very useful plugin Gallery Category Parent built by our very own (Nine Four) Nathan Pitman.
Be sure to read Paul’s forum post for the details on what add-ons they used to bring the site together.
Blog Entry
This is a on-going series of entries where I highlight EE experiences.
I love empowering clients with ExpressionEngine when they’ve been running a static site. Their excitement at the new control is contagious.
Kelly Sims via Twitter
Blog Entry
A little developer treat for you, courtesy of Leevi Graham at Newism: LG FirePHP. It allows you to use the FirePHP debugging framework while developing your EE site.
FirePHP enables you to log to your Firebug Console using a simple PHP method call. All data is sent via response headers
and will not interfere with the content on your page. FirePHP is ideally suited for AJAX development where clean JSON
and XML responses are required.
The extension is currently freely available at its repository on GitHub.
Blog Entry
Let’s celebrate the upcoming EE 2.0 beta, shall we?
For the next week (until 7/7/09), I’m offering free shipping within the USA for EE Code T-shirts. Now you can get a comfortable t-shirt for under $20. Ka-kow.
I haven’t forgotten about people outside of the USA. For the same limited time, international buyers get 50% off shipping ($4 instead of $8).
In case you haven’t heard about the t-shirts before, here’s a short description:
A playful, syntactically-correct t-shirt printed with white ink on a royal blue American Apparel Fine Jersey Short Sleeve t-shirt. These shirts will last longer, fit and feel better than most any shirt you’ve worn.
EE Code t-shirts are available in the EE Insider Shop.
Blog Entry
In the weekly EE 2.0 update, EllisLab CTO Derek Jones let out the news that they’re now focused on moving away from the private developer preview to a multi-stage EE 2.0 beta.
Basically, there will be 2 phases, with the first one being more restricted than the second.
The second phase will be a semi-open beta. Participants will be determined via an application process. We’ll post the details on what we’re looking for here on the EE Blog. We hope to keep the time between phases short, but please understand that the intention is to have a high-quality beta process, which may require extending the time between phases. We will keep the community informed here on the Blog, as always. And don’t worry, the criteria will not be as tightly focused as the developer preview. We will be pulling from all segments of our community.
Read the entire update for information about the EE 2.0 beta process.
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