Over a series of 8 videos, watch and learn as Ryan builds an entire ExpressionEngine website from beginning to end. Get started now.
Do you need an easy way to display the correct file type icon next to a file download? A new extension from Republic Factory might come in handy.
The File Extension Icon extension “returns an icon or the file type as text for a specific file, based on the file’s extension.” Pretty straight-forward and a nice alternative to using PHP in your templates.
It’s free and available now.
Posted on Jun 30, 2009 by Ryan Irelan
Yesterday, Erskine Design released the Related Entries Module, a “re-loaded module version” of the Better Related Entries extension (Google cache version, as the URL redirects to the new Erskine article).
Erskine developer Glen Swinfield explains:
The module works by extending the EE weblog class, it runs a query to get related entries and inserts a pipe-separated list of the IDs of those entries into the tag parameters. It’s as if you had added the IDs yourself in the tag only it’s dynamically getting them for you.
Because the Ed_related class extends the EE Weblog class the ‘entries’ method is available and unaffected so all of the usual parameters can be used.
That part about using the usual parameters? Sweetness.
Read the entire article for a usage example, a minor warning and the download link.
Posted on Jun 30, 2009 by Ryan Irelan
Jason Morehead (winner of a free EE Code T-shirt), offered up a helpful EE Insider Tip for doing date comparisons, which includes comparing two date variables.
Very handy, indeed. Be sure to read the entire tip and if it’s helpful, mark it so!
Do you have some EE tips to share with the community? Check out EE Insider Tips, a community-powered mini how-to database. Create tips, edit tips, save tips and search tips. It’s a great resource for those little nuggets of EE information that may make the difference in your next project.
Posted on Jun 29, 2009 by Ryan Irelan
Web developer extraordinaire and EE Insider guest author, Kenny Meyers, recently launched his personal website Happy Magic Fun Time. In lieu of standard comments, he’s using hash tagged Twitter replies displayed with the appropriate blog entry.
Kenny is cleverly using the Twitter Search plugin from Lumis but acknowledges some immediate issues:
I’ve already seen problems arise with merely two articles to my humble name. The first and most significant problem is that I can’t remove the “RT”: This is twitter speak for Re-tweet, which despite the many who think it’s spam, is appreciated.
Another issue I’ve noticed is that links to the article-in-question show up. Though, like a young Charlie Kaufman I enjoy the meta commentary as much as anyone, it serves the audience and the other commenters little purpose. Grand as it is and as much as it feeds my ego (a vacuous space with a constant sucking noise), it is a bit difficult to maintain flow.
Read Kenny’s full how-to, Twitter Comment System, over at Happy Magic Fun Time.
Posted on Jun 29, 2009 by Ryan Irelan
So now that we have Building a blog with CodeIgniter, in order to make it lifestreamy, to make it tumble we need to add our delicious and twitter links to it. To do this, we’re going to employ an area outside of the MVC structure called “Libraries.”
Posted on Jun 26, 2009 by Kenny Meyers
It’s Wednesday and it’s on.
Tonight at 9 PM EDT (US) a group of EE experts, beginners and novices will all gather in a chat room to ask, answer and discuss questions about building websites with ExpressionEngine.
Won’t you join us?
Learn all about the chat on the EE Help Chat page. See you tonight in the chatroom!
Posted on Jun 24, 2009 by Ryan Irelan
The one-day conference in Seattle WA this October, EE Roadshow, opened up submissions for talks. If you have something you want to share with a group of EE users, write it up and apply.
We’ve got a venue (Seattle, WA) and a date (October 2, 2009). Now we’re looking for volunteers to speak on panels, moderate sessions or give presentations. Help us make this year’s conference the best it can be.
So, what are you waiting for? Submit your idea now. Deadline is June 30th.
Posted on Jun 22, 2009 by Ryan Irelan
“bo-oz” on the EE forums posted a new plugin called CP Access, that allows you to determine whether a user has CP access with a simple tag pair.
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{exp:cp_access}Only Visible to Members with CP Access{/exp:cp_access}
There are other ways to do this (that don’t require a plugin), but this is a handy, PHP-free way of checking for control panel access.
CP Access is free and available for download in the EE forums. I downloaded and tested the plugin in my EE sandbox running 1.6.7 and it worked as expected.
Posted on Jun 22, 2009 by Ryan Irelan
Geek Hut posted a helpful screencast tutorial on how to work with jQuery, JSON and CodeIgniter.
I shot this screen for those who are looking for an extremely simple explanation and demonstration for sending and receiving data asynchronously via jQuery Post and JSON. About two years ago I really struggled with this concept so I figure there are probably others who will find this information useful. I would have been extremely happy to find something like this when I was learning (and frustrated).
Posted on Jun 22, 2009 by Ryan Irelan
It’s inevitable. We all run into problems with ExpressionEngine or third party add-ons. Maybe there’s a bug or maybe you’re implementing something incorrectly or in a way that is not supported.
Looking for a solution you post to the developer’s forums, send an email or post to the EE forums. Of course you can’t just say “this add-on doesn’t work,” you have to be more specific, do a little homework and make sure the question hasn’t already been answered. Not only is it courteous but it also increases the chances of finding a solution to your problem.
Brandon Kelly, the developer behind popular add-ons Playa 2 and FieldFrame has written up an informative article on his site called: The Perfect Support Request. Brandon walks through a real support request he received where the customer did all of the right things along the way, like checking whether or not this issue came up before:
I can’t tell you how many times people ask me something that I’ve already answered time after time on Get Satisfaction. Very frustrating at first, but I’ve come to expect it. To see that Mahalie has actually taken the time to see if anyone else has had a similar issue, and logically deduced that hers is unique, is nothing short of fascinating.
It’s a worth a read to make sure you can be effective when reporting issues to EllisLab or add-on developers.
Posted on Jun 22, 2009 by Ryan Irelan
Erskine Design recently launched an iPhone version of their website and wrote up how they did this in ExpressionEngine. It’s a nice little trick using the path.php file.
We announced the launch of the iPhone version of the Erskine Design website on Tuesday. This alternative version of the site is located in a subdomain of the main erskinedesign.com domain, but both versions run on the same ExpressionEngine install. I thought there’d be a number of people out there who might be interested how I did it. So here you go…
Read the whole article: Create an Alternative Version of Your ExpressionEngine Website
Posted on Jun 17, 2009 by Ryan Irelan
AJ Penninga has a cool way to give clients an easy way to produce content and drop in images they’ve uploaded. He was nice enough to create a screencast that shows how he has a collection of add-ons set up to accomplish this.
I just made a screencast after a request on twitter to detail how I used these add ons to give my client WYSIWYG for text and drop in snippets for images in the content.
It also gives me alot of flexibility to resize, align, cache, etc images they upload too.
AJ used FF Matrix, LG Replace, LG TinyMCE and imgsizer to make it happen. Check out the video!
Posted on Jun 17, 2009 by Ryan Irelan
This is a on-going series of entries where I highlight EE experiences.
Expressionengine has made my life as a Web nut so much better!
Brian Klepper via Twitter
Posted on Jun 17, 2009 by Ryan Irelan
There is nothing in the world everyone wishes to hear more than your opinion. The primary vehicle for this is your blog. In the last article we began the process of building a tumblelog with CodeIgniter. In this, Part 2 of a four-part series, we will be building the blog in CodeIgniter.
Posted on Jun 17, 2009 by Kenny Meyers
Kenny Meyers (Blue Flavor and EE Insider guest author) had an itch and scratched it; he created a new extension that adds some additional detail on the Edit tab table in the EE control panel.
Enter Pinpoint, which adds the url_title field to the Edit page. This may come in handy if you find yourself with multiple entries with same the title; a quick and easy to way to tell those entries apart.
Posted on Jun 16, 2009 by Ryan Irelan
Last Friday I gave away another free EE Code T-shirt to a contributor to EE Insider Tips. Congratulations to Jason Morehead for winning and being the author of some excellent (and helpful!) Tips. The tip by Jason that people found the most helpful was his suggestion to create a performance indicator:
When setting up a site, I often create a performance indicator that displays the number of queries and the time it took for EE to generate the page. This is helpful for debugging purposes, to test caching, etc.
How can you win? Add at least three EE Insider Tips to the system and if one of them is helpful to me or a lot of others, you could win. The winner is up to me, but I’m heavily influenced by how helpful others find the tips. To create tips, you need to sign up for a free EE Insider account.
Looking forward to seeing your tips!
Posted on Jun 16, 2009 by Ryan Irelan
What do you get when you combine a Flickr EE plugin and a few jQuery plugins? A simple way to create a Flickr carousel on your ExpressionEngine website.
Darren Hoyt wrote up the quick tutorial (would’ve made a great EE Insider Tip!) on his blog. He came up this combination because:
Lately a few Expression Engine clients have needed to display their photostream dynamically in a way that’s compact and eye-catching, so the carousel format came to mind.
If you’d like to see what it looks like, Darren has posted a demo of the EE Flickr carousel.
Posted on Jun 16, 2009 by Ryan Irelan
There’s been a steady show of interest in having a second EE Help Chat that is at a time more convenient (read: not in the middle of the night) to EE developers living in Europe.
I’m all for this, but I need your help. Rather than schedule a chat at some arbitrary time, I thought I’d poll the community. So, what time (please use GMT) and day would be best for you to participate in a EE Help Chat?
Obviously, I won’t be able to accommodate every schedule out there, but if we can find a time that seems to make sense for the majority, that would be great.
Leave your day and time suggestions in the comments or by emailing me.
Posted on Jun 15, 2009 by Ryan Irelan
The EE Roadshow is back this year and this time it will take place in Seattle, WA on October 2, 2009. If you want to keep up with the plans for the conference, join the email list or follow EE Roadshow on Twitter.
To get an idea of what the EE Roadshow was like last year, you can read about it in the archived EE Roadshow 2008 site.
Posted on Jun 11, 2009 by Ryan Irelan
Dan Benjamin, who recently moved his site to ExpressionEngine has jumped into the EE add-on world with his first plugin, Shrimp, which lets you easily create short URLs for your entries.
Shrimp is different from similar plugins in that it provides features like customizable link generation, access to the shortened URL for your own custom links, smart meta tags which hide themselves on non-entry pages, access to the relative URL (without the protocol or domain), and more, without any unnecessary database access.
Dan has created a special page where you can learn all about the plugin. It’s a free download, available on his site.
Posted on Jun 11, 2009 by Ryan Irelan