Blog Entry
DigitalNoon posted an interesting way to create conversation-like comments on ExpressionEngine. The solution uses jQuery to place a small bit of markup in the comment body field that links to the comment where you clicked a “Reply” button.
<a href='#c_01'>@Michael Scott</a>
So, it’s an easy way to link to a comment without having to type it out manually. It’s not threaded comments, but a simpler implementation serving the similar goal of allowing commenters to easily address each other.
My only problem with it is that the code available doesn’t function at all when I turn off Javascript. I’m not saying it should work, but non-functioning buttons shouldn’t be on the page. So, this is something to consider if you have an audience that may not enable Javascript and decide to implement this.
DigitalNoon offers up all of the code (available in the entry or as a download) and a full tutorial on how to get up and running. Maybe it’s something you can use for your next project?
Blog Entry
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!
Blog Entry
I’m really enjoying all of the interesting and helpful EE Insider Tips that have been coming in; I’ve been learning a lot of new stuff. From time to time I’ll share a tip that I’ve found helpful, so here’s one for you.
Yesterday user JonnyUK added a nice tip on making sure your dynamic lists don’t leave behind ul tags when there is no content to display.
The problem occurs when there are actually no results/entries returned for whatever reason. This then leaves you with an empty and incorrectly formatted list…
Read his entire tip: Make sure to format/code your dynamic lists properly
If you find it helpful like I did, be sure to mark it so!
Blog Entry
The ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter Conference in Leiden, Netherlands has launched its website and is now taking early bird registration. If you want to meet up with a fine crew of ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter experts, Leiden is the place to be on October 22 and 23 2009.
I have the wonderful pleasure of speaking at the conference along with an impressive cast of characters like Leevi Graham, Veerle Pieters, Mike Boyink and Brandon Kelly.
Early bird tickets are available until August 1st. After that you have to cough up an extra 100 Euros.
I’m looking forward to meeting the European community and hope to see you there, too.
Blog Entry
Congrats to Jonathan Longnecker of Fortyseven Media, who is the winner of the first of 5 EE Code T-shirts that I’ll be giving away over the next few weeks. Jonathan created a popular tip on making sure your website copyright date is always accurate.
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!
Blog Entry
This is a on-going series of entries where I highlight EE experiences.
Honestly, ExpressionEngine, will you marry me and my wife?
Marc Amos via Twitter
How-to Article
Editors Note: I’d like to welcome Sean Smith as the newest guest author on EE Insider. Sean is a Canadian web developer based in Seoul, South Korea. He is an avid ExpressionEngine fan and runs EEforums4You, which helps other EE developers skin the Forum module. If you want to know more about Sean he can be found on Twitter @createsean or in a coffeeshop drinking coffee.
When talking to web developers it seems that the overwhelming majority are Mac users. That certainly seems to be the case in the ExpressionEngine community, but there are still a large number of developers using Windows XP, Vista or soon Windows 7. This article will discuss several tools and applications that are essential for developers using the Windows platform.
Read the Article
Blog Entry
It’s only been a few days since launching EE Insider Tips and we already have a lot of great, helpful tips in the system.
Here are some that I’ve “marked as helpful:”
If you haven’t already created an account and added in your own helpful tips, what are you waiting for? I’m giving away free EE Code T-shirts to some of the most helpful tips. See my blog post about it for details.
Happy tipping! (erm, or something)
Blog Entry
Tired of copying sites via (S)FTP and then editing files directly on the server? Do you wish you could keep a current snapshot of the site files in a safe version control repository and then deploy out changes as needed?
Well, Hivelogic’s Dan Benjamin has written an exhaustive tutorial on how to deploy your ExpressionEngine websites with GitHub and Capistrano (a deployment tool created for deploying Ruby on Rails sites).
Here’s Dan’s summary:
Many people are familiar with the advantages of using Git and GitHub to manage their projects and source code, but deploying an ExpressionEngine installation for deployment in this way can be a bit tricky. This article details the Capistrano recipe I’ve created specifically for automating the management and deployment of an ExpressionEngine website, with provisions for maintaining uploaded content across deployments, omitting unwanted content from the repository, setting the correct permissions, and more. The recipe also handles creating the server-side directories you’ll need to accomplish these tasks in a completely automated way.
Go expand your EE toolbelt and deploy your sites in a powerful way!
How-to Article
Editors Note: I’d like to welcome back Kenny Meyers as a guest author on EE Insider. Kenny is a web developer at Seattle, WA based Blue Flavor. He loves ExpressionEngine & CodeIgniter for their “less is more” approach and the ability to generate good, clean standards-compliant markup. He will be writing a series of articles on building a simple web application with CodeIgniter.
In my previous article, we went over the basics of CodeIgniter. Now we’re going to actually build something. For this four-part series we’ll build a tumblelog using many of the features CodeIgniter has built-in as well as third-party libraries.
Let’s get started.
Read the Article
Blog Entry
Yesterday, I unveiled a new feature: EE Insider Tips. While Tips is something I had thought about doing since earlier this year and have been slowly building out since then, it was a small group of people that pitched in the last few weeks to help me refine the site section, find bugs, and make it better.
So, a special thank you to the EE Insider Tips testers:
Thank you!
Blog Entry
Kevin Shoesmith (Factory Interactive, EE Roadshow) posed a question in the forums about a custom search module:
We’re basing this module on custom search code we wrote for a recent project when we realized we needed more than what EE’s Advanced Search could provide, but didn’t want to battle a Solr implementation.
[...]
So, we ask: what kind of features do you need in enhanced search for ExpressionEngine?
If you’ve found yourself wanting more out of search, give Kevin and Factory Interactive your feedback and wishlist.
Blog Entry
Creator of the SL Freshview Subscribe (for CampaignMonitor) extension Stephen Lewis of Experience Internet has released another email marketing extension for ExpressionEngine: SL MailChimp Subscribe
SL MailChimp Subscribe makes it easy to subscribe new members of your ExpressionEngine-powered website to one or more MailChimp mailing lists.
With the extension you can automatically add members to MailChimp mailing lists, “specify ‘opt-in triggers’ to allow a member to control which lists he is added to” and “associate custom ExpressionEngine member profile fields with MailChimp Interest Groups and Merge Variables, on a list-by-list basis.”
I’m not a MailChimp customer, so I have not tested or used this extension. I have, however, used Stephen’s SL Freshview Subscribe extension and recommend it.
Blog Entry
Today I’m opening up a new feature on EE Insider. Please say hello to EE Insider Tips, a collection of community-created mini tutorials on ExpressionEngine.
Right now there are only a handful of tips in the system to get started, but I know that you will jump in and contribute your tips.
Share your tips
The idea is simple. We all have little tips and tricks about developing websites with ExpressionEngine, but not always a place where we can share them with others and make them easy to find.
EE Insider Tips allows you to create a mini how-to, share a code snippet or development philosophy.
Find Tips
It’s easy to find the information you’re looking for by using the search, browsing by tags or viewing the tips the community has found most helpful.
Save Helpful Tips
If you find tips that are useful and helpful, you don’t want to lose track of them.
You can easily keep track of the tips you like by marking them “helpful” and then later referencing your Helpful Tips right on your EE Insider Tips dashboard.
Find a tip you like and never lose track of it.
Contribute and Win!
Over the next two weeks, I’m going to award a free EE Code T-shirt to five different people who contribute tips. In order to qualify you have to add at least 3 tips and one of those has to be deemed (by me) to be excellent and helpful. Winners will be notified by email.
Anyone can view tips, but contributing to EE Insider Tips, marking tips as Helpful and other features require a free account.
Thank You, Solspace
Finally, I want to thank Solspace for sponsoring EE Insider Tips. I used several of their add-ons to make EE Insider Tips possible and they’ve been extremely helpful when I ran into implementation issues. Thank you!
Blog Entry
It’s always nice to see how other people work with ExpressionEngine and Chad Crowell of Web Inception offered up a large list of the EE add-ons he uses to get started with a project.
Chad doesn’t enable every extension or module, but finds it useful to have the add-on files in the project already in case they’re needed.
I start each ExpressionEngine site with a much larger bank of add-ons than most (if not all) of the blog posts you have read along this topic. My point of view is that it doesn’t hurt to have them in place in the file system of a website, and if I need them, it’s much quicker to just enable them and get back to work.
It’s a great list and you’ll probably come across add-ons that you haven’t seen before.
Blog Entry
Jonathan Longnecker at Fortyseven Media wrote up an excellent how-to for creating custom category URL structures.
The method was born out of their work on a furniture website where the requirement was to be able to navigate up the URL from the individual product view and see all products in a category and then all categories.
So, if you have a URL like this (from their example):
http://site.com/products/sofas/10-123/
If the user removes the product ID (“10-123”), all of the sofas should display and if the category (“sofas”) is removed, all categories should display. This isn’t possible with the standard EE setup, but this article by Fortseven Media is an excellent solution to the problem.
Blog Entry
While helping a colleague with an Multiple Site Manager issue on MediaTemple, I came across this thread in the EE forums: How-to setup the MSM on Mediatemple’s DV 3.0.
User “nek4life” wrote up some clear instructions on what you need to do to get up and running with the Multiple Site Manager. Essentially, you need to disable a couple of PHP options to get things working.
Hopefully anyone that is a customer of MediaTemple and runs EE MSM will find this helpful at some point.
Blog Entry
Update: This project is no longer available. See ExpressionEngine Starter Files for something similar.
Kenny Meyers of Blue Flavor has created an easy way for you to add documentation to your EE client sites: EE Documentation.
EE Documentation is a group of templates, css and images that you can use to build documentation for your client installs. The idea actually spawned by one Mr. Ryan Irelan and his excellent ExpressionEngine Screencasts. In particular, his episode 12 screencast about preparing sites for clients.
You get (for free) a set of styled templates, print stylesheet and a clean, simple interface that you can easily implement into ExpressionEngine using Kenny’s easy-to-follow instructions.
To get a better idea of what the templates look like, check out the demo of EE Documentation.
Blog Entry
If you have a cat, or have ever strolled down the pet aisle at the grocery store, you probably have seen Feline Peline; the green bags of pine cat litter line the shelves.
When I saw this particular site come onto my radar, I was amused because I’ve been using this cat litter for my cat for a few years. It’s great to see that the site is powered by ExpressionEngine.
The site was built by Concentric Marketing and the redesign was launched in 2007. Jason Clewell, Director of Interactive at Concentric Marketing, was nice enough to share some information about the site. For example, redoing the site in ExpressionEngine helped the site build community and grow.
Since moving to the new design and implementing dynamically generated content, we have moved closer to our goal of generating a community that shares the same concerns as Feline Pine – feline health. Since the redesign the site has seen monthly traffic grow by nearly 600%.
Why was EE chosen for this project?
EE was chosen for its flexibility and rapid development capabilities. Prior to redesign the Feline Pine site was pretty much a static brochure site. When we approached the redesign we really wanted to incorporate more interactive, community based components. Feline Pine is not just a cat litter but a company dedicated to the well being of cats everywhere. EE allowed us to rapidly develop a blog for our in-house veterinarian, Dr. Gaspar; develop forums for our community to ask and answer questions; collect customer reviews to better understand the product; and have some fun with the “Cat of the Month” feature.
What add-ons did you use?
Thanks to Jason for the information about the Feline Pine site!
Blog Entry
Won’t you join us tonight at 9PM?
Learn all about the chat on the EE Help Chat page. See you tonight in the chatroom!
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