Blog Entry
Earlier this month, the add-on repository Devot:ee opened its doors with the goal of being the place to find ExpressionEngine add-ons.
Ryan Masuga, the man behind Devot:ee, has created a website which catalogs almost 400 extensions, plugins and modules.
You can search for add-ons, browse by tag, rankings or favorites. But the most impressive feature for EE developers is the ability to browse extensions by the hook they use. This is especially helpful for new EE developers looking for example code for a certain hook.
Want to find out how other developers are using the member_member_login_single hook? Do a quick search, download some add-ons and dive into the code.
Of course Devot:ee can’t do this alone; the site needs your help in submitting add-ons that are not yet cataloged, ranking add-ons you’ve used and supporting the site by signing up for a subscription account (I have my membership).
If that wasn’t enough, Devot:ee also has bunches of swell prizes to giveaway, but you have to register to have a chance to win!
Blog Entry
While we may not be one of the 10 largest sites, we’re glad to see some huge online properties powered by ExpressionEngine.
Travis Smith of Hop Studios has put together a spreadsheet of the The 10 Largest ExpressionEngine sites. There are probably a lot of them that you hadn’t heard of before. I’m guessing that there are even more large sites that run EE that we don’t know about (I know of at least one very large media site). Not everyone company or organization wants to make public what platform they use to power their web presence.
The impetus behind this article was to give you, the EE designer and developer, the ability to show your potential clients why choosing EE is not a risky decision and that it has a proven track record of handing massive amounts of traffic.
Thanks to Hop Studios for putting together this helpful resource.
Blog Entry
I’m getting reports that the first batch of t-shirts I shipped out last week have begun arriving at their destinations. There are many lucky EE users around the world who can now wear some EE code.
If you, too, want to sport this comfortable and durable American Apparel t-shirt, there are shirts available in all sizes (S, M, L, XL, XXL) and they’re hand packed and shipped by me.
Visit the EE Insider Shop.
Blog Entry
As promised last week, here is another personal website running ExpressionEngine. This time I bring you Anton Peck, a designer and illustrator. Anton recently re-launched his site on ExpressionEngine and uses it to display and promote his illustration and power his art blog and journal.
I asked Anton about his experience building his site with ExpressionEngine and he was kind enough to provide some background.
Why did you choose ExpressionEngine?
I chose EE after using just about every other system out there. I pretty much had three options:
- Systems that were too narrow. Blogging platforms that needed massive “hacking” to turn them into something else.
- Systems that seemed powerful enough, but appeared to have just been abandoned, and had very little community behind them.
- Systems that far too complex in features and structure, requiring heavier PHP lifting than I was willing to do.
EE seemed to fit me well and had none of the above drawbacks. As a designer, I liked the language. I also liked not having to hack it right out of the box to do what I wanted. As my skills grew, I could let the system (and how I build my site) grow with me. What sold me was the community, I couldn’t believe how supportive everyone was when it came to working with EE. It’s like a family with them.
What challenges did you face while building your site?
The only real challenge (and even then it wasn’t too bad at all) I had was altering the stock RSS template into something that looked like how it needed to in various feed readers. This included making sure the site name showed up, proper links, and the ability to merge multiple weblogs with custom fields into the XML stream by using conditionals to test for the existence of a {summary}.
Did you use any add-ons? If so, which ones?
No add-ons for me. I actually purged as much as I could (I used to run quite a few) and developed the site as clever as possible with just the built-in goods.
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!
How-to Article
Many of us have been in this situation. You launch a snazzy new website and once the traffic starts to hit it, the site drops to its knees and begins crawling its way through the day. Your client or boss starts emailing and then calling, asking: “Why is the site so slow? Can you fix it?”
With a little planning and an eye towards EE template coding best practices, you can prevent the situation I described above.
Read the Article
Blog Entry
There aren’t a lot of details available yet, but Europeans save the date. October 22-23 2009 is The ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter Conference in Leiden, Netherlands.
If you want to be notified when there is more information, you can sign up to the mailing list.
Blog Entry
I’ve touted FieldFrame by Brandon Kelly as a “true developers tool” and now it’s gotten even better.
Today, Brandon released FieldFrame 1.1, which includes support for Stand Alone Entry Forms. Yes, that’s right. Your FieldFrame fieldtypes will now also work in your SAEFs.
Complete list of changes in FieldFrame 1.1:
FieldFrame fieldtypes now work in SAEF
added a Max Rows setting to FF Matrix
FF Matrix fields now work in IE 6/7/8
added Label setting to FF Checkbox
bug fixes
FieldFrame 1.1. is free and available now for download.
Blog Entry
In the forums, “Frychiko” asked if it’s possible to display a user’s email address with their comment.
I was wondering if it is possible to display an email address for each comment displayed under an weblog post.
I run weekly giveaways and it is quite annoying having to find emails by SQL queries in the admin section of the control panel. Last time I checked the documentation there was no option to display the email address.
Mark Bowen came up with a simple query using the Query Module to fetch the email address of the commenter.
My suggestion would be to wrap that email address in a conditional that only displays it for Super Admins and not the entire world (including spammers).
Blog Entry
I like to bring to your attention a lot of different types of EE-powered websites. I haven’t done a lot of personal blogs, so I think it’s time to do that. The next couple of sites I feature on EE in the Wild will be personal sites.
Today I want to introduce you to Jim Renaud. Jim is a freelance designer and used ExpressionEngine to build his personal blog. He described his new blog in his entry “Credit where credit is due,” but I also asked him to share some more EE-specific information about his new personal site.
Why did you choose ExpressionEngine?
I chose ExpressionEngine because I feel it’s the easiest way for a person with front-end experience to make a website with a high quality and flexible content management system. For the most part it allows a designer like myself to design a site without thinking of how the CMS is gonna ruin the vision of my design.
I designed the site in Photoshop and created the entire PSD files for three pages: the homepage, the full-post/comments page and the search results page. I then sliced and diced the files like I would any site and coded the site to work with static content in the browser. Then when I get it working the way that I want it, I simply started replacing the static content with ExpressionEngine tags. I don’t have to worry about creating themes or finding tons of 3rd party extensions to do basic stuff.
What was your experience building your blog with EE?
I wanted to build a site and launch it very quickly. My current site was done very quickly. I spent about three days from finished code to implementing the CMS. Never once did adding the EE tags return results that were unexpected or broke my other code.
Another strength of EE is that there are tons of more add-ons that I want to add to my site eventually like Live Search, Categories and Tag Clouds and others to grow my site. The only education I’ve used to learn to build this site came from the EE Screencasts and the occasional EE Wiki or EE Knowledge Base for things not covered in the screencasts. I am very happy with the process and glad I switched from Wordpress to ExpressionEngine.
For add-ons, Jim used Akismet, eeFlickr and EE Gravatar.
Blog Entry
As is always the case on Wednesdays, tonight is the weekly, free EE Help Chat.
Consider this your invitation to come chat ExpressionEngine for one hour tonight and we’ll try to answer your questions.
Since recent chats have been completely filled with lots of new chatters left out, I’ve increased the chat room limit from 12 to 25. Hopefully, this will allow both newbies and regulars alike to enjoy an hour of EE geekery.
Learn all about the chat on the EE Help Chat page. See you tonight in the chatroom.
Blog Entry
Just when you thought you couldn’t get enough EE in your life, I’m here to help. I’m happy to announce that starting immediately a new line of high quality t-shirts featuring some funny EE code are available from EE Insider.
Say hello to the EE Code T-shirt.
The quirky code is printed in white ink on royal blue high quality American Apparel Fine Jersey short sleeve t-shirts. The t-shirts are also syntactically correct by featuring a closing tag on the back of the shirt.
Sizes available are S, M, L, XL and XXL. There are limited quantities of each size, so if you want one, order sooner rather than later to ensure your size is available.
All payments are handled through PayPal (no account required) and are personally packed and shipped by me.
Visit the EE Insider Shop to place your order.
How-to Article
Dynamic Parameters are a documented feature of the ExpressionEngine weblog entry tag pair but it’s something you might not have used before or even know about. In this article we’ll walk through two simple ways to allow your content to be filtered using Dynamic Parameters.
Read the Article
Blog Entry
From Derek Allard on Twitter I found out about some really nice CodeIgniter OS X folder Icons by Vicente Russo Neto.
You could use Get Info on any icon and paste these icons in as replacements or use a great app like CandyBar to manage custom icons (and more).
Blog Entry
This is a on-going series of entries where I highlight EE experiences.
Dear Wordpress, I’m leaving you for ExpressionEngine because he doesn’t make me cry & he does everything better than you. Goodbye forever.
Luc Latulippe via Twitter.
Blog Entry
I don’t do this often, so please allow me to address some EE Insider site news.
As you can see on the right side and top of the website, EE Insider serves ads to help cover the costs of running the site. It’s a unique opportunity for companies and individuals to share their products and services to a very savvy and sophisticated group of ExpressionEngine developers and designers. I approve every ad that appears so as to make sure it is something that the readers of EE Insider would find useful and appropriate.
There are currently three different ad spaces available on the site itself (all of which are sold out for May), but I wanted to bring attention to the opportunity to sponsor the EE Insider RSS feed.
RSS feed sponsorships are sold weekly and consists of two messages (once at the beginning of the week and once at the end) that appear in the feed only. The sponsorship message describes the product or service and includes a link a page of your choosing.
If you’d like to sponsor the EE Insider feed, please get in touch.
Blog Entry
Shape Shed has released a simple shell script, which automatically sets the proper file and folder permissions required by ExpressionEngine.
The file sets all the necessary permissions on a default installation of ExpressionEngine and allows you to specify a custom system folder name if you have set one.
The script is free and available for download now.
How-to Article
So, you’re starting out building your first site with ExpressionEngine and you’re thinking to yourself: “I wish there was an easy one-page document I could use to reference some of the most commonly used ExpressionEngine tags and variables.” Well, you’re in luck.
Read the Article
Blog Entry
Do you have a nagging question or problem with ExpressionEngine?
Would you like to get help from a group of enthusiastic EE developers and users?
Yes? Well, come join us for the weekly EE Help Chat, a free one-hour chat where you can get help with your issues or pick the brains of the other EE users.
Learn all about the chat on the EE Help Chat page. See you tonight in the chatroom.
Blog Entry
Irish Women in Business is a gorgeous new EE-powered website that is “a networking initiative for Irish women and men in business from startups to thriving enterprises.”
“Mandarax” posted about the launch in the EE forums and was kind of enough to include some of the add-ons used: a small mix of Solspace, Leevi Graham and Mark Huot offerings.
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