Blog Entry
George Ornbo released a new ExpressionEngine module today called Twit-ee.
Twit-ee fetches data from the Twitter API and allows you to display it in your ExpressionEngine templates. A variety of tags are available allowing you to show your own tweets, your friends tweets and more.
You can get your own timeline, the public timeline, replies to you, your favorites, your friends and your followers. With all of those options, you should be able to find what you need in this module.
I downloaded, installed and tested this module and it works as expected.
Blog Entry
Jason Hudnutt of Invoked Projects has started an interesting EE Forum thread called ExpressionEngine & Best Security Practices. He is soliciting your input on what you to to make you ExpressionEngine installation as secure as possible.
I was curious as to what the “paranoid” EE users do for security on their live ExpressionEngine websites. Such as tweaking permissions and etc. I know EllisLab takes security to heart but I want to know what the community does to ensure their install is secure.
There are the obvious things like changing the name of the system directory, but what else do you do?
Blog Entry
This is a on-going series of entries where I highlight EE experiences.
Have I ever mentioned I love ExpressionEngine? Because I do. I love it more than Vince loves his Slap Chop.
Steven Ovadia via Twitter.
If you aren’t using multiple extensions from Brandon Kelly and Leevi Graham, then you’re probably not using ExpressionEngine right.
Ian Beck via Twitter
Blog Entry
Solspace announced on Tuesday that a new version of their User Authors extension is available. This extension, um, extends the functionality of their very powerful and useful User Module, allowing you to add multiple authors to an entry. Here’s a description of the update:
Some new features include the ability to search for all available authors by entering “*“ as a wildcard, and the ability to show the “primary” author first in your front end templates. Most noticeably, we’ve added the User:Entries function, which mimics the Weblog:Entries loop, and allows you to display all weblog entries authored by specified authors (yes, multiple at a time too, if you wish!).
The extension remains $14.95 and requires the User module.
How-to Article
A frequent question in the forums is how to easily move a site from a staging or local server to a production server without everything breaking. While site migration is out of the scope of this article, I do want to address one simple way you can make moving sites easier: create a robust config.php file.
In recent versions of ExpressionEngine, the config.php file has become leaner as more of the installation settings have been moved into the database. This can be a inconvenience when moving a site to a different server because it requires making so many database changes and isn’t as portable as file.
Luckily, we can still use the config.php file to override settings in the database.
Read the Article
Blog Entry
Responding to a request in the EE forums, Cody Lundquist (CodysPlace.com in the EE forums), put together a simple, yet useful, extension called Goto Comment. The extension automatically scrolls down to the last submitted comment, so the commenter is greeted with the published version of the comment they just submitted. You have to place a single EE tag inside your comment entries tag pair and the extension does the rest.
I’ve tested this extension and it works as expected. I haven’t tested it, however, in every possible situation (e.g. with comment approval turned on). I did notice that it produces an empty anchor tag, which will probably not pass validation tests.
Blog Entry
Seattle-based architecture firm Mithun has recently launched a new website running ExpressionEngine. The site was built by the talented crew at Blue Flavor. Web Developer Kenny Meyers filled me in on the details of the project. Mithun “focuses on building sustainable and wonderful buildings. A very talented group of people that wanted to move architecture away from flash-based sites and onto content-filled, information-sharing standards site.” The site features a lot of the projects that Mithun works on, including the very cool Project Green.
Here’s what Kenny says about the site:
The site is a special combination of jQuery, ExpressionEngine and tons of media. There were a couple interesting problems to solve with the site, in particular the media management would be quite complex. The site makes heavy use of Mark Huot’s wonderful file extension for uploading media per project. It was customized a little to allow limit to be a parameter. Otherwise is their very little custom code involved except for some control structures.
Another interesting problem, related to this, that ExpressionEngine helped solve was the slideshow metadata. On each project page there are different slideshows that automatically play. These are a combination of the jQuery cycle plugin and some custom slideshow code. They pull metadata from an XML file, generated by PHP and EE templating language, as there is currently no great way to handle this without creating multiple sections.
The Solspace tags module is used in the site for content metadata. This is used along with some PHP to generate the tagging visual data on the projects page: http://www.mithun.com/projects/. Each project and knowledge article has tagging and some have two category groups attached to them. I hit a wall a couple times trying to solve display problems with EE and categories but eventually round the right conditional control structure that was needed.
Mithun has an iPhone site (not a mobile one, just iPhone) so that Mithun architects could quickly show off their work. It’s built using an ee template group that sits by itself at http://www.mithun.com/mobile. The site allows you to browse all the materials and projects on the main site.
The site was designed by Tom Watson, who had to deal with a giant company review board at Mithun; a company of architects who have opinions about design (which you can read on their site). The focus was on all the beautiful imagery and media and Tom did a great job of creating something usable and beautiful to wrap around their great content.
How-to Article
Editors Note: I’d like to welcome web developer Brandon Kelly as a guest author on EE Insider. Brandon is also active in the EE developer community, having released five EE Add-ons, including the popular extension Playa.
As an extension developer, I want to make it as easy as possible for people to track updates to my extensions. I tend to promote major updates on the EE Extensions Forum and Twitter, and LG Addon Updater carries a lot of weight as well. Recently I decided to open up a new avenue for tracking updates: Change Log feeds. A lot of people use feed readers to subscribe to the websites they enjoy, so why not use them to track extension updates as well?
Read the Article
Blog Entry
For all the web designers out there, I thought I’d pass along that Mark Boulton has released his new e-book on designing on the web: A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web. This book isn’t just for designers; anyone who works on the web will find it useful and, dare I say, practical.
A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web aims to teach you techniques for designing your website using the principles of graphic design. Featuring five sections, each covering a core aspect of graphic design: Getting Started, Research, Typography, Colour, and Layout. Learn solid graphic design theory that you can simply apply to your designs, making the difference from a good design to a great one.
The book is only 12 pounds (just shy of 17 USD) comes only in PDF format and is available now. If you’re not ready to buy, you should check out the free sample available for download or browse Mark’s Flickr Photostream for some snapshots of the book while in production.
Blog Entry
This is a on-going series of entries where I highlight EE experiences.
Love the ExpressionEngine community - everytime I get stuck with a new site feature there’s always a forum post/add on that sorts it all out
Simon Mills via Twitter.
Blog Entry
Newism is celebrating their recent launch of the new Campaign Monitor website by holding a contest that is rich with prizes. Over the next several weeks, they’re going to detail how they built the Campaign Monitor website with ExpressionEngine and in the process you can enter your name and get a chance to win one of three very, very sweet prizes. The series of articles at Newism will “cover all of the cool bits from the Campaign Monitor build, with an emphasis on the ExpressionEngine implementation and front-end XHTML / CSS tips.”
I wish I could play, too, but I’m taking part by offering an entire set of my ExpressionEngine training videos as part of the grand prize. It’s free to enter, so be sure to read the rules and enter your name. Good luck!
Blog Entry
Nashville based online marketing firm Paramore|Redd recently launched a new website on ExpressionEngine. It’s a really well-done site (be sure to check out the bios), so I emailed to ask if they would reveal how the site was built in ExpressionEngine. Brad Haynes, a Senior Designer/Developer at the firm was kind of enough to write up a little bit about the site.
After having used Expression Engine for twenty or so websites, we couldn’t wait to drop our new site on top of its flexible foundation. In combination with some Leevi Graham add-ons - and multiple other tweaks, touches and near anxiety attacks - we were able to extend the core of Expression Engine to suit our needs.
The site is significant for both its modular layout and *tasteful* uses of javascript. We really wanted a great user experience. Tests show that legibility increases with dark text on a light background. However, imagery looks much better on a dark background. I explored that idea by implementing both light and dark templates… with textual content on the light template and imagery-related content on the dark template. EE’s flexibility made this a breeze.
The site uses a myriad of EE Add-ons:
Blog Entry
It’s Wednesday and that means tonight at 9 PM Eastern is EE Help Chat, a one-hour chat session where you can bring your EE questions and ideas. EE users of all levels are welcome, so if you’re a beginner, don’t be shy!
To learn more about the EE Help Chat or to read past transcripts, check out the special EE Help Chat page.
See you tonight.
Blog Entry
Ryan Masuga has posted an excellent article over at devot:ee about the state of how EE add-ons are released, announced, tracked (or not), maintained and improved. Ryan walks through the current methods of distributing your EE add-ons.
The forum posting method is the most widely used, yet, in my opinion, the most ineffective. Ryan agrees:
Many times, the developer won’t overwrite the file in the 1st thread post with a new version, but will attach updated files to a later post, that may be buried 7 pages down the line, forcing users to wade through any number of off-topic comments, support requests, and other detritus.
[...]
There’s no guideline for titling the thread, or the file(s), either. My suggestion has always been to prefix the thread title with the type of add-on you’re posting, such as “Extension: MD Dulee Noted”, or “Plugin: Weegee”, but not everyone follows that.
There’s also the Official EE Add-On Library. I, like Ryan, tend to look there last when searching for an EE add-on. It’s rarely updated and most of the developers I tend to download from don’t have their add-ons listed.
And then there’s Github. A group of us have been using Github as a way to track and share add-ons and other EE code. The community isn’t for everyone (it’s developer-focused), but having a central repository is a great thing. There is a free Github account and you can host as many public projects as you’d like.
It’s a good time for Ryan to begin this conversation. As the EE user base grows ,there’s no better time than now to fix this scattering of EE add-ons. The problem will only get worse with EE 2.0. We will see more people developing add-ons because suddenly we’ll have joined the CodeIgniter developers community.
Now is the time to get organized as a community. This isn’t something that has to be lead by EllisLab. Let’s let them focus on building great software. The community can more than handle this task.
I, for one, am very supportive of Ryan’s undertaking and hope he can use devot:ee as a tool to organize this beautiful mess of add-ons. Give the whole article a read and post any feedback.
Blog Entry
Ben from PutYourLightsOn has released a new module called Exchange Rates, which allows you to easily convert currency and get the latest exchange rates (updated at least every hour) right inside your EE templates. This module is exciting to me because it’s in a different vein than most of the modules I come across.
The module has two functions: get current exchange rate for two currencies
{exp:exchange_rates:get_rate from="EUR" to="USD"}
or converting a certain amount from one currency to another.
{exp:exchange_rates:convert amount="900" from="USD" to="EUR"}
The rates are pulled from the Eurpean Central Bank via the handy XML provided by the bank.
I downloaded and tested out the module and it works as described on the information page and in the documentation.
Blog Entry
fabEE has surfaced. What is it? A planned EE add-on that will let you use the Facebook Connect API to allow a site member to link their Facebook account to your EE website. In return, your site gets access to their Facebook profile.
The site for fabEE is still under development, but there is a sign-up form there, if you’re interested in being considered for beta testing phase. The final release will be a commercial product, although a price has not been announced.
How-to Article
Last week I showed you how to rebuild an EE sandbox using a simple shell script that pulled from a database dump and tarball of ExpressionEngine files that create a fresh install of ExpressionEngine. Well, now here’s another shell script that I think you might find very useful.
Read the Article
Blog Entry
You may have been hearing something about SmoothFunction, a not-yet-launched EE add-on website. They’re tagline is: “EE addons for cool people” and they’ve put up a splash page with a prompt to sign up to be notified when they launch. But what is this site? Who’s behind it and when will it launch? I asked the two guys behind the site to send me some background.
SmoothFunction is the collaboration of Tom Jaeger and Jack McDade — we have several modules in development, the flagship of which is “Boomerang” — fully integrated email marketing with templates, WYSIWYG support, reports, bounce detection, click and open rates, test sends, etc. It may not be quite as robust as CampaignMonitor, but you buy it once and you’re DONE.
If you don’t need a full-fledged email marketing module, they also plan to offer a “lite” version of the module:
We’re also releasing a “lite” version of the module without the tracking, reports and advanced features, but including templates, test sends and WYSIWYG support. We’re calling that “Frisbee” and will be released before Boomerang.
Other add-ons they have planned is an Ad Manager that will do all of basic tracking and an add-on that will offer “more robust Google Maps/Geocoding integration.”
I asked them when they plan to launch and the response was that it will be soon. If you’re looking to keep up with what SmoothFunction has planned, be sure to stop by their site and sign up to be notified. As they launch add-ons, I’ll try to review and cover them here on EE Insider.
Blog Entry
EllisLab may be working on EE 2.0 but yesterday they signaled (again) that they have no intentions of neglecting the EE 1.6.x branch. They released version 1.6.7, which they’ve described as a “security and maintenance release” in their announcement blog post.
We want all of our users to know that we’re committed to continuing to support 1.x even as our efforts are thrust fully into 2.0. ExpressionEngine 1.x is a platform you can continue to use and rely on now and in the future.
So, are there any goodies in this release?
For developers there are two new hooks for the weblog entries: weblog_entries_query_result and weblog_entries_row. So, what they do? Both allow you previously unavailable access to hook into the weblog entries tag pair. The first hook gives you complete access to the entire query object to do with as you please and the second hook lets you alter each entry’s data. I haven’t yet played around with the new hooks, but if you have, please post a comment with any initial thoughts or ideas how you think these new hooks will be helpful to EE developers.
Among various bug fixes that you can read through in the Release Notes, there is also a nice addition of the {parent_id} tag for categories, so you can easily get the parent of any category.
Blog Entry
Another week has gone by and it’s once again time for the weekly EE Help Chat. The EE Help Chat is all about answering your questions and helping you learn more about ExpressionEngine. It welcomes people of all levels of experience with EE. Learn more about it on the EE Help Chat page.
See you tonight!
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