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Today EllisLab announced that it is adding a Grid field type to ExpressionEngine:
Today’s developer preview for ExpressionEngine 2.7 includes a feature that was previously only available through the third-party add-on market: a fieldtype that allows authors to used grouped fieldtypes to publish any number of rows of related content within an entry. We’re calling it Grid, and it’s great for photo galleries, addresses, product details, baseball statistics and more.
More on the rest of their announcement and thinking later. I’m sure you have an opinion on it. We do, too.
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Your work or your life? Do you have to choose? For the latest EE Podcast, Carl Smith of nGen Works joins the show to share stories and tips about how he prioritized his personal, family and business goals for a more satisfying career and life. We talk about the difference between balance and focus, setting priorities and taking the time to think before acting (or reacting). Carl also offers his perspective on time-wasters, knowing when to say “yes” or “no,” and dealing with problem clients and projects. Tune in now!
Thanks to EE Coder for sponsoring!
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- Playa Links by The Outfit
Playa Links is free fieldtype meant to accompany Pixel & Tonic’s Playa fieldtype.
- Entry Mapper ($) by DevDemon
Entry Mapper is the first absolute positioning entry system for ExpressionEngine. For years to create a custom absolute positioned map or image map within ExpressionEngine it all had to be hand made or require the content administrator to use difficult manual adjustments. Well these days are behind you!
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An interesting approach to EE site deployment by Krasimir Tsonev where he logs out all queries required to make changes to an EE site (add channels, fields, etc) and the re-runs those queries in another environment.
It’s a somewhat manual, requires changing core files but also possibly a workable database migration for ExpressionEngine.
I have several servers and every one of them has its own database. There are changes in my local database which I have to transfer to the others. I don’t need to export/import the whole database. I need only the latest changes which I’ve just made. Ok so … if I inject some code just before to send something to the mysql I’ll be able to log all the queries. Doing this I’ll have the exact requests to the database and will be able to execute them on the other machines.
Has anyone else tried something like this?
Deploying ExpressionEngine based site
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This is a on-going series of entries where I highlight EE experiences.
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From Ben Croker last week:
While we are proud of the Multi Language Module and have had great feedback from people about it, the add-on is a bit outdated and really only suitable for smaller sites with less demand for multi-lingual functionality. So for that reason we are making it a free add-on for everyone to use as you wish. This also means however that the add-on will not be further developed and that support requests will get second priority after commercial add-ons.
The module is available for EE1 and EE2. It used to be free for non-profits and now it’s free for everyone.
Read Ben’s full post.
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Pic Puller, the add-on that makes it easy to pull in Instagram photos, was updated this weekend to support the new Instagram video feature.
Regardless of how you feel about the new feature (I turned off auto play and miss Instagram how it was), Pic Puller has you covered if you need to pull in a complete Instagram feed.
John Morton, the developer of Pic Puller, even posted some sample code so you could see how to use it to display videos.
Pic Puller is $15 and for sale at Devot:ee.
(See our original coverage 18 months ago)
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Earlier this year Jason Siffring posted a great article on how to use a transactional email service for ExpressionEngine emails. I was working on improving mail over Mijingo and needed to refer to the article.
Jason even gives you a great comparison of third-party email services. Also, note the Escort add-on that will make it easier to interface with the service APIs.
Has a client ever said to you, “Why didn’t I get that reset password email?” Have you ever had to wait patiently for like ten minutes to get a new member activation email? Ever lose sleep wondering if your contact form is really working? If so, let me introduce you to the wonderful world of transactional email delivery services.
Learn about transactional email services.
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We are in our fifth year of EE Insider, after the site launched in January of 2009. In Internet years we’re aging. But with the update to EE2 and a planned refresh of the site design, we’re planning to be here, in some form or another, for much longer.
I want to thank the advertisers on the site who help, along with the readers and the community, to make keep this thing running:
- Structure - Travis has built the easiest way to allow your clients to manage pages (with hierarchy) in ExpressionEngine. I love Structure and use it on Mijingo.com.
- Pixel & Tonic - The longest running advertiser on the site and well-known for the add-ons Assets, Playa, Matrix and Wygwam. They make some of the hottest add-ons for ExpressionEngine.
- Solspace - By far, Solspace has the largest catalog of EE add-ons and is one of the original add-on developers. When an add-on comes from Solspace, you can trust that it’s going to work and that you’ll get the support you need. Their Freeform Pro module makes it simple to create forms for your website.
- Vector Media Group - Based in New York City, they are not only experts (and leaders) on ExpressionEngine, they are also experts in SEO. Matt, Lee, and the entire team at Vector Media Group are a valuable part of our community.
EngineHosting provides EE Insider with their fast and reliable hosting services. For a long time I ran this site on a virtual server I built and managed. That was a pain. I’m so happy to have the nice people at EngineHosting take care of this for me now. Check out their new Virtual Server Cluster plans, which start at $45/month and SSH access for basic tasks.
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The Outfit, an agency based in Massachusetts, released last week a new add-on called Playa Links. By the name you can already see that it works with the Playa add-on by Pixel & Tonic.
We’ve created a companion fieldtype to Playa to make things easier for our clients, and we’d like to share it with the community. Playa Links is a fieldtype which will display links to all entries currently associated using your Playa fields. This is a read-only fieldtype, meant to assist your end users in more easily navigating ExpressionEngine’s Control Panel.
The add-on is free and currently available on Github.
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Coming off last week’s Engine Summit we’re already hearing chatter about the next big release of ExpressionEngine. For me, and this site, however, it’s been a long road to ExpressionEngine 2.
I originally built EE Insider in late 2008 and up until a month ago it was still running a 1.x flavor of ExpressionEngine. It was the last remaining site that I regularly interacted with that was running the old friend we all knew so well.
So, why did it take me so long to upgrade? I mean, goodness, it’s been almost 3 years since EE2 was released.
Here’s why I stayed on EE1:
- It was stable and worked perfectly for me at all times.
- I had add-ons in use that were not updated yet (back when I originally looked at upgrading)
- I had some functionality of the site that would require major re-working through an update. I didn’t see the investment as being worth it at the time.
- Did I mention it was stable and worked?
ExpressionEngine 1.6 and 1.7 were (and are) excellent releases. I depended on them over and over again for all sorts of sites. EE2 has certainly matured into a great CMS (I use it to power my e-commerce store) but there was the risk of disturbing something that works fine and gets the job done. I could still post content from MarsEdit, my guest authors could still log in and post their content (although they did comment how weird it was to see EE1). We could do the business of the site without any problems.
It didn’t take long for all of my add-ons to be updated (the most impressive part of the EE1 to EE2 move was how responsive and quick the add-on developers were) so that reason didn’t last very long.
Up until EE Insider moved to EE2 I had the EE Insider Tips section of the site where people could submit their own EE tips. This section, while starting strong, never took off and the interest wasn’t there to sustain it as a great catalog of EE tips and tricks. As time went on I turned off the ability to add new tips. Now you can’t even access the tips unless you come from a search engine (99% of the traffic) or from another link on the site.
For EE Insider Tips I was using a handful of add-ons to make the posting functionality work properly. I would have to decide it was worth the time to rework that section of the site that was performing so poorly. In the end I decided it wasn’t worth even having it running and I turned off the ability to submit new tips. Another reason not to upgrade wiped from the board.
After those reasons were no longer, well, reasons, I decided that I did need to update but was working on other projects that needed my attention more than upgrading software on a site that wasn’t broken. I also saw the pain and struggle that Ryan Masuga and the Devto:ee team went through when they upgraded their site. I didn’t want that pain. I don’t like pain.
But one big frustration I had was that I couldn’t try the latest and greatest add-ons from our prolific developer community. Sure, I could use them on other sites but there were add-ons I wanted to use right here on EE Insider.
A month ago Chris Imrie and Eric Lamb announced the Entry Analytics add-on. Eric writes for EE Insider and told me he wished he could see the analytics for his articles on the site. I broke it to him that EE Insider was still running ExpressionEngine 1. He encouraged me to upgrade. I told him I don’t have time.
But then I thought, hey, why the hell not? Why not branch the repository and test the update again? Sure, I’d have to kill some stuff on the site to make it happen but it would be a good time to prune the dead wood.
I went through and made a list of everything I needed to have and then completely disabled all add-ons. After the EE2 upgrade I looked at what was broken and then fixed only the stuff I needed. It was a liberating and refreshing exercise.
There was only one issue with the upgrade, which involved some entry content that contained single quotes being truncated during the migration. This could’ve been disastrous (and, frankly, it’s a little concerning that this could even happen) but fortunately I had a good backup and the ability to whip together a quick bit of SQL to migrate over just the truncated content from my backup.
The upgrade took less than two hours, including all prep, planning and backups. The content migration to fix broken content after the upgrade only took about an hour to determine the problem, test a fix and do the final migration. For a project I didn’t want to do it only took me about 3 hours to actually get it done. That’ll teach me.
Do I regret not upgrading earlier? I only have a few regrets over the last 38 years and none of them have to do with software. The time was right when I did it and it worked.
What’s next? With the big update out of the way, it’s time to shake the dust off the design and code and make them more modern.
Blog Entry
- MC Country by Michael Cohen (ProImage)
Uses the IP2Nation module to detect and output a visitor’s country (the ISO country code) from their IP. Can optionally display content or redirect to a URL if a visitor is from a specified list of countries.
- Photo Frame ($) by Objective HTML
Photo Frame is a robust module that allows you to upload and manipulate photos using a clean and simple interface. Photo Frame has a plethora of settings and configurations and is compatible with many of the best add-ons, so it can be used in exactly the way you need it. The possibilities are endless and your users will love it.
- Photo Frame Effects Pack ($) by Objective HTML
The Effects Pack adds a new button, and new effects preview window to the Photo Frame Toolbar. There are 10 effects in this package, 4 are completely original. The following effects are included in the package: grayscale, sepia, emboss, edge detections, mean removal, negative, aged paper, newspaper, storybook, and midnight.
- Photo Frame Button Pack ($) by Objective HTML
The Button Pack adds 9 additional buttons to the Photo Frame toolbar. The following buttons are included in the package: blur, brightness, contrast, flip, pixelate, rgba, sharpess, smoothness, and vignette.
- Link Vault Limiter by Masuga Design
This extension enforces member download limits for the Link Vault add-on.
- Just Resize ($) by Isaac Raway (Airways)
Just Resize does one thing - it just resizes images. It does not fetch remote images, it doesn’t do sepia tone effects, it just resizes and returns a URL to the saved image. This combined with copious amounts of debug output make it the best choice for simple image resizing tasks - it just works.
- Better Category Layout by JCDerrick
Better Category Layout allows developers to easily arrange their category groups on a single line, where all the fieldsets have an equal height. It’s plain and simple, but it works.
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Ben Croker, who spoke at this year’s Engine Summit put together a quick summary of his experience at the online conference.
All of the speakers and presentations, bar none, were really interesting and it was great to be able to ask questions and even chat amongst ourselves in the message chat room. I even got to heckle Eric Lamb, kept it to a minimum though!!
and
What I’m most excited about however is getting confirmation that a major release is in the in the works, so lets show some love for James and the rest of the hard-working EllisLab team!!
Read Ben’s entire write-up
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Crazy, I know, but Henshu, an add-on the hooks into the popular (and powerful) Zenbu add-on, lets you edit some entry fields right in the entry listing page. Henshu is made by the same folks at Zenbu Studio.
Watch the preview video to see it in action.
Blog Entry
This is a on-going series of entries where I highlight EE experiences.
My first EE site (which is no longer live, thankfully) was a total mess. I had no idea how to use custom fields and field groups, opting instead to have one field group for all of my weblogs.
I learned a lot from that site. But I learned the most from the one that crashed and burned at launch.
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If you’re not in Seattle, you might be in Toronto. Well, it’s a good thing. The Toronto ExpressionEngine meetup takes place tomorrow June 18th at 6:31 (?) PM at The Office Pub on John Street.
I can speak from personal experience with this meetup. This is a great group of people and one that made me feel welcome in a cold, windy city 1,600 miles (2500 km) from home this past March. An excellent cast of characters who care a lot of about ExpressionEngine. If you’re in Toronto, you should attend.
Location and details are available at the Toronto-ee website.
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This Thursday at WINTR on Ballard Ave NW the latest installment of the ExpressionEngine Seattle meetup will take place.
Pre-meetup eating and beveraging happens at the Ballard Pizza Company at 6PM. The main event starts at 7 PM at WINTR. This meetup features Jimmy Fursman speaking on the topic “Practical Caching for ExpressionEngine.”
Ten people are already RSVP’d to attend. You could take it to eleven.
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No matter which solution you choose, beware of the technical debt you incur along the way. Sam Hernandez says it well:
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404 Page Not Found. While developers may be familiar with this and other server error pages, site visitors may not, which can lead to confusion and lost traffic. For the latest EE Podcast, Ryan Battles joins the show to talk about ways developers can make their server error pages and site error messages more effective. Ryan details ways you can customize some of the default server messages, as well as ExpressionEngine’s system messages. Ryan discusses EE template development, and how developers can ensure that a correct 404 redirect occurs when necessary. He also offers tips for front-end form validation. Tune in now!
Thanks to Entry Analytics for sponsoring!
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