Over a series of 8 videos, watch and learn as Ryan builds an entire ExpressionEngine website from beginning to end. Get started now.
Patrick Pohler reminds us of the Ohio ExpressionEngine Meetup tonight.
We’ve got an Ohio/Columbus ExpressionEngine meetup tonight at 7pm! Let’s go #eecms http://t.co/hWKYzajx
Posted on Nov 09, 2012 by Kyle Cotter
Thursday, November 15, the EE Seattle Meetup group will host their third Meetup at WINTR.
This Meetup will feature Paul Burdick, one of the original minds behind ExpressionEngine, where he’ll speak on how you can build great software while having fun building a business/community.
Matt Fordham will also speak on bootstrapping ExpressionEngine!
Sounds like a fun night. Make sure to RSVP!
Posted on Nov 08, 2012 by Kyle Cotter
Posted on Nov 08, 2012 by Ryan Masuga
Eric Lamb, of mithra62, home to popular add-ons Backup Pro and CT Admin, has reflected on the past year of selling an “Add-on Developer License”. Meaning, you purchase one license for unlimited uses on your client projects.
In short, he realizes developer licenses are not positive for his particular business. Eric covers developer licenses, as well as the topic of code obfuscation and the trust ExpressionEngine add-on developers put in the customers.
It’s definitely a great read and a nice insight into Eric’s thinking pattern.
Posted on Nov 05, 2012 by Kyle Cotter
Another week and it’s…wait a minute, it’s November? This week sped by me quickly and with Kyle’s absence (he was probably working on his tan on a beach somewhere), the posting was light. I’m glad Kyle will be back next week. I bet you are, too.
The last few weeks have been crazy. Personally and professionally, there is a lot going on and, as usual, the year always ends at top speed. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I hope any EE community members in the Northeast have escaped any major damage or injury during Hurricane Sandy. I also hope that you are all warm and safe. And that if your electricity is not yet restored, that it is soon. I have family in the northeast out of power for days now and I wish there was something I could do about it.
Since EECI the community has pulled together to push the Stack Overflow proposal closer toward approval. We continually show that we are a self-sufficient community that can organize itself, support itself and help each other, no matter what happens around us. I’m sincerely proud of that. You should be, too.
Okay, enough from me. Let’s get to the news.
Answering customer support through email clients is messy & error prone. HelpSpot makes it organized and easy. Learn why companies like EngineHosting, BrilliantRetail, and Focus Lab use HelpSpot to manage their support.
Garrant Consulting launched Host-ee, a hosting service tailored to ExpressionEngine.
My friends at Exp-resso released an update to their excellent e-commerce module, Store. They also made their language packs available on Github (following the lead of Solspace) for community translation.
Ben Croker (nice to meet you at EECI, Ben!) release a beta of Continuum, a real-time visitor tracking add-on.
Gmaps 2.2 is out and adds geocoding support for EE templates and more.
Did I miss anything? Hit me up on Twitter and I’ll get the word out.
Have a great weekend!
Posted on Nov 02, 2012 by Ryan Irelan
EE add-on developers Eric Lamb and Ben Croker have a message and some audio for you to listen to. They sat down on Skype, hit the Record button, and shared their thoughts about EECI and EE add-on development.
Hello EE folks,
Eric Lamb and Ben Croker here. Today we’re doing a bit of an experiment that we want to share with the community. From time to time the two of us talk over Skype about EE development, programming in general, and the industry as a whole (among other things). One day Ben came up with the idea to record our discussions with the idea being that we’d release a test to see if there’s any interest in the things 2 developers discuss. This is the result.
Now, this is just a discussion between 2 programmers about topics in the ExpressionEngine ecosystem. There are zero production values, don’t expect any theme music, an introduction, or even any sign off talk. To be frank, it is quite raw. Still, we think it’ll be interesting and entertaining at the least and show the perspective of two add-on developers when it comes to ExpressionEngine.
Lastly, we’d like to thank Ryan Irelan for allowing us to publish this on EE Insider and Lea Alcantara and Emily Lewis for giving us their blessing on this experiment.
Thank you and we hope you enjoy it.
Ben Croker and Eric Lamb
Have a listen to their recording and be sure to give them feedback on Twitter.
Eric Lamb and Ben Croker’s EE Developer Conversation
Posted on Nov 02, 2012 by Ryan Irelan
Our “Get to Know #eecms” series continues with EE Insider’s own Kyle Cotter! We chat a little about EECI and our favourite moments, discuss the the StackExchange proposal, and then get into Kyle’s business, his involvement in DCEErs, his time at EllisLab, and of course, our rapid-fire 10 questions!
Tune in and get to know Kyle now!
Posted on Nov 01, 2012 by CTRL+CLICK CAST
Posted on Nov 01, 2012 by Ryan Masuga
Hey, wait, it’s already Friday? This week went by too quickly. Everyone has been heads down and getting back to work after a great EECI and here’s what they’ve been working on.
I wrote about this earlier today, but there was the good news that the EECI conference will continue on under different ownership.
Okay, now onto the rest of the news.
Answering customer support through email clients is messy & error prone. HelpSpot makes it organized and easy. Learn why companies like EngineHosting, BrilliantRetail, and Focus Lab use HelpSpot to manage their support.
Version 2.1 shipped with support “for OpenStreetMap, CloudMade, Toner and WaterColor map types.”
Solspsace released their add-on language files to the public so you can help them add to them and update them. If you are capable of translation into another language, Solspace will give you a free license for the add-on you help translate.
One of my favorite add-ons. Sorry, wanted to get that out.
Version 2.3.2 has some bug fixes, improvements and native Rich Text Editor support.
Ben’s experience at the conference all summed up in a short blog post.
And here’s Ben’s write-up about his talk on progressive add-on development.
One of the great things about Eric is his candid, honest view of life as an add-on developer. Eric dishes no bullshit. It’s a great quality.
His latest version of CT Admin (1.5) boasts a big list of changes and improvements as Eric is going to compete with similar functionality built right into Cartthrob.
Bug fixes, bug fixes. Love this add-on. Have you used it yet?
Since our last Weekly Wrap, DevDemon has updated Forms (3.2.3), which includes a new dashboard and other bug fixes and improvements. Editor 2.2.3 was also released with bug fixes and some other enhancements.
Kyle is out next week so you’re stuck with me again.
Have a great weekend!
Posted on Oct 26, 2012 by Ryan Irelan
Today it was announced that Turner Parscale, a partnership that invests in web technologies, purchased “the assets and rights to EECI.”
In short, this means that EECI will go on and it is backed by a company that has the resources to continue EECI and grow it. And the new owner (Brad Parscale of DevDemon) is right from our community.
I will reiterate what I said in the press release: I am very excited by this. I wasn’t sure if anyone would take on organizing EECI again because of the capital investment required to reserve conference spaces, hotel room blocks and more. I know I couldn’t do it.
Here’s the entire press release:
San Antonio TX – Oct 26, 2012 - Turner Parscale LLC, a technology investment firm, has purchased the assets and rights to EECI, the Community run conference for ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter conference, from Whoooz! Webmedia for an undisclosed amount.
Turner Parscale, a partnership funded by Tom O. Turner and Brad Parscale, invests in emerging web content technologies. Brad is the President of Giles-Parscale, Inc and DevDemon Add-Ons. Tom is the CEO of Pisces LP, a San Antonio-based private equity and venture capital firm. His portfolio includes Akimbo Financial, www.akimbocard.com, which he co-founded in 2009.
Brad Parscale stated, “It is exciting to take over the reins for the EECI Conference. Turner Parscale’s goal is to make EECI the best conference it can be. We have already started to plan for amazing things in 2013.”
Turner Parscale is actively searching for and investing in web content technologies and sees the ExpressionEngine community as a highly successful source for growth opportunities.
Ryan Irelan with Mijingo said, “After the last EECI in Horseshoe Bay, Texas, I wasn’t sure if someone would take over and continue running a large community event every year. I’m excited that the conference is again going to be run by someone from the community. Large multi-day conferences take a lot of time and resources to put on. It’s exciting that Brad and his team are taking over EECI.”
For more information: info@turnerparscale.com www.turnerparscale.com
Posted on Oct 26, 2012 by Ryan Irelan
Posted on Oct 25, 2012 by Ryan Masuga
The ExpressionEngine community really is unique. When the community wants something, they sure get it done.
In efforts to provide a centralized place for asking community questions about ExpressionEngine, a proposal has been setup on Area 51 of Stack Exchange, and we, the community, need your support to get this proposal to beta stage.
Patrick Pohler (who was a speaker at EECI this year) proposed this project, and it has been well received.
… this is a place for all users [of] the ExpressionEngine CMS to post questions and receive answers. Front-end developers, add-on devs, designers and non-tech users are welcome!
This would provide an alternate location to post your ExpressionEngine questions and get feedback.
So, for the good of the community and spreading knowledge about ExpressionEngine, commit to this project!
Posted on Oct 24, 2012 by Kyle Cotter
@johnwbaxter I’m retiring from add-on development, so won’t be supporting them for much longer. Open sourced everything about 6 weeks ago.
— Stephen Lewis (@monooso) October 23, 2012
Stephen Lewis in the above tweet notes that he is retiring from add-on development, and has open sourced his existing add-ons. Stephen developed several popular ExpressionEngine add-ons including Campaigner, SmartDown, and more.
I wish you the best in your new endeavors, Stephen.
Posted on Oct 23, 2012 by Kyle Cotter
EllisLab placed their language packs on Github a while back, and now Solspace has followed suit.
All of their language packs are on Github, and they need help translating.
If you are fluent in another language, and are able to assist translating an add-on, Solspace will reward you with free add-ons!
Read the blog post for full details on how to contribute.
Any opportunity to use Github is a plus in my book.
Posted on Oct 22, 2012 by Kyle Cotter
This week’s Weekly Wrap is a special EECI conference edition. On Sunday, almost 200 people converged on Horseshoe Bay, Texas (outside of Austin) and its beautiful hill country surroundings. The main conference took place on Monday and Tuesday and each day was filled with talks and presentations from the community. There were two tracks: main and developer. Throughout both days attendees had to make a tough choice between talks in the same time slot. I know I missed some I wanted to see. If anything, that’s a sign of a conference filled with great content.
It was great to see everyone again and meet a bunch of new people, too. When and where the next EECI will be we don’t know but I’m sure someone will step up to keep an annual EE conference going.
Answering customer support through email clients is messy & error prone. HelpSpot makes it organized and easy. Learn why companies like EngineHosting, BrilliantRetail, and Focus Lab use HelpSpot to manage their support.
This week’s wrap is all below in a quick 3 ½ minute video created and written by Kyle Cotter. Enjoy and see you next week!
No slides.
No slides.
No slides.
No slides.
No slides.
No slides.
No slides.
Posted on Oct 19, 2012 by Ryan Irelan
The podcast takes it to the road all the way to Austin, TX for EECI 2012 US!
In this very special episode, we have a record-breaking amount of guests that will fight for prizes with the EE Trivia Challenge, panelists on Development and Community (including EE Insider’s own Ryan Irelan!) diving deeper into their topics, and then we cap everything off with a best-of-the-best Masters Tournament, to the title of EE Master to lord over all.
Thank you for all who watched in person, as well as listened in live! Thanks to all the winners of the trivia and Masters challenge – if you didn’t attend, you have to listen in to find out who they were!
If you weren’t able to get to EECI, tune in to the live (and uncut!) episode of the EE Podcast.
Posted on Oct 18, 2012 by CTRL+CLICK CAST
Posted on Oct 18, 2012 by Ryan Masuga
Blake Walters talked on “Practical Tips For Writing Custom Plugins”this morning at EECI.
He started off the presentation with this great quote:
EECI Helped Changed How I Build Sites.
I remember EECI in Brooklyn last year, where Matt Weinberg, Rob Sanchez, and many others highly emphasized jumping into the source code, and getting into add-on development.
This year Blake helps those who’ve never written add-ons, and those with little experience in add-on development, learn the very basics of getting started.
Compared to last EECI, Blake’s process for how he built sites changed:
For those who don’t write add-ons, their first thought is to enable PHP in their templates. Here’s why you shouldn’t:
When using PHP in templates, parsing on input and output are different. Blake shows us how each method is parsed in relation to when ExpressionEngine tags are parsed.
So why would you want to build a custom plugin?
Breaking down the tag:
Add Your Comment
Share on Twitterexp:eeci:present style="keynote" parse="inward"
Where can you go for information?
Places to go for info:
You can build add-ons as either:
ExpressionEngine is a platform we can build stuff on.
Blake then walked through the anatomy of a plugin. (It was really code heavy)
Here are his slides so you can see all the wonderful code.
Update: Blake has posted his code and examples on Github.
Posted on Oct 16, 2012 by Kyle Cotter
What do you get when you take Ryan Masuga, Mitchell Kimbrough, Brandon Kelly, Lodewijk Schutte, and Eric Lamb, and put them all in the same room? Hilariousness to say the least.
This developer round-table, moderated by the amazing, tall, and fantastic Ryan Irelan (I was paid to say that) was a source for hearing straight from the horses mouth about the world of add-on development.
Notable statements from the round table:
Q. “Have you considered reevaluating the price due to widespread adoption?”
We’re pretty much breaking even, with our sales and support, lowering them for more customers would increase support and not make it beneficial . - Brandon Kelly
Q. Is support something you’re concerned about?
All: Yes. Low: No. Support isn’t the main time hog at the moment.
Brandon and Mitchell have dedicated support staff.
Q. Is main support from newbies?
Pretty wide range. Some on a weekly basis. Easy to think their taking advantage. Then the others who have put a ton of effort into it, with the one little thing they can’t figure out. Majority, it’s newbies. - Brandon Kelly
We’re supporting people with complex problems, or supporting complex add-ons. Supporting edge cases. Doing it again, we’d release fewer things, simpler, more focused. 1/4 payroll dedicated to support - Mitchell Kimbrough
Q. Trends with numbers?
It’s not a steep curve. Things are flattening out. - Mitchell Kimbrough
We’ve been flat at every stage of the game. When I released Playa, week to week basis when selling it. When Pixel and Tonic came out it raised the ceiling. When we released Assets, the total revenue didn’t change at all. Matrix, Wygwam, Playa took a dip. - Brandon Kelly
Fairly flat. About a year ago, I saw a steady increase. That went on for about 9 months. About 2 months ago it’s gone down again. Too early to tell. - Low
Every time I have a record month, the next month it goes down, then the following it goes up. I don’t know what to make of that. - Eric Lamb
Q. About 2 years ago, add-on devs made the migration to ExpressionEngine 2. What do you see about the future of add-on development?
We have a pricing problem as a community. We need more and more difficult challenges to keep the team engaged. We want to build a bunch of difficult stuff. But the volume of sales and price point would support the stuff we want to do. Unless there is drastic change of core tool, not much else I can do. - Mitchell Kimbrough
There are things not possible at moment I currently work around. Better APIs with channel entries. But actually fetching channel entries [needs improving]. If I didn’t have to do this “hackish” trick, it’d be better. Really depends on what EllisLab’s priorities are at the moment. Would love custom field approach applied to categories and member fields. Really up to EllisLab. - Lodewijk Schutte
It’s a limited API. Holds us back from doing some of the cool stuff. The API is the problem. - Eric Lamb
5 years from now. At this point I have been releasing add-ons for 5 years. Back in 2007, ExpressionEngine back then was a lot more prominent in the workflow then it is today. Back then it was ExpressionEngine plus a few add-ons to fill in a couple gaps. Today, the add-ons have exploded, and you start with ExpressionEngine then build your site from there with add-ons. It doesn’t look like ExpressionEngine out of the box anymore. And that all happened in 5 years. So 5 years from now, the trend will continue. Like iOS the built-in software is nice, but it’s the apps that make it. And that’s probably the model that ExpressionEngine is looking at right now. 5 years from now we’ll be looking at ExpressionEngine as more of a platform and add-ons will be needed more and more. - Brandon Kelly
Q. I noticed add-ons need to work with each other more and more, how do you handle add-on compatibility?
My add-on expected something, another add-on expected something else. I don’t lose sleep over it. But when it comes up, the add-on community is great, they respond well. It’s always an easy fix, you kind of just work through it, it’s not really been a big problem for me. With Updater, for example, it was a simple fix, nothing that required me to do anything above and beyond. All these things come up anyhow, between ExpressionEngine versions. It’s the nature of development. - Eric Lamb
As far as proper compatibility, you have to add a couple of methods to your fieldtype, same thing with Matrix, Low Variables, etc you need to add a couple of methods. That’s kind of like writing an API. Emailed Brandon on what to do to make it work. Decided to name stuff generically so we can use the same hook. Try to keep it open. Always open for suggestions. - Lodewijk Schutte
Communication between developers is key, and strongly encouraged.
Q. How do you work with EL to make sure a new ExpressionEngine release doesn’t break functionality.
The lead time we get on a preview isn’t enough time for proper Q/A. Our library is too big. For add-on devs with 1,2, maybe 3 add-ons, the preview gives them enough time to update. - Mitchell Kimbrough
Q. Have you considered a different support model? - Rob Sanchez, Mighty Big Robot
Yeah, forum support is not sustainable. We want to help people succeed. Unfortunately, people sometimes take advantage of that. A team of three people, you spend all day catching up on support from the weekend. We have some ideas we’re considering. Moving more towards a private support model. Maybe, a pay per instance, monthly subscription. Then just pimp the community forums for people to go there to get help. It has to be adjusted. - Brandon Kelly
Q. When people don’t read, do you have a solution for getting these people support fast.
A lot of questions are RTFM type questions.
Again, I think that falls under the “people taking advantage of us” category. Maybe having to pay up front will make them think twice. - Brandon Kelly
And that’s a wrap.
Posted on Oct 15, 2012 by Kyle Cotter
Want to get a new ExpressionEngine project up and running in 26 seconds? Carl Crawley of Made By Hippo walked us through how to do just that.
Why is a bootstrap needed?
Carl listed three reasons:
Some main points from his presentation:
Now for the fun part. Carl has quite the setup for getting your new project up and running in no time.
He has a bash script that pulls your base install from the repo, sets up the database, handles renaming of system folders. sets permissions, and cleans up unnecessary files.
The best part, Carl has posted his bash script and standard config and database file. So, go check it out now! It’s certainly useful.
Posted on Oct 15, 2012 by Kyle Cotter