On Saturday afternoon I sat on a panel at Drupal Day Austin. I was invited to represent Happy Cog and discuss why we use ExpressionEngine (the good, the bad, the desires) so attendees of the one-day conference could learn more about other content management systems.
The moderated panel discussion covered everything from why we chose the CMS to things that we wish it could do or what the pain points are. It wasn’t a time to beat our chests about how great our tools are but, instead, to give an honest assessment about what our tools can do and what they’re lacking.
More than anything, the idea that a single-track, one-day CMS-specific event would dedicate an entire hour to talk about other software was refreshing to me. This wasn’t a partisan approach to developing for the web. It was inclusive and educational. I learned a lot.
Marcus Neto, former Product Evangelist for EllisLab, has put together a video demonstrating some of the features of ExpressionEngine. This 30 minute video walks through all the ins and outs one would want to cover in pitching ExpressionEngine to a potential client.
As you can tell, Marcus has done these types of demos before, multiple, multiple times.
I know we all appreciate him taking the time to record this, and hopefully it’ll help give a solid starting point for pitching to clients why ExpressionEngine is such a great product.
CartThrob, one of the fantastic e-commerce solutions for ExpressionEngine has some awesome changes in store for us. (See what I did there?)
A series of tweets were sent from the @cartthrob account highlighting three new main features:
Order Manager
Gift Certificates
Expired Cart Notifications
Order Manager
From the looks of the screenshots, this Order Manager is full of graphs, reports, and more, to easily keep track of orders.
Gift Certificates
Gift certificates are coming to CartThrob! With the ability to keep track of amount redeemed, and remaining balance, I’m sure this is a welcomed addition.
Expired Cart Notifications
From what appears to be a method for sending custom email notifications to customers for reasons relating to one’s cart expiring, these additional customizations to CartThrob look useful.
So, there you have it folks. The three previewed new features of CartThrob. No word on exact dates, but the folks over at Barrett Newton sure seem busy.
The Twin Cities ExpressionEngine User Group will be meeting tonight, September 18th, at the Nerdery. The speaker for the meetup is Nick Benson of PressEnter, where he’ll be speaking on ways to optimize images in ExpressionEngine.
Here’s the problem: Rich Text Editors (RTEs) are not always the best solution for a creating a diverse block of content for news post or longer, more complicated blog articles. Now don’t get me wrong, I love RTEs for many reasons; they let my clients update content for themselves with (usually) minimal fuss and effort on my part. So by and large they are a standard for every CMS in this day and age. And thanks to a recent ExpressionEngine update, a RTE is finally standard on my favorite platform.
However I’ve always felt that despite all the good that RTEs bring, they come with a decent amount of bad. Simply put, clients often mistakenly break a site’s design with RTEs. You can limit the damage through toolbar configurations that prune non-essential buttons and features, but I find myself often leaving out a more complex function such as table control. The table creation interface on most RTEs is lacking or easily misused by clients. The same goes for any kind of image use other than the very basic
The folks over at Objective HTML have released a sneak peak video of their upcoming Photo Frame fieldtype. This powerful add-on allows for in-browser image cropping, all from within the publish page. It provides a streamlined photo upload experience, and looks like a great alternative to the native File field. This add-on is clearly focused on getting your clients uploading and editing images fast.
We’re halfway through September and here in Austin the summer heat has broken, rain is falling and there’s a hint–just a small hint–of Fall.
The Fall is a gorgeous time in Austin and, it just happens, next month is EECI 2012 just west of town in the beautiful Texas hill country. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone there. You’re coming, too, right?
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Editor 2.1.0 Released
DevDemon announced a new version of Editor. Version 2.1.0 offers “Site Pages linking support & {filedir_x} parsing.”
Low Search 2.1.0 Available
Low Search now has relationship filters, a new low_search_pre_search extension hook, which lets you change the search params before the search, and lots more.
New Site Launches by QB Marketing
QB Marketing has a bunch of site launches to mention this week. Here they are:
Kyle Cotter announced an update to Sassy CP. Version 2.0 is still free!
Austin ExpressionEngine Meetup
On 9/26 the Austin ExpressionEngine Meetup will take place at Capital Factory in downtown Austin. I’ll be presenting on my experience selling products online with ExpressionEngine.
Gmaps 2.0 Available
Gmaps 2.0 was released with more caching, support for Google Maps Premium key, and a lot more new parameters.
Flag Master Updated
The new version of Flag Master include Zenbu support, new tags and more.
Tweet of the Week
Chosen by me, shared with you.
Today we passed 1700 add-ons listed on @devot_ee- Awesome! Add-on devs are what make #eecms as powerful and easy to use as it is.
This special live show will be a fun end cap to the two day conference, starting with a chance to win some prizes by playing an ExpressionEngine themed quiz show. Is your buzzer finger ready? You must be in attendance to participate!
And there will be prizes. Don’t miss it!
Aren’t registered for EECI? Shame on you. I’ll be there along with a great group of people. Join us! Register now.
WordPress is, of course, on top with more than 50% of the market. ExpressionEngine sits in 11th with around 1%. It also looks like they’re including some forum software (e.g. phpBB), too.
The trend report looks pretty steady for everyone.
Reword by Jean-Francois Paradis An equivalent to translate() or __() in Wordpress which translates a given string using a dictionary. This implementation can also handle placeholders (eg: Hello %s) and can translate dates formats (eg: Today is %d).
Shortlist($) by Joel Bradbury Shortlist is a quick and painless way to allow site visitors to create lists of items on the fly. Shorlist lets you add anything to a list. User’s don’t even need to have accounts with your site to create, keep and share their list.
Redactee($) by Jack McDade (Lobster War Machine) Redactor, the wonderfully simple and lightweight WYSIWYG editor is now lives as an EE Fieldtype, under the secret identity known as “Redactee”. Use it as a Channel Field, Matrix Field, a Low Variable Field… even in Safecracker. Simple to use, feature-rich, and smooth as butter. Supports image browsing and image / file uploads, even to Amazon S3.
This week’s EE Help Chat is tonight at 9 PM Eastern.Join us in the free chatroom where we’ll talk all things ExpressionEngine. Have questions, or want to talk about the new release? Come join the fun!
The chat is sponsored by EngineHosting, a reliable and affordable place to host your ExpressionEngine sites, and Mijingo, the best way to learn ExpressionEngine and more (They just released a new video on building Static Websites with Jekyll).
Among the general changes, is a change from the Reactor team where you can set your third_party themes folder via config.php (a much appreciated addition).
The bug list is a plenty, so I encourage you to take a gander for yourself (I think I even saw some SafeCracker bug fixes in there).
There are a couple new hooks for developers as well. Overall, this looks like a solid release.
Great work by the engineers at EllisLab, and all those involved! I look forward to giving it a spin.
Robin Sowell reminds us in the forum thread that ExpressionEngine 2.6 will require users to be running PHP version 5.2.4 at a minimum, and MySQL version 5.0.3 at a minimum, which is a higher requirement than it is currently. So, plan ahead!
With EECI just around the corner, I’m sure the adrenaline is starting to pump. For those who live in the Austin area though, you have the opportunity to meet up prior to the big event.
Wednesday, September 26, 2012, come out to the Capital Factory, and hear the one and only Ryan Irelan speak about his experience selling digital training materials using ExpressionEngine (Which by the way, are fantastic, and you should definitely check out).
Ryan will walk through the E-commerce setup he has, and the choices he made while building it out.
Be sure to RSVP, as I’m sure Ryan looks forward to seeing all of you out there.
I’m very happy to welcome Kyle Cotter to EE Insider. Kyle will help me keep the site updated with news and information about ExpressionEngine and from the community. He will also be at EECI next month and will post updates from the conference.
If you’re a reader of the official ExpressionEngine blog you probably already know Kyle. He worked as an intern and then part-time on the EllisLab team doing blogging, media creation and other community efforts. Kyle recently left EllisLab to work on building his own business.
Kyle is very passionate about helping people with their work using ExpressionEngine, sharing ideas, and organizing community events. He also has more drive and passion than I ever did at his young age. It’s very impressive. He’s going to be a great part of the team.
I spent the last week on a working vacation and I think I need an actual vacation now. Maybe next month? Meanwhile, all of you have been busy creating things for ExpressionEngine, launching sites and proving that the community leads itself.
Earlier this week I talked about the upcoming EECI conference outside of Austin, Texas. I mean it when I said: I want to see you there. What are you waiting for? Book those travel tickets before prices go up. The conference and hotel are a great deal. There’s going to be a great group of people there and you’re invited!
Next week we have some changes planned here at EE Insider. So, let’s kick back and bid this week farewell. Next week is surely going to be even better.
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Iain Urquhart Relaunched Aucklandnz.com
A late edition because I missed it in the original post.
Zenbu, an add-on that replaces the entries listing screen, is the pick for September by the Devot:ee staff. I’ve used Zenbu and like it.
Snaptcha Adds FreeMember Support
Ben Croker added FreeMember support to Snaptcha in the latest release. Snaptcha is “an invisible captcha and will be the last time you will ever have to think about protecting your forms from spam bots.”
Gmaps Now Includes Transit Services
The 1.0.15 update to Gmaps included support for transit services directions.
LogMeIn Updated
LogMeIn is now at version 1.5 and has support for the latest version of ExpressionEngine.
In next week’s Seattle EE Meetup, Seamus Holman will talk about how to redesign ExpressionEngine using layouts, override.css and more. Matt Perry will discuss speeding up EE with a quick look at scaling websites.
Quickee Released
Quickee is a navigation launcher for ExpressionEngine. It’s in the same vein as tools like Quicksilver Launchbar or Alfred. Check it out!
Joel Bradbury is at it again. Today he released a new add-on called Shortlist. While I do wish it was called short ribs because I’m a bit hungry right now, Shortlist is pretty damn cool.
Shortlist lets you add anything to a list. User’s don’t even need to have accounts with your site to create, keep and share their list.
I wasn’t sure at first either. Lists? C’mon. I can make lists! But Shortlist let you create lists in the way you create an Amazon wishlist. You could also use it to collect stuff, like images or files into a group.
This is pretty cool:
Shortlist doesn’t care where you’re content’s coming from. Wherever you’re content’s coming from, if you can see it on your site, you can add it to a shortlist.
Shortlist don’t care!
You can also clone or share a list. Check out the examples for more ideas.
Search is an integral part of any CMS, but what solution is right for your visitors? How can we make it easier for them to find content? The podcast delves into EE Search options from the basic core needs, to more complicated add-ons that leverage the power of Google or their own wizardry. Tune in to find out the various ways you can maximize your site search!
Quickee by Matt Fordham A quick navigation launcher for ExpressionEngine, kinda like Quicksilver/LaunchBar/Alfred
SKU Matrix($) by Alan Bradley The SKU Matrix allows for the dynamic creation of Product Options without the need for having to manually specify each attribute. Additionally it allows for options to be created using Categories and Channel Fields from related Channels.
Cancel Button by a&m impact Add a cancel button beside the submit button at the Entry form. Click Cancel to go back to the previous page.
Excerpt by Jean-Francois Paradis Display a text summary based on a given number of words or a given number of characters.
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We’re halfway through September and here in Austin the summer heat has broken, rain is falling and there’s a hint–just a small hint–of Fall.
