Blog Entry
The new website for the EECI conference went live today and featured the speaker lineup for the 2 day conference in October.
In October of 2012, hundreds of ExpressionEngine users, developers, designers and businesspeople will descend on Horseshoe Bay Resort, near Austin (Texas) for sessions, talks, workshops, and more at ExpressionEngine Conference US.
Whether you’re already using ExpressionEngine or considering it for your company or organization, you won’t want to miss out on this one-of-a-kind event.The ExpressionEngine Conference is your one stop for learning new tools and techniques you can use today.
As previously noted, the conference will take place October 15-17 in Horseshoe Bay, Texas, which is just outside of Austin. The event takes place at a resort, so everything you need will be there on site.
I will travel the short 45 minutes from my house in Austin to the conference and be there for the entire thing (plus some). I hope you can join us, too.
Tickets go on sale tomorrow at 11 AM CDT. Each ticket is only $250 for the conference. If you want to do the third day of training there’s an additional ticket that costs $700.
Blog Entry
A quick publishing note, so everyone understands how I approach hot topics, like what exploded last week on Twitter and elsewhere.
As in the past, I tend to hold off posting and try to reflect on what everyone is saying and then publish something that I feels reflects the situation and, of course, with a little of my own opinion spit in here and there.
Sometimes it even takes me a year to process events that have happened and how they fit into the bigger picture of things.
This site isn’t about immediately reflecting the latest mood on Twitter or in the forums. The people that really care about that are already on Twitter, following the #eecms hashtag. But there are a lot of people who just want to learn about EE, find the answer to a problem and then get back to work.
EE Insider is for them, too.
Blog Entry
Excerpt of a comment by Carl Crawley on Jack McDade’s blog post:
As a community, we’re somewhat unique in our close sense of pride and support in ExpressionEngine, so a lot of the times, when bugs are reported, other community members (including myself) will post ‘workarounds’ or ‘fixes’ which hack/fix the bug. This has created a SNAFU situation whereby we self-sustain the platform without direct involvement of EllisLab and it simply cannot go on. Regardless of our community, we are the customers of EllisLab and owners of a commercial product. As a result they have to become more culpable of their failings to their customers and the bug list is just one of the areas where they’ve fallen down in my opinion and they need to buck up their ideas pretty quickly or we’re going to see an exodus away from the platform.
I’ve thought a lot about this comment from Carl. At first, I nodded my head in agreement. The community is certainly sustaining EE in a way. But in the same way it always has: through community resources, learning materials, invaluable add-ons, collegiality, and conferences. There is certainly a problem with the number of bugs unaddressed and plenty of fixed from the community.
There are definitely problems. But any CMS would die if the community walked away. That’s just how it works. I don’t see how we are any different.
Blog Entry
I was traveling last week and the conversation on Twitter took off pretty quickly but I wanted to sum up some major pieces here.
Stephen Lewis reacted to Twitter conversation about the number of open bugs in the ExpressionEngine Bug Tracker and the suggestion that he pitch in to make things better:
The whole idea that fixing ExpressionEngine’s bugs is somehow a problem for the “community” is completely wrong. This isn’t Open Source, this is a commercial product. We’re paying for the privilege of using it.
The ExpressionEngine community is incredibly loyal, in this case to a fault. We want our beloved CMS to be solid, reliable, and bug free, and so (the illogic goes) we should just roll up our sleeves and make it so.
That prompted Ryan Masuga from Devot:ee to post his take:
Anyone that has looked at the EE Bug Tracker recently knows that it is growing, and there are numerous bugs that haven’t even been looked at or assigned. Some of the bugs are posted by EllisLab’s own team members. Some seemingly simple-to-resolve bugs have been hanging out for months. The state of the bug tracker coupled with the company’s self-imposed radio silence are maddening, especially for us, as we make out entire living off of this CMS in one way or another.
Jack McDade also chimed in and highlighted the community:
We’ve managed to stay banded together because of great community sites like Devot-EE, and because great add-ons like Structure (shameless plug), Matrix/Playa, and a hundred others and their respective developers. Being a part of the community has changed my path as a developer for the better, I just hate to see this much dissension in the ranks. The community has always been one of ExpressionEngine’s best features.
For those of us who have a lot invested in ExpressionEngine, the cause of the last week’s uproar—and the tone of some of the uproar—is certainly deflating and discouraging.
Blog Entry
Kevin Smith (EllisLab Director of Services) wrote up an overview of how you can think about content when building an EE site:
Before you install ExpressionEngine and start tweaking preferences, it’s best to take some time to think about the content you’ll be managing with EE and plan out that content’s structure. […] In this overview, you’ll learn why and how to plan your site’s content
Kevin’s approach is that if you think ahead about how you break up your content when implementing the site in ExpressionEngine, you can be as flexible as possible when presenting your content. Also, future site changes or redesign efforts will be easier.
For a clearer view of the approach behind Kevin’s article, I recommend the following two resources:
Blog Entry
- BrilliantRetail SagePay Form Payment Gateway ($, for EE2) by Glenn Jacobs
Adds support for SagePay Form to BrilliantRetail. Let SagePay handle the PCI compliance and take payments.
- Escape (for EE2) by EpicVoyage
Provides variable escaping for SQL or HTML output
- Unrelated (for EE2) by EpicVoyage
Allows access to regular parent entry fields within {related_entries} and {reverse_related_entries} tags.
- Router ($, for EE2) by Isaac Raway (Airways)
Router is a regular expression based routing system for ExpressionEngine requests. It allows you to define any custom URL route you like, without needing to worry about template naming and without using large conditional checks.
- Postmaster ($, for EE2) by Objectivehtml
Postmaster is the definitive solution for emailing channel entry data within ExpressionEngine. Easily create beautiful email templates using the live preview, and impose extremely fine levels of control to send emails exactly when you want.
- devot:ee Sales Export (for EE2) by Derek Hogue (Amphibian Design)
Built for EE add-on developers, this module lets you export CSV reports of your add-ons sold through devot:ee, including net profit calculations, filtered by add-on and date.
Blog Entry
Next week, on July 26th at 6 PM, the inaugural meetup of ExpressionEngine Seattle takes place.
The meetup already has 17 attendees and will feature a talk by Matt Fordham called “Using the “Template Partials” pattern in ExpressionEngine for greater performance and template organization.”
In Seattle? Learn more about the meetup and sign up to go.
Blog Entry
Last week I posted about the new Low Events add-on and mentioned that it looked like it would be a good solution for a current project. Well it was…except for one thing. I needed the ability to scroll through events by week, too, and Low Events only supported month and day.
I posted a support ticket for Low asking if this was possible and then the next morning I woke up to two emails: one describing how he could implement it and another with the updated add-on.
Today Low released version 1.0.1:
Added week unit to display events per week, according to the ISO 8601 standard
You’re welcome.
Blog Entry
Earlier I posted that EECI 2012 in the US had to change locations (and dates) because of not enough hotel availability in downtown Austin, TX. I was sad that EECI wouldn’t take place here in my new city.
The week before last Whoooz! announced the location and date change for the two-day conference.
More information about the conference that Robert Eerhart of Whoooz! Web Media is organizing was released as part of a recent EllisLab blog post.
The largest community event for ExpressionEngine users and developers, EECI 2012 US, is going to be held October 15th - 17th at the Horseshoe Bay Resort, close to Austin, Texas. You can expect ten top notch speakers presenting a variety of hot topics. 60 minutes each, five presentations per day. Between the talks, we leave plenty of room for discussions and meeting new people. Also, the event is fully catered. To make your conference even more fun we host a party for you every night. All of this in a very comfortable, top quality venue.
Marriot’s Horseshoe Bay Resort is about one hour away (59 miles) from the Austin airport and a bit less than that from downtown Austin. It sits in the Texas hill country right next to Horseshoe Bay. As a resort it contains all of the amenities you will need whether you’re traveling alone or with your family.
And that’s what makes this location so intriguing: you can bring your entire family with you and double book it as conference and vacation time. That’s what I plan to do (and I only live 45 minutes away from the resort).
The resort is large and has a pool, spa, golf, and beaches. It also has several bars and restaurants throughout the property.
Taxi fare to the resort can be expensive (the Marriot site says it is $160 one way). It will be cheaper to share a cab or rent a car and drive. You can get a basic rental car for around $30 per day and the hotel has free on-site parking. I don’t know if the conference will organize any transportation so that might an option as well. Robert posted in the comments that the conference will provide free transportation between the resort and the Austin airport.
Additional information about the resort:
A big thanks to Robert for his hard work and dedication organizing this event since 2009 when it first took place in Leiden, The Netherlands.
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The results are in! Emily and Lea go through the 2012 Listener Survey results as well as questions sent directly to the podcast. What did survey respondents feel were the best episodes thus far? How did they parse the survey information? What other things were gleaned from the survey? Who does their transcripts? Find out and more as the EE Podcast goes through their listener mail bag!
Blog Entry
- Low Events ($, for EE2) by Lodewijk Schutte (Low)
Do you need to display events on your site? And do you like to keep things simple? Then Low Events is the add-on you want.
- Entry ID Search (for EE2) by Punch Buggy
Provides users with a small form to search channels for a specific entry_id. Limits choice of channels and results based on their channel privileges.
- Placeholder (for EE2) by Natetronn
Placeholder allows you to easily add placeholder images to your site.
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After not finding a solution online Michael Sibley scratched his own itch and put together a basic Coda 2 syntax mode for ExpressionEngine 2.
So far I have enabled basic syntax highlighting for ExpressionEngine 2 tags / parameters and added auto-completion for most standard ExpressionEngine tags, variables and parameters along with some Structure tags for good measure. The mode imports the built-in modes for HTML, PHP and Javascript so in theory these should all be highlighted correctly as well.
It’s a free download and Michael wants feedback on it. Go get it.
My one bit of feedback so far: Put it up on GitHub and let others fork it and add to it.
Blog Entry
Today the weekly EE Help Chats take place. They are scheduled at two different times to make it easier for everyone to join in.
Here’s the info:
The first chat is at 21:00 in the UK (GMT+1) and you can join the EU EE Help Chat Room to ask questions and help others.
The second chat is at 9 PM EDT in the US and you can join the EE Help Chat Room to hang out for an hour or two.
Both chats welcome people with all levels of experience with ExpressionEngine. We especially welcome people new to ExpressionEngine. The chats were originally set up to help out those who were just getting started and that’s still my goal and mission with the weekly chats.
Thanks to our sponsors, Mijingo and EngineHosting, there is now increased capacity and plenty of room for everyone.
See you in the chat!
Blog Entry
If you’ve been holding off on getting your tickets to the DCeers one-day ExpressionEngine conference, then you might want to take a look at the website again. The entire conference schedule is now available.
The conference takes place on Saturday July 28th at Canvas Co-work in Washington, DC. Tickets cost only $35. They have limited space, so don’t wait if you want to spend the day learning more about ExpressionEngine.
Blog Entry
The new add-on from Low might have come at just the right time for me. I have been working on a specific events display implementation and the Low Events template tags are just what I need.
Yesterday Low Schutte unveiled Low Events, a two part approach to managing events in ExpressionEngine. There is a simple Google-calendar-like field type for selecting the date:
The Low Events fieldtype is inspired by Google Calendar’s date/time picker. I love the way it suggests times for you, shows duration and is smart enough to know when the date you entered is invalid. In your templates, the fieldtype gives you lots of variables to work with to display the dates just the way you want.
and template tags that solve very specific problems you have when presenting events in the template.
The Low Events template tags all center around the idea that you’re either showing upcoming events (omitting passed ones), or showing events per year, month or day (including passed ones). Other tags like the Archive or Calendar tag, will help you link to specific dates.
I’ll be picking this up to try as the solution on a current project.
Low Events is available now and costs 30 Euros directly from Low or 40 US Dollars on Devot:ee.
Blog Entry
There are two meetups coming up in the next week:
- The Dallas/Ft. Worth group will meet on Thursday July 12th at 7pm. There isn’t a topic posted yet but if you’re in the area, you should definitely sign up and attend this week’s meetup.
- Twin Cities EE group will meet on Tuesday July 17th at 6pm and the topic will be: “Image Optimization, Stash / Snippet / Preload Replace, Shortcode.” That sounds like a full evening of information from three different speakers. There will also be an open mic time for anyone to present their ideas or projects.
EE Insider always likes to post meetups, so if you have one coming up, let me know.
Instructional Video
Previously, I mentioned the Seed Module by SquareBit, which allows you easily populate Channels with dummy content for testing. Here’s a quick look at the module and how it works.
The module is free and available from the SquareBit website.
Get the Video
Blog Entry
- Force SSL ($, for EE2) by EpicVoyage
Easily configure how your SSL certificate is used in combination with EE. Supports HSTS.
- Gmaps (for EE2) by Rein de Vries
Always have trouble with the intergration of Google Maps on your site? Always struggling to get it work? Well, those days are gone with the Gmaps plugin for ExpressionEngine. You can now easily create maps, markers, polygon, routes and more! It supports all major functionality of the Google Maps API and more will come.
- Seed (for EE2) by Joel Bradbury
A good developer is a lazy developer. Stop making dummy test entries by hand. Use Seed to make them for you.
- Encaf Clique (for EE2) by Chad Crowell (Encaffeinated)
Clique can show or hide template content based on if the currently logged in member is in the group(s) you specify. It does this by looking at the currently logged in member’s group_id, and comparing that to the list of group_id’s that you pass into Clique using the groups parameter.
- weserv (for EE1 & EE2) by Lavi Yatziv
If you would rather not set up a bunch of thumbnails across your templates just plunk down this plugin!
- Data Import (for EE2) by Percipio
Allow data to be imported from a remote/local database table to Channel, Matrix and Expresso Store fields.
Blog Entry
The pitch goes like this:
A good developer is a lazy developer. Stop making dummy test entries by hand. Use Seed to make them for you.
Dummy entries are annoying and I know you know I know you know that I hate to create them manually. Earlier this year I was building a simple CMS with Ruby on Rails and was delighted to see the seed data functionality.
For ExpressionEngine we have Seed (by Joel Bradbury). It lets you configure how the seed data is populated based on conditions you set. You tell Seed the channel you want to populate and how many entries. You can then set some populate options.
Wonderful add-on. It’s free, so go get it now.
Blog Entry
Today my publisher pushed out an update to my ExpressionEngine 2 Book. The update brings the book in line with the latest version of ExpressionEngine 2. I did a complete audit of the book and updated almost every screenshot so what you see on the screen is exactly what you see in the book.
ExpressionEngine 2: A Quick-Start Guide was the first book published on ExpressionEngine 2. It was created to teach the best way to learn ExpressionEngine and give the reader a firm foundation to go off and explore advanced features and customizations with confidence. Throughout the book we build a complete website from beginning to end and all of the code is included. You can even click in the ebook to download the code you’re reading!
The book is now published exclusively as an ebook and you will be notified of any future updates.
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