Blog Entry
- SocialCount ($, for EE2) by websecret
This plugin returns counts of likes from social networks: facebook.com, twitter.com and vk.com and caches the counts to the cache folder. The plugin can write result to channel field, for sorting for example.
- Structure Sub Pages (for EE2) by Rein de Vries
A small plugin that retrieves the sub pages from the structure module. Handy when you want to grab the first subpage in row, or to redirect directly to its subpages when you hit the parent page.
- Image Autosizer (for EE2) by EpicVoyage
Automatically resize entry images. Stop rejecting uploads that are “too big” from non-savvy users.
- cpb Trigger Shelf (for EE2) by Curtis Blackwell
cpb Trigger Shelf is an ExpressionEngine 2 accessory that makes Parse19’s Trigger accessible via a keyboard shortcut.
Blog Entry
EngineHosting quietly relaunched their sign-up process that includes a brand new design, new plan options and the ability to purchase third party products during the sign-up process. There a two big pieces of news in this new store:
SSH Access
On Virtual Server Cluster plans (not the low cost shared hosting plans) you now have SSH access to the server access to a separate SSH server in the 4 virtual server cluster (EngineHosting got in touch and asked that I clarify how the SSH access works –Ryan). For those of us that have been wanting that for a while, this is very welcome news. The plans that include SSH access start at only $45 per month, so it’s within range of almost every project. All of the common stuff you can do at the command line is available, like MySQL, SSH tunneling and cronjob creation. You can also access your web files and get read only access to your log files (great for tailing log files to monitor for errors).
You can review all of their plans on the hosting sign-up page. The cheaper shared plans are at the bottom.
Buy Third Party Add-ons
As part of the sign-up process you can now purchase third party add-ons. Available right now are:
- Select Pixel & Tonic add-ons
- Select Solspace add-ons
- BrilliantRetail E-commerce
Purchasing ExpressionEngine during sign-up isn’t available anymore (I don’t know if it’ll return) but if you put your EE installation up on the server, EngineHosting will install the add-ons for you. The fact that you can purchase all of those add-ons while grabbing your hosting is a nice convenience.
Other Options
While purchasing any of the virtual cluster plans, you can also add Varnish (web app accelerator/caching), Memcached (“high-performance, distributed memory object caching system”), CDN services (Conent Delivery Network), and Private IP/SSL.
EngineHosting and EllisLab
While I’m on the topic of EngineHosting. Last Friday EllisLab posted a blog entry about how they were “severing ties” with Gippy’s Internet Solutions (the company behind EngineHosting). What does this mean?
The only practical change for the Community is that ExpressionEngine is now available exclusively through ExpressionEngine.com. If you previously purchased your ExpressionEngine license through Gippy’s, it will of course remain valid.
[…]
Gippy’s has always been an excellent hosting provider and upstanding contributor to the Community and we have every reason to believe that will continue far into the future.
The rest of the blog post seemed like a lot of insider baseball that is hardly relevant to the EE community at this time.
EE Insider is hosted on EngineHosting and I’m looking forward to moving to one of the new virtual cluster plans to take advantage of the SSH access and other goodies. This is a nice step forward for the community’s hosting provider!
Blog Entry
The folks at .net Magazine asked different ExpressionEngine developers to submit the add-on they find themselves using the most. The title of the piece of “The top 12 ExpressionEngine add-ons”, which is a little misleading but the article does have some great recommendations.
“Among all of the ExpressionEngine add-ons, which one do you find yourself/team using the most, which is the one you can’t live without?”.
I saw some critcism on Twiter that some people listed add-ons they developed. If that’s the add-on they use the most or find the most useful, I don’t see the problem with that. A lot of add-ons are created to scratch an itch or solve a recurring problem. If they solved it, why wouldn’t they use it?
Read the entire list of 12 to see the answers that were give by the 12 developers.
Blog Entry
At last night’s ExpressionEngine party at SXSW Brandon Kelly of Pixel & Tonic gave away some fun t-shirts. As I noted in a tweet earlier, here’s the shirt:
Blog Entry
People ask for it a lot from add-on developers and some already support it. One of the biggest add-on sellers out there, Pixel & Tonic, is now offering a discount for EE users who purchase 10 or more licenses at once:
Many of you have requested that we offer some sort of discount on large purchases. We’ve always liked the idea, and today, we’re happy to announce that if you buy 10 or more licenses of a product at once, we’re going to knock 10% off the price!
Blog Entry
- Login Backup Pro ($, for EE2) by Rein de Vries
The Login Backup Pro module is a module where you can make full backups of your EE installation. The backups can be started manually as via a CRON. Beside that there is also a function that will trigger the backup on login. It is also FTP ready and in the future it will support other cloud servers as well.
- True Preview ($, for EE2) by Laisvunas
True Preview allows you to preview the entry being edited by clicking Preview link on Edit Entry page in ExpressionEngine’s control panel.
- Store : Quotations ($, for EE2) by Percipio
This addon extends Exp:resso Store and allows you to create, manage and send quotes.
- AjaxPublish ($, for EE2) by Isaac Raway (Airways)
AjaxPublish hooks into the publish page to prevent the need for a full page reload when saving an entry. This can greatly improve the performance and experience of editing content through ExpressionEngine.
- Bookmarks ($, for EE2) by Yuri Salimovskiy (IntoEEtive)
This module lets people bookmark ExpressionEngine entries, members, comments and categories for quick access. You can think of it as of light version of favorites module.
- Foursquare Venue ($, for EE2) by Jeff Freeman
This plugin displays information about a Foursquare venue, including the number of users who have checked in to the venue and the current mayor.
- Marker (for EE2) by Lee Hilton
Marker is an EE 2.x plugin that converts between Markdown and HTML. Both directions are supported, Markdown -> HTML as well as HTML -> Markdown.
- MSM Site URL (for EE2) by Rein de Vries
If you have problems getting the site URL from another MSM site, then you need this plugin! This small plugin get the site url from a given entry_id or site_short_name.
- Helpdesk ($, for EE2) by KREA (Peter Felix)
Helpdesk for ExpressionEngine enables EE-powered sites to run their own customer support platform. Create support tickets from emails or stand-alone ticket forms (SATF), assign them to your colleagues and publish your e-mail communication into channel entries.
- NSM Devot:ee Stats (for EE2) by Leevi Graham (Newism)
Retrieve add-on statistics from Devot:ee.
Blog Entry
Sales: either that word makes you excited or run for the hills. But, it’s a reality for all those that work on the web.
Before you can create sites with EE, you need to be able to sell the solution. Now, don’t fear! We have Brad Parscale of DevDemon fame, join us on the show to provide some useful tips to sell ExpressionEngine and our services in general—from a starting freelancer to pitching to Fortune 500. Marcus Neto, Director of Sales and Evangelism, also drops by to give his insight from his studio days and talks about how EllisLab is helping raise ExpressionEngine brand awareness, and how EllisLab helps companies in their sales strategy.
Listen to Selling EE now!
Blog Entry
For the last couple of weeks I’ve had access to a new Adobe Labs project called Shadow. I describe it as a set of tools (apps, really) that make it easy to set up a real-time mobile test bed. Line up your devices and then update your code on your computer and every device in your test bed automatically updates, too.
Shadow is available for OS X, Windows, iOS and Android. You need to run Google Chrome (and a special extension) to get everything to work together.
Shadow is free at Adobe Labs and available now.
Blog Entry
In 80 days the new EU legislation on web browser cookies grace period will end in the UK. As of May 26, 2012 “if you are not compliant or visibly working towards compliance, you run the risk of enforcement action, which can include a fine of up to half a million pounds for a serious breach.” (via EU Cookie Law Explained)
In short, you need to get consent from your website visitors to store cookies on their computer. From The Cookie Collective:
It has been designed to protect online privacy, by making consumers aware of how information about them is collected by websites, and enable them to choose whether or not they want to allow it to take place.
It started as an EU Directive that was adopted by all EU countries on May 26th 2011. At the same time the UK updated its Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, which brought the EU Directive it into UK law.
Each EU member state has done or is doing the same thing. Although they all have their own approach and interpretation, the basic requirements of the directive remain the same.
EE developer Andy Marshall (you might know him as “moogaloo”) wrote about this on his blog and the implications it has for users of ExpressionEngine.
The law requires all non-essential cookies not be dropped until the user explicitly opts in. The definition of non-essential seems pretty vague - some people see eCommerce cart cookies as essential and therefore exempt from the laws, but I’m not sure if that’s been categorically confirmed. And what about ones that are hard coded into a CMS that, whilst largely benign, would be hard to argue are essential to the site’s functionality.
ExpressionEngine - our CMS of choice - for example uses 3 cookies to track a users recent activity, last visit and general site movements. None of these record a person’s email, name or other identifiable details, merely their browser session on your site, but are all non-essential to the site.
I do not live in the EU and I am not an expert on this law but it seems like is a lot of gray area here in how the law requirements are interpreted.
So, what is going to happen to sites running ExpressionEngine? I don’t know but hopefully everyone will be able to comply before the May deadline. In another blog post today, Andy Marshall again covers the topic of the legislation and EE. He wonders what EllisLab is doing about it (if anything).
The problem is, ExpressionEngine uses 3 cookies by default and they can’t be turned off. They don’t do anything that concerns me, but the fact they can’t be removed from the core EE installation does. By using an ExpressionEngine site, I am now making a site uncompliant with a very real law that will require sites to run without non-essential cookies.
Andy called on EllisLab to address this problem. In the comments Steven Grant linked to a EE support thread that shows that EllisLab is aware of the problem and, as of the last update in January, plan to work on the issue and address it so everyone who in affected by the EU leglisation can comply. Robin Sowell, a software engineer at EllisLab replied:
We’ve reached the discussion stage on it- it was already on our radar. We haven’t started coding on it, and our plans aren’t currently firmed up, but we do know the deadline is looming. But yes- we do intend to give our users a way to comply with the cookie requirement. At least on the frontend, EE will need to be able to run cookie free, and I’m thinking some posts on different ways to honor the requirement will likely be needed as well. And yes- right now, there’s no way to totally disable cookie setting.
Hopefully in the next 80 days we’ll have more updates about the progress EllisLab is making on making the frontend of EE cookie free.
Blog Entry
This edition of Ask the Readers comes via Twitter by Ryan Battles. Ryan asked:
Chime in via Twitter or in the comments with your thoughts, ideas and experience managing navigation.
Blog Entry
On Tuesday March 13th, the Buckeye State is going to host an EE meetup in Columbus. The gathering will take place at 7 PM at Gordon Biersch Brewery. If sipping some beer and chatting EE with fellow community members isn’t enough to entice you to attend, maybe the hundreds of dollars in free add-ons will!
Come and mingle with some of the brightest minds in Ohio, at least those who have chosen to work with ExpressionEngine as their CMS of choice! There will be hundreds of dollars in addon giveaways from the kinds folks at Dev Demon, EE Harbor, Mithra62, and Put Your Lights On.
Alright, EE Ohio folks, get it on your calendars.
Thanks to Ryan Battles of Jovia Web Studio for the heads up about the event.
Blog Entry
- Wygwam Entries ($, for EE2) by Toby Evans
This is an extension to Wygwam using the new config hook. It adds support for linking to any channel entry (not just from the Pages module)
- Social Sign On ($, for EE2) by Laisvunas
‘Enables to login and register to ExpressionEngine website using popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, Yahoo etc. Allows you to grab much info about user from his social account. Based on Hybridauth library.
- Clone Layout Module (for EE2) by Ted Geving
Clone / Copy a Publish Page Layout from one channel for a different group and/or channel.
- Forms ($, for EE2) by DevDemon
Forms are finally simple and powerful in ExpressionEngine. Delivering like no other module seen before in ExpressionEngine we make the job of creating forms simple for you and your content admin. Previously forms were a hassle in ExpressionEngine, tucked deeply within the modules system, they were cumbersome and extremely difficult for a non-developer to use. These days are over, Forms is about to set you free!
- SugarMembers ($, for EE2) by Atcore Systems
SugarMembers is a SugarCRM module and Expression Engine addon the enables the creation of new ExpressionEngine users from the SugarCRM interface. This is a great solution when looking to create a user portal in Expression Engine that is integrated with SugarCRM.
Blog Entry
Earlier this month Dan Cederholm released Pears, an open source WordPress theme that makes it easy to create a custom “markup & style pattern library.”
Nathan Doyle (“natetron”) created Pears for EE, which is an ExpressionEngine theme based on Dan’s WordPress Pears theme.
When I saw Dan’s theme I was hoping that someone would port it over to EE. Thanks for doing that, Nate!
If you’re not sure what Pears is all about, read through Dan’s site description to learn all about it and how you can get up and running with your own pattern library.
Blog Entry
The video from EllisLab featuring the new EE rich text editor is making the rounds and people are starting to chime in on what it means and how they see this playing out vis á vis third party add-ons.
I don’t think it does according to what we see in the video but I’m not sure if that’s planned or not.
What’s your reaction to this? Tweet EE Insider or hashtag your thoughts with #eecms and we’ll find it.
Blog Entry
- Detour Pro ($, for EE2) by Mike Hughes (cityzen)
Are you tired of managing your redirects with a clunky .htaccess file? Do you want to have Control Panel access to set up and manage redirects? Detour Pro (upgrade from the Detour extension) is here with new exciting features including 301 and 302 redirects, wildcards, start dates, expiration dates and more.
- Encaf Where is the LV? (for EE2) by Chad Crowell (Encaffeinated)
Now its not just a hit song from the Black Eyed Peas, Where is the LV? allows you to place a Low Variables link in the Structure main page so it is easier to access.
Blog Entry
We have fan of ExpressionEngine and author of Adaptive Web Design, Aaron Gustafson, as our guest this week! We define progressive enhancement, talk about the layered approach to web development from content to deployment, and how EE fits into that workflow.
Blog Entry
Last night in an email announcement, EllisLab pulled back the curtain on their new rich text editor. In a short preview video they give a look at some of the editor’s capabilities.
ExpressionEngine 2.5 Preview, the Rich Text Editor from EllisLab, Inc. on Vimeo.
Until I actually use this thing I can’t really comment much on it. Demos of software are different than actually using them. That being said it does look like this editor will be a nice default for ExpressionEngine and certainly has been a missing piece for a long time. Does it replace other third party editors like Wygwam? I don’t think so. If only for the lack of “Paste from Word.”
My full comment and review will be reserved for whenever it is I can use the editor myself. Until then, be sure to watch the video and leave your comment here about what you think (EllisLab closed comments on the video page).
Blog Entry
Update: Wes Rice pointed out in the comments that some of the information in the PDF isn’t correct. He’s written up a nice list of information that addresses it. Lest I be a “fool,” I’m posting this update so everyone will scroll down to his excellent comment.
Earlier this week, Eric Lamb asked if there was sheet that showed the benefits of using ExpressionEngine versus WordPress. Well, apparently there is.
I hadn’t seen this one before but Alex Kendrick linked to to a PDF by Graham Huber that compares WordPress and ExpressionEngine in terms of how content is organized and some major features, including the number of security advisories (the PDF states 175 for WordPress vs. 2 for EE).
This type of content would be a helpful addition to the Pro Network. Many EE professionals would benefit from being able to log in to the Pro Network and access documents they need to help support their case for why ExpressionEngine is the best choice.
Read the entire PDF: WordPress vs ExpressionEngine
Blog Entry
In short, Detour Pro gives you a GUI to manage your website redirects (301, 302, wildcards). It supports simple redirects (don’t get too fancy, cowboy) but that’s usually the kind that you need.
One thing I’d like to see is an option to turn on a layperson’s interface that masks the methods (301, etc) and just labels them as permanent, temporary, etc. The idea being that if you’re going to abstract .htaccess rules into a Control Panel interface, make it so people who have no idea what redirects are can use it. They just need to know that they want this old page to go to this new page. Boom. Done.
That being said, I like what I see with this add-on from Mike Hughes. Read the Detour Pro documentation for all the information about the add-on.
The add-on costs $22 from Devot-ee or you can buy a developer license for $100 and use it on unlimited sites. The developer license is only available from the Mike’s Cityzen website.
Blog Entry
Over the weekend, CartThrob 2 was deemed “production ready” in an announcement on the CartThrob website.
CartThrob2 is now production ready and available for purchase here at CartThrob.com. Though it’s been fun building a Google-style perpetual beta, CartThrob2 has really grown and is ready for release. Over the last few years we’ve refined every feature and interface, added tons of features, updated docs, templates, and everything in between.
The sweetheart of a e-commerce system for ExpressionEngine was first released for ExpressionEngine 1 and has been revamped for EE2. If you haven’t used CartThrob before, check out the video walk-thru(.mov file) for a general overview.
If you were one of the customers that particpated in the paid CarthThrob 2 beta, then your license is automatically upgraded to the production ready version.
CartThrob is also now bundling their add-on will other add-ons, like CTAdmin, Export it, Securit:ee and Backup Pro.
CartThrob 2 is $149.00 and available now.
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