A special thank you again to the advertisers, who help keep the lights on here at EE Insider. Each month a handful of wonderful companies in our community share their products and services with you via advertisements on the site. The ads are always relevant to you, tasteful and the products and services trustworthy.
A huge thank you to:
Might Big Robot - They have been advertising their Profile Edit add-on and just recently released the Field Editor add-on, which makes it very easy to create custom fields in EE2.
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 Rating module allows you to easily add rating functionality to 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 and Lee at Vector Media Group are a valuable part of our community.
Structure - Travis and Jack have built and supported the easiest way to allow your clients to manage pages (with hierarchy) in ExpressionEngine.
EE Insider just started its fourth year online and it wouldn’t be possible without the help of our advertisers. Would you like to share your product or service with the community? Get in touch.
AJAX Mailinglist($, for EE1 & EE2) by Laisvunas This plugin allows you to display mailinglist form in ExpressionEngine’s templates and submit it without reloading of the page. This add-on has been designed to be fully compatible with AJAX Form Validator http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/ajax-form-validator.
Pic Puller for Instagram($, for EE2) by John Morton (SuperGeekery) Pic Puller is an Expression Engine Add on that integrates Instagram into any Expression Engine installation, version 2.3.1+. Pic Puller walks you through setting up an account with Instagram, creating an app, and integrating it into your own EE site.
TGL Instagram(for EE2) by Bryant Hughes (The Good Lab) This is an ExpressionEngine 2 module for interacting with the Instagram API and can be used to display instagram pictures and data in your templates. Currently, the module only retrieves information from the authenticated user’s feed and a specified user’s feed. The module has a CP backend, which directs the user through the oAuth process.
Local Calendar($, for EE2) by Biber Ltd. (Can Berkol) LocalCalendar fieldtype is datepicker plugin that currently supports a datepicker for both Gregorian and Hijri calendars. The fieldtype also supports conversions of dates of the two calendar types. The plugin provides the same conversion functionalities. Out of the box, LocalCalendar does support Arabic, English, and Turkish languages and it provides integration with our Multi Language Support Extension.
Field Editor($, for EE2) by Chris Newton (BarrettNewton.com) Breathe new life into EE’s channel fields editor! Adding & editing fields won’t be a chore anymore. Field Editor adds powerful features to EE’s standard field editor interface. Rather than laboriously clicking and editing each and every channel field or clicking and clicking and clicking to add new fields to a channel, you can now add, delete, re-order and manipulate your custom fields all in one simple interface.
Responsive CP(for EE2) by PutYourLightsOn (Ben Croker) Responsive CP is a custom ExpressionEngine theme that makes your control panel work better with mobile devices as well as look more professional. It also allows you to easily add your logo to the bottom of the control panel (good for branding client sites).
Workflow is a common topic among the EE community, and one important part of that is constantly emphasized: version control! Are you using it? Intimidated? Tune in to this week’s EE podcast where guests Ian Pitts and Adam Wiggall discuss how they use Git for version control with their EE projects, and hopefully their advice soothes your worries. Ian and Adam talk about their workflows, preferred tools and add-ons, and how version control has completely changed the way they work.
Mighty Big Robot released Field Editor this week, a new add-on that gives you one screen to edit all of the fields in a channel field group and other cool features like drag-and-drop field reordering, import and export of field groups so you can easily reuse them without having to create them all again, field cloning and more.
The add-on requires EE 2.4, so make sure you upgrade or try it on a new site. At only $9.99 I can’t think why you wouldn’t buy this to try it out.
Along with the annoucement about EE 2.4, EllisLab also mentioned that in the upcoming 2.6.0 release the MySQL and PHP version requirements will increase.
Lastly, I would like to note that our PHP and MySQL version requirements will change with the 2.6.0 ExpressionEngine release, giving you at least 3 months to prepare. Our PHP version requirement will be 5.2.4 and our MySQL requirement will be 5.0.3. Making the call now allows our developers to plan new features with optimized code while still giving our users plenty of time to make sure their hosting environment is compatible with ExpressionEngine’s future needs.
If you’re running on an older server config or your host is behind in updating PHP and MySQL, you have 3 months to get things in order. EllisLab is usually very conservative with their PHP and MySQL requirements1, so hopefully this won’t affect too many people.
The latest version of PHP at time of writing is 5.3.9 and the latest MySQL is 5.5. ↩
Today he released Responsive CP, an EE theme that makes your control panel a little more flexible.
Responsive CP is a custom ExpressionEngine theme that makes your control panel work better with mobile devices as well as look more professional. It also allows you to easily add your logo to the bottom of the control panel (good for branding client sites).
In keeping with the popular responsive design movement, Ben used media queries to adjust the control panel design to the screen size.
We’ve loved being a part offended the EE community over the past few years, and plan on staying active as both EE/CI users and coders—we still have CodeIgniter apps in production. So—if our announcement sounded overly-brusque or dismissive of Ellis Labs or the community in any way, please know that it certainly wasn’t meant that way.
He noted that there were a couple of things that made them move:
the availability (or not) of highly managed, platform-specific enterprise hosting. EE does not yet have a comparable, truly enterprise-scale hosting solution for media companies in particular (see http:vip.wordpress.com)
To address the main issue about Grist.org moving to WordPress, good for them! At the end of the day, the CMS is a means to an end. If they feel the move will be advantageous, I am glad they are doing so and I genuinely hope it works out well for them.
As a community, we should not be offended when a company switches technologies. After all, it is not a personal attack on EE or its user-base. They didn’t pillage our proverbial village or threaten our livelihood. Not all companies are the same and not all end goals are the same. No big deal.
Illuminated($, for EE2) by Isaac Raway (Airways) Illuminated is a content editing fieldtype for people who speak HTML.
Server Variable(for EE2) by Rein de Vries A small plugin that retrieves the server vars from the server.
Google Currency Converter($, for EE2) by Percipio Perfect for eCommerce environments selling items globally, this plugin allows you to instantly convert numeric values to alternate currencies, with parameters to round results to specific decimal places.
Auto Increment Field($, for EE2) by Biber Ltd. (Can Berkol) Auto Increment Field is a read-only field type that mimics MySQL auto-increment functionality.
ThEEditorCodeMirror(for EE2) by Anthony W. Rainer The same as ThEEditor (http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/theeditor), but uses CodeMirror which is faster and more supported.
JMS SuperSearch Wrangler(for EE1 & EE2) by James Smith SuperSearch Wrangler removes common words from any Solspace Super Search keyword searches to improve the quality of search results. (Requires Solspace Super Search addon).
A couple of weeks ago I asked you for your wishes for ExpressionEngine in the year 2012. The response was wonderful and full of great ideas and, thankfully, very little snark. I wanted to hear everyone else’s ideas but neglected to share my own.
I agree with many of the suggestions in the comment thread of my original post. But if I had to only choose one thing (and, in truth, it’s impractical for me to do so) to wish for with ExpressionEngine in 2012 it’s this:
Bring back ExpressionEngine Core (or something similar)
When the end of ExpressionEngine Core was announced, I was all for it. I thought it was a good move by EllisLab to charge for all access to the ExpressionEngine application. And, you know, it might have been good for their business and for our community. There’s something to be said about an admission price (albeit a fairly low one at only $99.95) and how it can keep the community professional. And, for the most part, that’s the case.
But paid-only licensing1 options also keeps out the casual, happen-to-stumble-across-ExpressionEngine users, who may have been suffering for years from the plight that is [insert CMS here] and are looking for a better way to create content websites.
It’s Where I Started
My first ExpressionEngine website was built on EE Core. I wanted to dabble and check out the new-to-me CMS and Core provided me that option. Using Core allowed me to make a ton of mistakes building my first ExpressionEngine site and learn a tremendous amount along the way (although, as usually is the case, many of my best lessons were learned when there was a lot on the line).
I’m not the only one. Ask around or start an informal Twitter poll to find out who started with Core. There are many others who also started on Core and are now thriving using ExpressionEngine in their consulting businesses or other web work.
Can we create the next generation of the ExpressionEngine community with a paid-only admission to the community?
Front Lines
I’m not trying to hoodwink you with a flashy show of altruistic word gymnastics; there is certainly a business consideration here.
I create tutorials that teach people how to learn ExpressionEngine. If there’s a barrier that keeps people from adopting ExpressionEngine I am one of the first (after EllisLab) to feel the impact. Have I? There are so many scenarios that without controlled testing it’s impossible to know. But is it in the realm of possibility that the lack of a free version of ExpressionEngine has slowed growth of the community and the businesses that do commerce in the space? Definitely.
An easier way into the community will help everyone using EE. I’m not just talking about add-on developers who sell their software commercially; it’s you, the consultant, freelancer and agency owner who also benefit from more people using–and becoming proficient in–ExpressionEngine. It makes it easier to pitch EE to clients, hire people to work on your team building EE sites and have access to better add-ons and supporting services.
Having an EE Core version of ExpressionEngine available would increase the number of people joining the community, adopting ExpressionEngine and building new sites on EE. This is good for everyone.
So, that’s my wish for ExpressionEngine for 2012. It’s not a feature, a bug fix or a complaint. I’d just like to see the community open to casual passersby, CMS tinkerers and people who don’t want to or can’t spend $100 on a license.
Yes, there is a 30-day money back guarantee for ExpressionEngine. I know EllisLab honors that guarantee but I think they’re so often used by companies (especially those sleezy television informercials) that they aren’t really taken seriously by many people (including myself). There’s also the situation where some individuals (young students just getting into web development) don’t have the money to throw down for a license. ↩
Grist is adopting WordPress for two main reasons: WordPress has become the world’s foremost CMS, and is the locus for a whole lot of journalism innovation and experimentation. We want to be part of that community, and more able to take advantage of the latest online news technologies. Our other goal has more to do with who we are. We are small — really small — and as such want to focus our technical energies on news, design and innovation, rather than hosting, uptime and infrastructure.
EECI - the premier ExpressionEngine conference - will be back twice this year. End of May we hit EECI hometown Leiden in The Netherlands for the European event and this time we focus on development.
Early November we’ll move the show to the US. The city is not chosen yet, but somewhere down the line Minneapolis - San Antonio is where we will be with a brand new edition of EECI US.
So, there you have it. Two shows, one giant ocean apart. EE Insider is currently dispatching our team of lobbyists to ensure the US version of the EECI conference is held in the great city of Austin this coming November.
Stay tuned to eeciconf.com for updates on location, speakers and tickets.
EE Harbor released this past week a new add-on for EE2 to help with making multi-language websites with ExpressionEngine. It’s called Transcribe. Creating a multi-language site is, without a doubt, still a task that has many, many solutions. EE Harbor and their Transcribe module are trying to be the solution.
From the product page:
Transcribe is a fully featured solution for creating multi-lingual websites in ExpressionEngine. Transcribe handles everything from word/phrase translation to channel entry translations and even url translation/routing!
Here’s a video walk-thru of setting up a site to use Transcribe:
Everyone’s favorite…Stephen Lewis wrote up some handy terminal commands that retreive all of the available extension hooks for a given ExpressionEngine installation. From the script comments:
A couple of useful bash one-liners for finding all of the extension hooks in a given ExpressionEngine installation. Here’s what it does:
Finds all of the native hooks, and any third-party hooks;
Sorts them alphabetically;
Outputs them to STDOUT or a file of your choosing.
Why would you need this? The most obvious reason is so you can easily find what’s available to you while developing an EE site, especially if it is one that you inherited or jumped into mid-project.
There are two commands: one that outputs the extension hooks via the STDOUT and one to a file. If you like these commands, it’ll be easier to save store them in an alias for easier retrieval or in a tool like TextExpander.
VZ Buyers(for EE2) by Eli Van Zoeren Add-on to Exp:resso Store. Displays a list of people who have bought each product.
Snaptcha($, for EE2) by PutYourLightsOn (Ben Croker) Snaptcha is an invisible captcha and will be the last time you will ever have to think about protecting your forms from spam bots.
Wiki Comments($, for EE2) by Percipio This module creates a relationship between a wiki page and a channel entry - it does this by automatically creating / deleting a channel entry every time a wiki page is created / deleted. Adding comments is just one option you can do - if you add some channel fields to your channel the possibilities for your wiki are endless.
Invitations($, for EE2) by Yuri Salimovskiy (IntoEEtive) Building closed community with ExpressionEngine has just become easier! Generate signup codes from CP, or let people generate them on frontend. View usage stats, associate users with people they invited, - and even let them earn credits for bringing referrals.
BMS Page Type(for EE2) by Ben Martin This plugin allows you to change the template type on the fly. Useful if you use a single template with logic to either display entries or rss feeds.
For our first episode of 2012, we thought it’d be nice to ask the community about their first EE websites. We had tremendous feedback and collected common threads regarding why they first started using EE, learning how to use it, mistakes made, and what learning outcomes came about. Tune in and reminisce!
In the last few years mobile has absolutely exploded. It’s the way people shop, browse the web and check email and the numbers are increasing exponentially. Because of this, we need to shift our focus on building websites explicitly for the desktop and really start thinking about the context that our work is being seen in and interacted with. We need to rethink the way we’re building websites.
In this tutorial we’re going to run through some ways to integrate mobile into our ExpressionEngine workflow.
Garrett reviews the differences between a dedicated site and a responsive approach (scaling the site dynamically based on device viewport). In the tutorial he’s opted to use a dedicated approach. He covers using global variables, creating a subdomain and all of the template work required. All of the project files are available for download so you can follow along.
As is usually the case with software, I’m sure this is easier said than done but I agree that it needs to be done. I sincerely hope that this will be on the radar for the EllisLab development in the coming year (and hopefully before EE3).
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