Blog Entry
We missed last week due to a heavy workload here at the shop, but that means we’re back this week with a ton of add-ons. We’ve also opened up voting for this year’s AcademEE Awards. Please take a second and go vote for those best new add-ons in 2011, as well as the top developer. Voting ends on December 18.
- AJAX Email ($, for EE1 & EE2) by Laisvunas
AJAX Email allows you to submit contact form without reloading of the page.
- Entry Auth Dir (for EE2) by koivi
Creates directories and uses HTTP authentication to password protect them. The data used to create these directories comes from entries in a configured channel with appropriate fields. If the submitted password field is empty, the extension generates a random password based on settings.
- Allow More EE Code ($, for EE1 & EE2) by Laisvunas
This plugin allows ExpressionEngine URL segment variables, fresh variables (EE1.x), snippets (EE2+) and ExpressionEngine’s comments to be used in entries and then parsed in the template.
- SSL Check (for EE2) by Yuri Salimovskiy (IntoEEtive)
Check whether page is accessed over secure (https) connection
- DT ProForm Select (for EE2) by Jeff Claeson
A fieldtype for ProForm. Allows you to select from your ProForm Forms. Can be used in a Matrix Fieldtype or as a standalone fieldtype
- Reflection (for EE2) by Bryant Hughes (The Good Lab)
Reflection is a fieldtype for ExpressionEngine that provides site admins with a feature heavy code-editor. The editor is powered by Code Mirror and features syntax specific highlighting and color theming options.
- Snippet Editor ($, for EE2) by Yuri Salimovskiy (IntoEEtive)
The editor for snippets and global variables that you’ve been waiting for - with revisions saved and code highlighted!
- BSD SocialEEsta (for EE2) by Blue State Digital
SocialEEsta adds social buttons to your ExpressionEngine pages with no fuss. It supports Twitter’s Tweet & Follow buttons, Facebook’s Like button, and Google’s +1 button.
- Search Locator ($, for EE2) by Jason Pancake (Flapjack Labs)
The search locator module allows site administrators and web developers to easily add a proximity-based search for store and/or dealer locations.
- Republic Variables (for EE2) by Republic
View, organize and edit your global variables. Republic Variables is made for multi-language content, but works great for your single language sites too.
- AJAX Registration ($, for EE1 & EE2) by Laisvunas
This plugin allows you to display member registration form and forgot password form in ExpressionEngine’s templates and submit them without reloading of the page.
- Store : Custom Inventory Columns (for EE2) by Percipio
Got the exp:resso Store? This extension adds the ability to add / remove columns to the Inventory page, including SKU code and Entry Date. Adding the SKU column also allows you to search by SKU code in the keywords box. You can now sort your inventory by SKU & Date too.
- Sassy-CP (for EE2) by Kyle Cotter (Cotter Web Design)
An override.css for the ExpressionEngine control panel.
- EETemplates Override.css (for EE2) by EE Templates
This is a simple one that just eliminates a lot of the contrasty color and uses mostly grey. Lots of CSS3 gradients and rounded buttons and less images help speed things up. And this is based off of the Corporate Theme.
- ConditionalTruncHTML (for EE2) by John Morton (SuperGeekery)
Truncates HTML/Text to the specified number of characters based on the length of another block of text. Does not count characters in HTML-tags, does not cut-off in the middle of tags, closes all open tags.
- Proxy (for EE2) by Bryant Hughes (The Good Lab)
Proxy is an EE2.0 Module used to substitute template tags with placeholder data, in order to more efficiently and effectively test your templates. Before Proxy, you likely created a plethora of test entires to test various types of content that could be used in a Channel Field. The process of creating all these dummy entries was time consuming, confusing, and led to not testing as rigorously as you should have been. Proxy was created to speed up the testing of templates, by allowing the developer to quickly swap in placeholder tag data when the template renders.
- Undo Gypsy (for EE1) by Brian Litzinger
This script will first undo Gypsy by creating separate field groups and cloning existing custom fields, migrating data accordingly, then un-installing Gypsy.
- Social Update ($, for EE2) by Yuri Salimovskiy (IntoEEtive)
Authomatically send updates to Twitter and Facebook when ExpressionEngine entry is published.
- Member Email Clean (for EE2) by Carter Digital
Returns the logged in email address as a straight forward string.
- CE String ($, for EE2) by Causing Effect (Aaron Waldon)
CE String is a feature-packed text manipulation tool that will allow you to template your sites smarter and faster. The syntax is revolutionary, and there are over 60 method options to help you code with power and efficiency. After using this add-on, you won’t want to go back to “the old way” of coding ExpressionEngine templates.
- CE Cache ($, for EE2) by Causing Effect (Aaron Waldon)
CE Cache allows you to store and retrieve parts of your templates (fragment caching) with file-based caching, database, APC, Memcache or Memcached. Since much of the heavy lifting doesn’t have to be run on every page-load, your performance increases can be astonishing. You can also escape any parts of your cached code, so they remain dynamic (like logged_in conditionals for example). This enables you to enjoy the speed increases without sacrificing usability or functionality where you need it.
Blog Entry
With EE 1 finally being phased out, it’s become more imperative to upgrade your legacy EE installs to the latest EE2 branch. Now, on Episode 58: EE1 to EE2 of the podcast, Ryan Masuga goes through the details of his journey to upgrade his client sites to EE2: should we even upgrade? Should we consider a clean install with imports instead? What should we look out for? Tune in and find out!
Blog Entry
Each week a group of EE users gathers together in a (not at all) secret chat room to help each other with EE issues, problems and questions. There is also a lot of general discussion about ExpressionEngine, web design and development.
Here’s the thing: you’re invited, too. Won’t you join us?
The chat starts at 9 PM EST in the US. Go here to join us: mijingo.com/go-chat
Instructional Video
In this 5 minute screencast I look at the LiveReload application for Mac OS X. LiveReload is a utility app that allows you to get an automatic preview of the templates (or directory of files) you’re working on in your preferred browser. It also supports preprocessing and running Terminal commands before reloading. In this video, I walk through the basic use of LiveReload by editing an ExpressionEngine template and also how you can use with other tools, like Jekyll.
Originally posted to the Mijingo blog.
Get the Video
Blog Entry
Stefan Rechsteiner reminded me with his tweet that today, December 5th, is the day that EE1 is no longer offered as a license option when you buy ExpressionEngine. Almost 2 years to the day, EllisLab released the ExpressionEngine 2 Public beta. It is certainly due time to retire the old and focus solely on the new.
The blog post last month from EllisLab with the detail has all the information you’ll need. Including important bits:
If you absolutely must start projects on EE 1.x, please email sales and we’ll work out a solution for you.
Please note that if you already own ExpressionEngine 1.x, download access will not be affected by this change.
Of course, support isn’t gone immediately but it won’t be around forever:
Second, as of April 23rd 2012, ExpressionEngine 1.x will no longer be publicly supported. If you have mission critical projects that need support, we’re happy to continue supporting EE 1.x through private & enterprise support contracts.
How-to Article
Recently on Twitter someone wondered aloud how he could find freelancers that do ExpressionEngine work. It’s really not that hard and there are a few different ways to go about it. Let’s run through them quickly so you can be on your way to finding the person you need.
These tips will help you find an ExpressionEngine professional, not just a freelancer. Some of the professionals you’ll find are agencies (larger and small), not individuals.
Read the Article
Instructional Video
Part of the EllisLab how-to video library.
Sometimes you forget your credentials to the ExpressionEngine Control Panel and need a way to log in when resetting your password via email fails. Watch this short video from EllisLab to learn how.
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Instructional Video
Part of the EllisLab how-to video library.
This EllisLab support video shows you how to change your system folder name.
Get the Video
Instructional Video
Part of the EllisLab how-to video library.
“This video will show you how to find your full server path and other vital PHP information, all from within the ExpressionEngine control panel.”
Get the Video
Blog Entry
Our friends (and long time advertiser on the site) Pixel & Tonic are hiring a PHP Developer on a contract-to-hire basis. Do you love their add-ons and want to help make them better? Well, time to spit shine your resume and apply for the position.
Pixel & Tonic is looking for PHP developer who’s a diehard fan of ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter to help us develop and support our ExpressionEngine add-ons.
Make sure you have great PHP chops and experience developing for EE. Is that you? Apply for the job.
Blog Entry
Everyone’s favorite add-on developer with the last name Lewis, Stephen Lewis, says it’s important for add-on developers to include hooks in their add-ons to allow for custom extensions.
Not all feature requests are created equal. Some are extremely insightful and far-reaching, and improve the add-on in ways you never imagined. Most are narrow, case-specific, and don’t belong in the core product.
Extension hooks provide a means of dealing with the latter in a way that doesn’t adversely affect the core add-on.
He continues with an example of his Campaigner add-on and how allowing for custom extensions lets him, in his own words, abdicate responsibility, for special features or customizations that a developer might need for their project.
Solid advice.
Blog Entry
It’s well known that if you don’t change your member profile trigger word from the default of “member,” that anyone can browse to your site and see a list of members.
This recently came up again in a tweet from Ryan Masuga and what followed were some good suggestions on what to do make the issue of inadvertently exposing your member list go away.
(My favorite is AJ Penniga’s highly technical solution to the problem.)
Read a full list of the suggestions
Blog Entry
This is a on-going series of entries where I highlight EE experiences.
OK, no more #eecms tweets, I losing friends.
Asher Awelan via Twitter
Keep tweeting away using the hashtag. We don’t mind.
Blog Entry
Oliver Lindberg at .net magazine compiled a fun list of potential gifts for yourself or your favorite web designer. Or maybe your favorite writer at your favorite publication on ExpressionEngine.
We’ve asked some of the industry’s leading designers to recommend their favourite Christmas gifts. So if you’re still stuck and don’t know what to get for your geek friends, here are more than 50 gift ideas for your inspiration
Participants included: Paul Boag, our own Fred Boyle, Andy Budd, the wonderful Veerle Pieters and Austinites Trent Walton and Tim Van Damme.
My favorite? The educational mug set suggested by Meagan Fisher.
Read the entire guide: The web designers’ gift guide 2011
Blog Entry
King of the Parse Order, Low Schutte, digs up an interesting example where an EE conditional isn’t treated as you might expect. Low skirts around the issue with a preload replace variable. Sneaky, sneaky.
I won’t spoil it here, so first check out the code that Low posted as a gist and then read his explanation below it. But, try to figure it out on your own first before looking at the answer. 
Blog Entry
Think you know variables? Think again! EE Podcast’s 57th episode, All About Variables, tackles one of the most used and integral parts of ExpressionEngine. We talk native functionality, touch on optimization, as well as the the variety of third-party add-ons that make the control panel interaction more user-friendly and development a lot more efficient.
Blog Entry
This is a on-going series of entries where I highlight EE experiences.
A lot of agencies still think that #eecms is poor for SEO, e-commerce, rich media etc. Time do something about that!
Hambo via Twitter
Take every opportunity to educate them.
Any #eecms 1.x to 2.x upgrade that doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. #fairytalesitellmyself
Mr. Wilson via Twitter
Client’s in-house dev: “I bought a personal license of EE over the weekend and have become mildly obsessed. I envy your expertise.” #eecms
Jeff Claeson via Twitter
Blog Entry
In an announcement on the ExpressionEngine blog, EllisLab CEO Leslie Camacho talked about the EE Reactor project and the people involved. Some of this was announced previously at the EECI conference last month in Brooklyn. Leslie also announced that the team already has code ready for an upcoming release of EE:
As of the time of publication, the EE Reactor Team has nine confirmed contributions scheduled for release in EE 2.4 (late January).
The team is focused on “code that makes life better for the EE dev community.” It’ll be interesting to see what they have planned. I suspect that the tweaks made are directly related to problems those developers have run into while working on client projects at their respective agencies or while writing add-ons.
Greg Ferrell, Leevi Graham, Brian Litzinger, Jack McDade, Erik Reagan and Rob Sanchez are all members of the team.
I look forward to seeing how this new experiment works out and hopefully I can get some of the members to share their experiences working on the team and code after the 2.4 release is out.
Blog Entry
- Get Thumbnail (for EE2) by Johan Strömqvist
The “Get thumbnail” plugin let’s you get the path to any autogenerated thumbnail from a default “File” field within your channel entries tag that you’ve defined yourself.
- Export It ($, for EE2) by mithra62 (Eric Lamb)
The goal of Export It is to allow ExpressionEngine developers the ability to take their data out of ExpressionEngine. Export It does this through 2 unique tools; the CP module and the REST API.
- Affiliator ($, for EE2) by Chris Newton (BarrettNewton.com)
Add affiliate marketing capabilities to your ExpressionEngine website. Tracks payments and conversions, allows you to set the commission rate of each affiliate, and pay affiliates via PayPal MassPay with the click of a button. Includes template tags for affiliate account management, payment history, and current unpaid commission. Supports CartThrob2, Brilliant Retail and Simple Commerce.
- Profile:Edit ($, for EE2) by Chris Newton (BarrettNewton.com)
ExpressionEngine member data is now insanely easy to manage and edit! Store & edit member profile data directly in ExpressionEngine Channel entries, with all of the power that channels provide. Administrative privileges, custom fields, SafeCracker forms, and getting to ditch the troublesome member templates and tags. Super easy and leverages what you already know and love.
- Disable Template Editor (for EE2) by Jesse Bunch
Makes the ExpressionEngine template editor read-only for templates under source control.
Blog Entry
The king of the EE parse order, Low Schutte, has dazzled us once again with a great way to leverage the EE parse order to make your templates even more flexible and reusable than you thought possible. What do you get when take Snippets, Preload Replace Variables and the Parse Order? Super flexible templates that don’t have the overhead of embed templates. That’s what.
According to EE’s parse order, snippets are parsed first, before preload replace variables. These, in turn, are parsed before plugin and module tags, so both can be used as early parsed variables. This combination makes it possible to change the content of your snippet on a per template basis. Much like embeds and embed variables, but without the performance hit.
A series of Preload Replace Variables set your template values and then the snippet just uses those variables to pull in the right data. Read the entire blog post from Low (or, if you’re like me, read it twice) to get all of the details, including some sample code.
Very cool.
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