Blog Entry
This is a on-going series of entries where I highlight EE experiences.
Why the hell is the Emoticon Module still installed by default!
Justin Long via Twitter
I heard that Kelsey Martens pays good money to EllisLab for that module to remain installed by default. Just a rumor though.
Blog Entry
I first released my series of ExpressionEngine video tutorials in 2008. That was back before EE2 was released and even before the infamous “Summer of 2008” came and went.
Last year, I released an updated version of the videos, with a brand new example site, under my own Mijingo imprint and redid them for the ExpressionEngine 2.1 public release.
Today marks another milestone in the videos that helped countless people learn EE. This update to the series includes completely redone videos in HD size (1280x720) The larger sized videos will make it easier to watch them at fullscreen or on bigger screens.
The videos still only cost $48 for about 4 hours of training over 8 different videos. That’s a tremendous deal to quickly get up and running with EE.
Read the announcement at the Mijingo blog and if you haven’t tried the videos before, today is a great time to get started.
Blog Entry
My friends at Vector Media Group created a gorgeous site to help you find the best places to eat: Drinking & Dining Guide for New York City. Who better to take recommendations from than the locals? No one, that’s who.
Eating and drinking locations aren’t just in Brooklyn, but also in other parts of NYC, so you can try different areas and fares. Suggestions are broken down into four groups: Quick Bites, Evening for Two, For Groups (very important!) and Classic New York.
The site is responsive, so it’s easy to use on your iPhone. Nice work, guys!
I’m getting hungry just writing this…
Blog Entry
Are you going to EECI? If so, you should be using the new EECI Event Guide made by Eric Miller Design and EE Coder.
The guide has three different components: a map of attendee locations, tweets by attendees and a stream of photos, slideshare and videos (youtube, vimeo) from the #eeci2011 hash tag. Check it out: http://eecieventguide.com/
Nice work!
Blog Entry
- VMG Chosen Member (for EE2) by Matt Weinberg (Vector Media Group)
VMG Chosen Member is a fieldtype allowing the AJAX selection of one or more members inside an entry. It’s specifically designed for use on sites with a large amount of members, in cases where a regular select dropdown with thousands of options would decrease publish page performance. It includes autocomplete capabilities and the friendly selection/listing of large numbers of users using a modified version of the Chosen JavaScript plugin. VMG Chosen Member can be used alone, within Matrix, or within Low Variables.
- EZ Image Resize ($, for EE2) by Vim Interactive, Inc.
EZ Resize brings the best features of CE Image into your text, text-areas and WYSIWYG field types. Allowing you to control image size, quality and much more inside of a multi-image field like WYGWAM.
- AJAX Pagination (for EE1 & EE2) by Laisvunas
Allows you to display content from multiple pages using Ajax. Any ExpressionEngine tag outputting pagination links is supported!
- Pages URI (for EE2) by Onno Groen
A simple button that copies the URL title field contents to the Pages URI field. Great for customers who don’t understand the Pages URI field.
- EE PromoteJS (for EE1 & EE2) by Greg Ferrell
The Promotejs EE (1 and 2) plugin is an adaptation of Remy Sharp’s WP plugin for: http://promotejs.com Rotates the Promote JS keywords and outputs the image link.
- States (for EE2) by Todd Perkins
Loop through US states and display long name / short name values. Great for select drop downs.
- Hide Template Groups (for EE2) by Todd Perkins
Hide template groups from pages module.
- Eventbrite (for EE2) by Todd Perkins
Eventbrite EE2 module.
- GitHub (for EE2) by Addict Add-ons
Need to show GitHub data on your ExpressionEngine 2 site? This’ll do that.
- ParamEEter (for EE2) by Protean Web
ParamEEter is a simple plugin that converts text (perhaps stored in a text field) into EE tag parameters, with various useful options.
Blog Entry
Following on the heels of the first multi-language site episode with Tom Jaeger, the EE Podcast takes the Asian perspective with Nicolas Bottari – who is fluent in Japanese and French – on Multi-Language Sites Part Deux. Some of the things we discuss could also be relevant to those working with sanskrit as well as kanji or Chinese characters. We talk about multi-byte characters and the importance of Unicode, right-to-left orientation, things to consider when setting up a multi-language site, some helpful add-ons, and a couple of quirky Asian site requests.
Blog Entry
It’s sometimes called “Kennygate” but some who are paying attention know it as that time EllisLab got called to the mat, acted on it and is now paying the price.
For the uninitated, “Kennygate” started with a blog post on October 13, 2010 by Kenny Meyers wherein he laid out several complaints about and suggestions for EllisLab and ExpressionEngine. Most of them were valid points about ExpressionEngine 2 and how they communicated. I once described it as a “ranticle” because it was a rant and perhaps, in my personal view, a little more incendiary than was warranted.
In the end, it didn’t matter how I described it because the community responded and raised their digital hands and pixelated voices in agreement. The outcry from the community was only tamped down when EllisLab responded. Not only did they respond with a blog post but it triggered a series of decisions and announcements whereby they promised improved communication about ExpressionEngine bugs, releases and plans. You could hardly find anything wrong with this response. It was swift, decisive and came directly from Leslie Camacho, the CEO of EllisLab.
But that’s where it began.
Quietly Growing
I started using ExpressionEngine in early 2006, which is relatively recent compared to others who have been around since the pMachine days. My recollection of working on EE in my early days in the community was that EllisLab (then called pMachine) was notoriously quiet and private. Maybe this was just the company inherting what I see as EllisLab founder Rick Ellis’ personality: outside of the limelight and just interested in creating cool things that help people. EllisLab weren’t interested in bragging about what they created. They knew it was cool. Their users loved it. I loved it.
Feature for feature, it is tough to argue that ExpressionEngine wasn’t a giant leap forward for how people created and managed websites. In a time when blogging tools were surging, ExpressionEngine was the affordable CMS that could do more than just set up a blog. It was the prim and proper, powerful CMS that would help designers and developers out of the awful situation of having to cram a website into a buggy, unsecure blogging tool.
March 2008
In March 2008 at SXSW, EllisLab held a special session to demo and talk about their upcoming release: ExpressionEngine 2.0. It featured a complete rewrite of the code using the open source PHP framework CodeIgniter, a colorful new interface designed by Veerle Pieters and lots of eye candy. The group in attendance was excited (I was not at SXSW that year) and buzz online palpable. This was the big coming out party for a company and product that had always lived quietly in its own corner of the CMS world. I was excited, you were excited, the nerds were excited.
The release date for EE 2.0 was set at “Summer 2008.”
21 Months Later
One of the highlights of Kenny’s blog post for me was this part where he addressed the nearly 2 year delay in releasing EE2:
Stop licking your wounds over the EE2 release date fiasco. We get it. Nobody won. ExpressionEngine 2’s release caused a lot of internal and external strife.
That’s right. Nobody won. Not EllisLab and the staff, not the community, not the add-on developers, not the people writing (and rewriting) books and other training materials. That’s why this article isn’t about rehashing that particluar piece of ExpressionEngine history.
In December 2009, EllisLab released the EE2 public beta. This was the first time the public could purchase and get our hands on and use ExpressionEngine 2. Up until that time you had to be part of the private beta or developer preview, the latter of which started earlier in the year (in February or March, if I recall correctly).
EE2 beta wasn’t always pretty but it was a beta.: feature complete and in need of a lot of testing in the field. There were major bugs, some unnecessary use of jQuery effects and a lot of gnashing of teeth in the community over the Control Panel design.
The beta was far from perfect but it was released. That’s a huge milestone. Within days of its release there was a book available on ExpressionEngine 2 and some developers had already migrated their add-ons to work with the new release. It seemed like we turned a corner.
Two Point One
The following Summer, in July 2010, EllisLab released ExpressionEngine 2.1 as the first non-beta version of the software. It still had some issues, but again, it was an improvement and between then and this week—with the release of EE 2.3—ExpressionEngine has slowly gotten better and more reliable.
The response by the community to the EE 2.1 release was to embrace the new version and run with it. Quicker than I thought would happen, people stopped building sites in EE 1.x and moved to EE 2.1. EllisLab, did you notice that? I know you did. That’s a huge achievement.
Today we have EE 2.3, a thriving add-on community with more than 800 EE2 add-ons listed at Devot:ee and a bunch of community websites and services.
The Response
If A equals success, then the formula is A equals X plus Y and Z, with X being work, Y play, and Z keeping your mouth shut.
–Albert Einstein
After “Kennygate,” Leslie Camacho responded with a blog post. He acknowleged Kenny’s post and talked about what they plan to do and the problems they’ve faced.
Historically its no secret that we’ve been bad at communicating with the Community during times of growth and the stress that goes with it. That’s precisely why I hired Leslie Doherty.
There’s no arguing (not even from EllisLab I’m sure) that ExpressionEngine 2 was a messy situation. But the community survived thanks to the relentless efforts of the EllisLab team. I don’t write that glibly or as a backhanded compliment. We ship websites. They built the software that let us ship those websites. Let’s not downplay or forget the difference.
The reaction by EllisLab—to somehow atone for their sins of shipping EE2 two years later than originally announced and communicating poorly along the way—was to open up and communicate more but, a lot of the time, overcommunicate. The overcommunication led to speaking freely about ideas that weren’t solid yet, talking off the cuff during podcasts and other public interviews (I’ve had several off the record conversations with EllisLab where project information was shared with me that was still in progress or still in the idea phase. I am not including those conversations as part of my analysis).
As part of an effort to be more open about what the team was working on, they took Kenny Meyer’s great suggestion to set up a status tracker, which listed the current work on EE2 and who was working on it. It was widely lauded and appreciated. Now we’d know if they were working on an oft requested feature or a particular annoying bug we’ve run into. It was our little window into their daily work on EE2.
But then they stopped updating it. It is stuck in an unclear time and lists people that no longer work at EllisLab. The problem isn’t that they stopped updating it, it’s that they create the tracker in the first place. I have never worked for EllisLab, so take this as pure speculation, but I don’t think it’s in their company culture to have public work trackers like that. Isn’t that okay? Yes, I think so.
This is the curse of transparency.
There was the time CCO James Mathias was chatting on the EE Podcast and took a completely inaccurate and inappropriate swipe at a popular ExpressionEngine add-on developer and add-on that undoubtedly made EE a better product. It came just after Pixel & Tonic released Assets, completely overshadowing the updated File Manager (which is now a solid feature in EE2). It came off very poorly but I would guess that the CCO was just trying to have a candid, frank conversation with his hosts.
I wrote extensively about the odd state of the announced yet unannounced EE Reactor project. In what was most likely a gesture of openness by tweeting progress and mentioning it in a blog post (see my posts for more information) it created genuine confusion. And now I’ve written twice about and helped publicize a project that might not ever happen or go past the experimental stage.
This is the curse of transparency.
EllisLab was very public about their hiring of a designer (which turned into hiring James Mathias as CCO). It was a much needed position for a company that didn’t employ a single designer. James is a great hire for EllisLab. In the blog post announcing James’ hiring, Leslie Camacho noted:
After a long in person interview in Seattle, he persuaded me to take the risk and bring him on in such a way that he’d have the authority and leeway to do what needs doing to make EllisLab a user experience focused company, something we started out being but drifted away from.
This note about refocusing EllisLab on UX was lost on most of the community (including myself until I reread the blog post while researching this article), because everyone thought James was coming in to fix the Control Panel issues. In fact, that was the focus initially and announced as such. As far as the community is concerned, the only new design we’ve seen is a community page for EllisLab, new forum badges and some other designs unrelated to the Control Panel. There have been some EE Control Panel tweaks but just not the overhaul that perhaps some expected.
This isn’t a bad thing at all. I’m not arguing that EllisLab is making wrong business moves. EllisLab has an internal agenda that fits their business and product goals. You can’t argue it should be anything except what they want it to be. But after “Kennygate” they’ve been giving the perception of being transparent about their plans and now the community expects it.
This is the curse of transparency.
A New Tack
Almost two thousand words later, we’re finally here. What is EllisLab to do today, right now to break the curse of transparency? This is total backseat CEO advice, but I’ve come this far, so why not go all ten toes in?
First, I’d like to see them go back to only talking about stuff that is solid and ready to launch. In his blog post Kenny Meyers wrote:
The Apple silence strategy works when you release high quality, excellent products that surprise everyone. You released ExpressionEngine 2 beta. Start talking.
EllisLab, go back to the Apple silence strategy. No, your products aren’t as beautiful as what Apple delivers. But few achieve that. In my personal projects, I rarely pre-announce anything. What happens is that excitement of announcing saps the energy to complete the project. Yes, annonucing is exciting but save it!
A favorite article of mine is Joel Spolsky’s Mouth Wide Shut. It opens like this:
When Apple releases a new product, they tend to surprise the heck out of people, even the devoted Apple-watchers who have spent the last few months riffling through garbage dumpsters at One Infinite Loop.
Microsoft, on the other hand, can’t stop talking about products that are mere glimmers in someone’s eye. Testers outside the company were using .NET for years before it finally shipped.
EllisLab, please announce products and services when they’re ready. Not when you think of them and not because you think announcing early will make the company seem like it communicates more. That’s just playing into the hands of the curse.
Being transparent about major bug fixes is, of course, important. And those active in the forums and the bug tracker know that EllisLab is responsive and transparent about bugs, bug fixes and when they will be rolled out into releases. You’ve even updated us on your release schedule so those people who maintain a lot of sites can plan and schedule updates.
As your customers that’s what you owe us. You don’t, however, owe us to expose your entire annual master plan 12 months before you want to see it come to fruition. If you ever feel like you did, I’m sorry. I think that sucks.
The secrecy and announcement of MojoMotor was a great example of not saying anything until it was ready. That was a great unveiling of a new product—despite the awkward timing with EE 2 still in beta—and it generated a ton of excitement.
If you do go radio silent on everything that is unfinished people will still complain. Yes, Twitter will be full of bitching and moaning and plenty of flapping jaws. That’s okay.
Stick with it. Show us your stuff when it’s polished and ready. I can’t wait to see what is coming next.
Blog Entry
As part of the EE 2.3 release yesterday, EllisLab included an improvement to the pagination functionality for channel entries and comments. The old pagination navigation was a stubborn child that needed a lot of coaxing and prodding to get it to act as one wished. Well, it’s gotten better.
Now the Channel module and Comment module come with a new pagination_links tag pair that makes it a little easier to customize the pagination navigation links.
Previously, you’d do the following to get pagination links:
{pagination_links}
And that would return something that looked like this:
« First < 24 25 26 27 28 30 > Last »
You had no control over the markup used for that navigation. It wasn’t ideal.
With the new tag pair, you can control the output of every piece of the pagination navigation. Previously, we only had conditionals for if previous_page and if next_page but now we have tag pairs that we can use to control what markup is used to display those parts of the navigation.
You can now use the following tag pairs inside of the pagination_links tag pair:
first_pageprevious_pagepage - this one lets you control the actual page numbersnext_pagelast_page
The updated EE documentation has all of the details on the new tag pairs and the variables you use inside of them. This is one of those small tweaks that goes a long way to improving how we use ExpressionEngine. For those of us who get delivered specific pagination design and markup, this is a huge improvement. It certainly is a welcome change.
Blog Entry
Yesterday, EllisLab released ExpressionEngine 2.3. It’s another major improvement release that included 70 bug fixes in addition to other tweaks, enhancements and security updates. The update is available now under your “My Purchases” area at ExpressionEngine.com.
The biggest updates were:
- Improved pagination that allows you better control over how you paginate channel entries and their comments.
- Member search tokens, so you can create better searches that return more accurate results.
- Copy and paste custom field tags from the Custom Field Group page (very handy!).
EllisLab also posted two short video overviews of new features. I’ve included them below.
I couldn’t find this in the change log but there is a report on Twitter that EE 2.3 now sets “Automatically turn URLs and email addresses into link?” to No by default. If true (I haven’t tested it yet), that’s great news.
Leevi Graham is reporting that only 5 CodeIgniter files were changed from EE 2.2.2 to EE 2.3. I’m not sure this means anything significant other than the changes in 2.3 were focused on fixing bugs in existing ExpressionEngine code, not altering CodeIgniter to support new EE features and functionality.
The reaction I’ve read on Twitter has been positive so far, without any major issues upgrading from EE 2.2.2. As always, please back up your site files and database before upgrading and don’t upgrade directly on a live server without testing the upgrade on a development server or localhost first.
Have you discovered other improvements or problems with EE 2.3? Let us know.
Video on Pagination Updates
Video on Member Search Tokens
How-to Article
At Republic Factory we’ve been working with ExpressionEngine for quite a few years now. We have more or less been lurking on Twitter and searching the forums now and then. Since being to EECI in Leiden the last two years and, as I write this, looking forward to going to NY in a few weeks we thought that this would be a good time to share a few tips with the community. Over the last few years we’ve gained a lot of experience building multi lingual sites with ExpressionEngine and that we feel hopefully could lend a hand to people starting out.
Being situated in Sweden we don’t have English as our first language, so most things we develop will be in Swedish and/or English. A lot of our projects also get translated to Norwegian, Danish, or Finnish. Recently, when working with a couple of bigger clients, we’ve also worked with languages like Russian, Spanish, Italian and Turkish. In this article we’ll give a few tips based on our experience of building multi lingual websites in ExpressionEngine, and introduce a couple of things to think about when starting out.
Read the Article
Blog Entry
People ask me why I’m so critical, or perhaps snarky, about add-ons, websites and services that use the -ee naming convention. After all, you big jerk, your site is called EE Insider.
Touché, touché. Of course, I would argue that this site is different because my site describes what it’s about. I’m not trying to be clever. If anything it’s a boring, uninspired name.
I think the first site to do the -ee naming scheme was Train-ee by Mike Boyink. It’s a good name. I happen to also like Devot-ee and it certainly has a better ring to it than Masuga Design Add-on Shop. Both of these happen to be real words, too.
I do think there is now an odd, unfortunate hastiness in naming your new ExpressionEngine related website something -ee but a lot of add-ons are using the naming scheme to their detriment. It isn’t original anymore and it keeps you from standing out. A clever -ee name isn’t clever at all and now that there are so many you’re being lumped in with the rest of them.
Steve: What’s that add-on again? Something “ee”…
Tim: Hmm…I don’t know there are so many.
If you don’t care about standing out or about marketing that’s okay. But you should. If you want to own your own identity and make it work for you if you create more add-ons, I recommend you keep it simple, clear and without the -ee. It can be clever, too.
A great example are the add-ons from Low. All of his add-ons have simple, descriptive names modified by his nickname.
- Low Variables
- Low Reorder (this used to be Reeorder and he smartly changed it after taking it over)
- Low Alphabet
- Low Seg2Cat
- Low Yearly Archives
Read the entire list of add-ons and it’s a clear message: the add-ons describe what they do, are created by Low and that’s what matters. Low owns his brand.
A different example is Backup Pro by Eric Lamb. Simple and to the point. This add-on backs up your EE sites. Perfect. That’s what I need. A similar type of add-on is Safe Harbor by Tom Jaeger of EE Harbor. The name is original and accurately describes (or gives a feeling for) what the add-on does.
Neither of these backup add-ons are trying to be overly clever with their naming.
Here are more add-on names:
- Champagne
- FireMail
- Store
- Campaigner
- Channel Images
- User
- Favorites
- Assets
- Playa
Look at the add-ons that have won an award from the community. They all have names that don’t share their branding with others: CartThrob (what a great name), Structure and Image Sizer.
You spend hours building a great add-on. Take a few minutes and name it something that doesn’t share your brand with others.
Blog Entry
The unfortunate naming convention (again) aside, the new MailChimp add-on from Digital Wax Works looks nice. And they need your help beta testing it.
Using ChimpanzEE you can:
- create campaigns
- create custom email templates
- manage reports and lists
- get campaign reports
- create a sign up form using EE tags
I haven’t tried this out but I did submit my email to be included in the beta. If you’re interested in the add-on and would like help beta test, submit your email, too.
Blog Entry
If you are a professional designer, developer or agency and use ExpressionEngine regularly or develop add-ons for EE, you can apply to the ExpressionEngine Professionals Network. There are requirements that you must meet to be considered so be sure to read them before applying.
A new feature of the Pro Net is that you can now edit your Pro Net listing to keep company, contact and other information accurate and up-to-date.
Blog Entry
This week we note the new developer Steve Callan who seemed to come out of nowhere with some interesting looking add-ons. Well done, Steve!
- IronCache (for EE2) by Matt Perry (Grist)
Caching extension for ExpressionEngine using Memcached.
- TrimEE (for EE2) by Steve Callan
TrimEE plugin trims down a supplied content to a set number of characters.
- YouTubEE (for EE2) by Steve Callan
YouTubEE plugin allows you to display the contents of a users YouTube stream.
- Query Field (for EE2) by Steve Callan
This simple ExpressionEngine fieldtype allows you to develop dropdown or multiselect menus based off of custom SQL queries.
- Merge (for EE2) by Steve Callan
Merges multiple local CSS or Javascript files into single files to limit the number of HTTP requests.
- Download Content (for EE2) by EllisLab
Simply place the plugin tag around the content that you wish to send to the browser as a file download.
- Allow URL Segments ($, for EE1 & EE2) by Laisvunas
This plugin allows ExpressionEngine URL segment variables to be used in entries and then parsed in the template.
- EE Syntax (for EE2) by mithra62 (Eric Lamb)
EE-Syntax is a module to syntax highlight code for ExpressionEngine 2 that uses Geshi as the translation mechanism.
- Title Cat (for EE2) by Brad Morse
Grab all category ids by supplying a url_title, can be used in or outside of channel:entries tag
Blog Entry
More than three years running, The EE Help Chat happens tonight at 9 PM Eastern.
Haven’t joined the EE Help Chat before? It’s easy: go to mijingo.com/go-chat and then fill out the form and you’re in!
There is a cap on attendees, so be sure to get there early.
Go chat!
Blog Entry
A couple of weeks ago, I wondered aloud on this site what EE Reactor is and even tossed around some ideas about how it would work. There was some push back in the comments and in private conversations but the reason behind my write-up still stands firm: don’t publicly talk about projects that are unannounced in a way that makes them seem announced. It’s confusing. Even to this so-called insider.
That’s what led me to speculate about the EE Reactor project. The part of my theory that EE Reactor would be a separate download for license holders wasn’t correct. In the comments, Leslie Camacho (EllisLab CEO) chimed in and noted:
There will only be EE proper, like Media Girl said. We’re not doing the Magento thing with multiple editions.
So, there we go. EE will be EE. Good news. How the flow of Reactor code changes to the EE releases will work isn’t finalized, according to Leslie. He said the plan is to allow “as much autonomy as possible in terms of what they want to work on” but they won’t have free reign on pushing out changes. The plan right now is that EllisLab would have tight control of the process and code would be thoroughly tested and reviewed, similar to how CodeIgniter works.
In response to my worry that developers would be, without a doubt, working for free to help improve a commercial product that could improve the amount of money EllisLab makes, Leslie answered:
People contribute to projects because it helps them in some way, because they like adding to something that makes a difference in people’s lives, and because they simply love doing it.
I couldn’t agree with this more but it does generalize the issue a good bit and flatten some of the nuances of this arrangement.
In the days following my article, I had conversations with various people in the community to get their opinion on the EE Reactor idea. Here’s what I heard:
- Great idea and a huge testimony to how great our community is.
- EllisLab should hire more developers instead of allowing people to work for free.
- What does this mean that EllisLab needs outside developers to make their product better?
- Dumb idea!
- This might allow developers to get their feature requests in so they can build better products.
Let’s unpack some of these.
Is it spec work?
First, on the idea that EllisLab is allowing people to work for free on a commercial product. This is always a touchy situation, especially when it comes to design contests and spec work. Admirably, EllisLab speaks out against spec work in the information page for the Professionals Network.
Please note that asking for free or underpaid work in exchange for a reward at a later date is called Speculative Work (spec work) and is not a standard business practice among professional designers and developers.
Does the EE Reactor work really fit the definition of spec work? Well, not really. The developers participating aren’t doing it in anticipation of paying work down the road with EllisLab or that they would get paid if there code fix or feature implementation gets pulled into the EE2 release product. So, in that sense it is not spec work.
What do you think?
In the comments of my article, Aaron noted with sarcasm:
If developers wanted to build products for me for free and then purchase them from me afterward, I’d welcome them with open arms too (If anyone is interested, please get in touch).
This is an argument that I’ve pondered myself but how the EE Reactor project came about was organically from the community (see Steven Hambleton’s comment), not EllisLab trying to strong arm developers into doing their work for them. Context is what matters here.
Doesn’t EllisLab Have Developers?
Yes, they do. And if you’re running EE 2.2 you’ll know that they’ve been hard at work chipping away at bugs, refinements and improvements. As I’ve mentioned before, if you used EE 2.0 and EE 2.1, you can immediately appreciate the difference EE 2.2 makes. It’s not a redesign, a redevelopment or anything of the sort. But it is a big improvement over what they had. While underwhelming compared to the Assets module by Pixel & Tonic, the File Manager is solid and better than what was shipped with EE 2.1.
So, EllisLab does have developers on staff. But they (we) are fortunate enough to have a room full of talented developers in the community. Will all of them participate in the Reactor program, if it moves forward after the initial test stage? I don’t know.
Creating Better Add-ons and Websites
One take on this is that by allowing EE Reactor to happen, the add-on developers can have more influence over the addition of new hooks they need and, most importantly, bug fixes that are keeping them from improving–or even releasing–their add-ons.
But it’s not just about developers. If a member of the EE Reactor team is building a website for a client and runs into a bug (and as of right now there are plenty, he or she could fix that bug and submit it to be included in an upcoming release of ExpressionEngine. In order to finish the site the developer would have to fix the bug anyway, so why not push that out for the benefit of everyone else?
Community
For a community that has a lot more commerce in it (add-ons, EE license, training materials) than other big CMS communities, we are never slow to help each other out. A group of developers seems willing to give some of their time in exchange for any of the above or nothing at all. Maybe they just want to help.
I was skeptical about this idea when I first heard it but after talking to others and hearing nearly all sides of the story, this looks like a great experiment.
Blog Entry
Objective HTML is working on a new version of their free add-on Google Maps for ExpressionEngine. They’re running a demo of version 2.3 that shows off parts of the improved add-on:
Below is only a portion of the next generation Google Maps fieldtype for ExpressionEngine. The goal was to create an intuitive and clean interface with as much versatility as possible. Over the past 6 months, I have gotten a tremendous amount of feedback. Listening to the community feedback has really given me a lot of great ideas and has created a plugin that otherwise wouldn’t have been possible for me to create.
Play with the interface and send any feedback to ObjectiveHTML.
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