Blog Entry
On his blog, German EE developer Thomas Aull shared how he sets up his ExpressionEngine installs to work between development, staging and production. His goal with the setup was to make the config.php and database.php files as portable and flexible as possible.
Note: The article is in German but Google Chrome will do a decent job translating it for you, minus a few glaring and funny errors.
Read the entire article: Mein Staging-Production-Workflow mit ExpressionEngine
Blog Entry
This is a on-going series of entries where I highlight EE experiences.
eecms allows one to delete the date tab when customizing the publish layout and then tells us it’s required when saving changes. Backwards!
Pixogee via Twitter
I ran into this just this weekend running EE 2.2.2 and it certainly was frustrating. It only took me a minute to figure out what was going on. To fix the problem I had to drag the entry date field back into one of the tabs.
I was certain that someone had already filed this bug but I wasn’t able to find a report. So I filed a bug.
Blog Entry
In the EE Forums, Adam George announced a new website: Useful Gifts, a charity organization based in Australia.
Adam didn’t give many details but the site is built on EE2, uses Cartthrob for payment transactions and Social Login for Facebook integration.
Check out the site: Useful Gifts
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Last month I wrote about EE2 bundles for the text editors Sublime and Textmate. Tom Davies also updated Anthony Short’s Espresso Sugar for ExpressionEngine2.
For now it’s a fairly vanilla port of the ee1 version (with which it ought to play nicely) but I’m planning on adding more features over the next few weeks, along with support for some popular addons.
In related news, Macrabbit released Espresso 2, so if you’ve been on the hunt for a new editor, maybe that’s your ticket to fun coding.
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I’ve been enjoying the ongoing series of interviews from MetaQ, a webzine by Q Digital Studio.
The latest interview is with Chad Crowell but also check out interviews with Stephen Lewis, Lea Alcantara and John Henry Donovan.
Blog Entry
Jonathan Longnecker at Fortyseven Media wrote up a how-to on how he got pagination, categories, and comments with Structure working together “in holy matrimony” after running into a few issues.
Maybe you’ll find a tip or two along the way, so give it a read.
Blog Entry
Happy Birthday to Mitchell Kimbrough, the granddaddy of ExpressionEngine add-on development and chief at Solspace!
To celebrate his birthday, you can save 39% on every add-on at the Solspace store. Wish Mitchell a happy birthday and then grab some add-ons.
Make it a Mitchell day. Here’s some more:
Blog Entry
- Fix-ee (for EE2) by Trevor Davis
Defaults the custom field formatting type to “None” for new custom fields, and switches “Automatically turn URLs and email addresses into links?” to “No” when editing Channel Preferences.
- Column-bo (for EE2) by Protean Web
This plugin is used to display data in lists or a table with a variable number of columns.
- zodEEac (for EE2) by sixthsense
zodEEac is a plugin to output Zodiac Name or Symbol for a given date field. The date field can be EE2 channel date field or a custom channel field or any date.
Blog Entry
Most ExpressionEngine sites are information-heavy, and inevitably, your client may come to you and ask how we can gather data about people’s experience with the site or the site content. Maybe your client just wants a bit more interactivity. Or, hey, you’re one of the many EE devs who love twisting their fave CMS to go beyond content management and want to provide a “learning environment” for you or clients. If this sounds intriguing, tune in to the latest EE Podcast where we talk data gathering techniques, polls, surveys, and quizzes!
If you like what you hear, there’s still time today and tomorrow to vote for us at the .net awards! Thanks for all your support!
Blog Entry
Want to have some cool magnets on your ‘fridge or whiteboard? You provide the printable magnet sheets and Cameron has you covered on the Illustrator file with all of the elements.
How does it work?
It’s pretty simple: magnetic sheets that are compatible with any inkjet printer. I’ve used Avery magnet sheets satisfactorily for similar projects. For this project, however, I used Office Depot magnet sheets. They have a glossy finish, whereas the Avery ones have a matte finish. Comparing the two, the ink seems to be more durable with the glossy finish.
Do you think 10 months old is too young to teach my daughter HTML? Naahhhh.
Blog Entry
This is a on-going series of entries where I highlight EE experiences.
If we had built a content management system, this would have been it!
Deckchair via their blog
(They say many more nice things about EE in the blog post.)
Blog Entry
A summary of the news this week as reported by EE Insider:
See you next week!
Blog Entry
In the comments of a recent EllisLab blog post, my friend and supplier of the finest gin, Kenny Meyers asked:
What’s EE Reactor?
I’ve been thinking the same thing and I thought it was just me. I’ve seen EE Reactor referenced in a way that made it seem like it was an announced somewhere but as far as I can tell it wasn’t. In the EllisLab blog post there was a bullet item that read:
EE Reactor concept update
Surely I had missed the original announcement if there was going to be an update. So I went hunting.
A quick google search turned up three tweets from Leslie Camacho about phone calls regarding EE Reactor and an update that “it’s going quite well…”.
Then there were some more mentions in the forum thread about “The state of EE”. All of the other Google results have to do with actual reactors and, you know, physics.
I’m not the only one wondering. In the forums, Danny Tam asked:
Are there any links you can point me to to learn a bit more about this EE Reactor? Can’t seem to find anything on it.
He was pointed to Leslie Camacho’s Twitter feed. Well, okay.
Another response to questions about EE Reactor was:
The reactor group (not branch) for CodeIgniter started in an effort to have a branch of CI that the community was responsible for maintaining and adding to with oversight from EL.
Recently the idea came up to harness this idea for EE. That is what is being discussed in this thread.
Leslie did answer Kenny’s question a couple of days later:
Like CodeIgniter Reactor, but for ExpressionEngine. We have four awesome devs eager to give it a trial run, goal is to have it set by EECI. If it works with 4, we’ll expand.
CodeIgniter Reactor started as a community run branch of CodeIgniter (Reactor is now a team of developers). It moved along at a faster pace than the version developed by EllisLab because it did not have the weight of commercial software (ExpressionEngine and MojoMotor) sitting on top of it.
The CodeIgniter you can download today is CodeIgniter Reactor but it’s no longer called that. As stated in a blog post by Derek Jones last month, “CodeIgniter ‘Reactor’ is CodeIgniter” and the EllisLab branch of CodeIgniter is “no longer being publicly maintained.” I don’t know if that means that ExpressionEngine 2 is still truly based on an open source version of CodeIgniter or not.
Is ExpressionEngine Reactor a community-driven version of ExpressionEngine?
It’s an interesting question and theory because EE is a commercial product and not open source like CodeIgniter. From what I can gather, EE Reactor is going to be an experiment wherein a set number of developers are allowed to poke, prod and improve EE and then EllisLab may pull (some or all of) those changes into the commercial version of ExpressionEngine.
Because EE doesn’t have a free version and isn’t open source like CodeIgniter, I don’t see how this could be anything but a tightly controlled experiment. What are scenarios on how this would work?
Here’s one I could come up with: if you own an EE license you could opt to download and use the EE Reactor version instead of the EllisLab version.
There are some potential downsides to this theory:
- EE Reactor could begin to implement features of commercial add-ons.
- More people would choose the Reactor version than the core EE version thereby shifting the development of the EE people use to a completely different team of developers.
- The Reactor developers would be doing free development work for EllisLab.
- Support could be a mess because the EllisLab support team would have to know two different “kinds” of ExpressionEngine.
- Fragmentation of add-on support (“Does this add-on support Reactor?”).
There’s a lot there. The above list is just me riffing on my theory of how it could work. As I’ve made clear earlier: I have no idea what EE Reactor is or how it really will work.
But people sure are talking about it like it’s been announced already.
Blog Entry
Eric Miller is organizing an EE meetup in NYC on October 5th so local folks can meet each other before the EECI conference at the end of the month.
The meet up takes place 7-9pm at the New York office of BMI. An RSVP is required to attend, so if you’d like to go be sure to sign up.
Blog Entry
It’s an interesting approach to permissions management in ExpressionEngine by John de Beer and his HooKan Permissions Manager add-on.
Screenshot from the HooKan website
Instead of clicking in and out of different member groups and access areas, you have a grid (member groups are the columns, permissions the rows) where you can click circles to enable certain access.
HooKan is in beta right now but up for sale for $17 (this is noted as an introductory offer until October 15th). The normal price is $34.95.
Blog Entry
It’s not a secret that custom publish layouts in EE2 are a little on the sensitive side. One little thing and they break down, take their ball and go home. One instance of breaking publish layouts was recorded in bug report 16406 by John Wells.
John posted a fix, which is a matter of tweaking a conditional in the content_publish controller for the Control Panel.
Read John’s bug report and fix for the details. It seems like it has helped others fix at least one instance of breaking publish layouts.
Blog Entry
- HooKan Permissions Manager ($, for EE2) by de Beer
HooKan collects all EE permissions in a single page from where they can be compared and updated without having to go to each user group in turn.
- MC Player (for EE1 & EE2) by Michael Cohen (ProImage)
An implementation of the JW HTML5 Media Player as an ExpressionEngine plugin.
- Backup Pro(ish) (for EE2) by mithra62 (Eric Lamb)
Backup Pro(ish) is a free version of the acclaimed ExpressionEngine backup add-on Backup Pro. Backup Pro(ish) includes complete database backup and restore, file backup, Cron support (with email notifications and attachments) and Auto pruning.
- Backup Pro Developer ($, for EE2) by mithra62 (Eric Lamb)
Backup Pro is the acclaimed backup module for ExpressionEngine 2. With the Backup Pro Developer license developers can install Backup Pro an unlimited number of times on an unlimited number of servers. Buy once and never worry about protecting your sites ever again.
- Extra Entries (for EE2) by Brad Morse
If you ever needed to populate a page that had a set number of blocks/divs/etc.. and you always need to display a set number but your channel may not contain that many all the time, this will allow you to provide filler at those times.
- US States & Cities ($, for EE2) by Bjorn Borresen
US States & Cities is a module and a fieldtype for building states/cities directory type websites in ExpressionEngine.
- PandEE ($, for EE2) by Atcore Systems
PandEE is an Expression Engine fieldtype that integrates the PandaStream video service with Expression Engine.
Blog Entry
The EllisLab sites will be down tomorrow (Thursday) for maintenance. From the announcement on their site:
The EllisLab family of sites (ExpressionEngine.com, CodeIgniter.com, MojoMotor.com, and EllisLab.com) will be down for scheduled maintenance on Thursday, September 22, 2011 beginning at approximately 10-11pm Eastern and lasting a number of hours. Access to critical resources such as the store, your product downloads, and documentation will be unaffected.
Plan accordingly.
Blog Entry
In the last couple of years we’ve seen a lot of movement in the e-commerce space for ExpressionEngine. It used to be that you had to use a solution that wasn’t exactly a good fit…but it worked. We now have Cartthrob, BrilliantRetail and others.
In a big win for Brilliant2, EllisLab is switching to their BrilliantRetail software for their store. They hope to launch the new store before EECI, but they’re not certain if that’ll happen. From Leslie’s blog post at EllisLab.com:
We’ve been working with David and Tony from Brilliant2 to relaunch the ExpressionEngine Store on BrilliantRetail, their excellent ecommerce add-on for ExpressionEngine. They’ve been a joy to work with and we’ve given them permission to release all the custom work we commissioned into future versions of BrilliantRetail. We can’t be more specific about this until the store launches. Honestly we’re not sure if this will happen before or after EECI, but we’re doing our best to make it before.
I know what you’re thinking…why not Cartthrob? Me too.
Blog Entry
Per a EllisLab.com blog post from Leslie Camacho, the next release of EE2 (2.3) is scheduled to be released in the second week of October. They’re moving away from their 8-10 week cycle because it was too aggressive.
What does that mean? I don’t know. Too aggressive for the development team or for users having to upgrade? I don’t find upgrading to be that big of a deal but I have heard from others that dread every release because of the work involved. We’ll have to wait for another blog post, which is scheduled for today, to learn more.
There wasn’t any mention of what will be included in the update but I assume it’s mostly bug fixes.
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