Blog Entry
The voting is underway for the .net Awards and you nominated the EE Podcast for the Podcast of the Year award. It’s up against some great podcasts, all of which are general web design and development podcasts. But we can GOTV and win this, right?
The podcast was profiled on the .net magazine site as part of the “top 10 podcasts.”
After handing the podcast off to Lea earlier this year, she and Emily Lewis have relaunched with a beautiful new site, great episodes and even transcripts of the podcasts. The latest show, Mobile Sites with EE was a great 26 minute discussion of what to consider when building for mobile.
Here’s the thing: let’s help them win. To do so, they need your votes. Go to the voting page, scroll down to #4 (“Podcast of the Year”) and vote for “the expressionengine podcast”.
Blog Entry
Vector Media’s Lee Goldberg wrote a great article on the EE Developer blog about what you can do when developing sites with ExpressionEngine to help improve search engine optimization. Unsurprisingly, the title of the post is also nicely optimized.
I think analytics and testing your SEO is probably one that a lot of people overlook:
Easy integration with Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer - Analyzing data is key to making your SEO efforts successful. Whereas many other systems make you update multiple pages to put on Analytics scripts, with ExpressionEngine, it’s literally a copy/paste situation. Even setting up advanced subdomain tracking, custom variables, and event tracking is painless, taking minutes where other systems take hours.
Lee also covers a few items that you shouldn’t worry about, like extra meta tags and submitting your site pages to search engines.
So why does Vector Media like ExpressionEngine?
Smart marketers know that there is no such thing as a one-size fits all approach to optimization, and ExpressionEngine’s inherent flexibility makes it easy to implement the right strategy quickly and seamlessly.
Indeed.
Bookmark it for future reference: Outstanding Search Engine Optimization with ExpressionEngine
Disclaimer: Vector Media Group is an advertiser on EE Insider.
Blog Entry
A couple of items from the world of Markdown this week:
Stephen Lewis at Experience Internet released an update to Smartdown that add a few new things worth mentioning. First, better handling of EE code samples, more control over the configuration for formatting and two extensions hooks, “which can be used to manipulate content before and after Smartdown processing.”
Mijingo (my training company) released a new, free (for a limited time) video on the basics of Markdown. The 33 minute video teaches you the syntax and tools you can use to create beautiful Markdown documents. It’s part of the new LunchWith Series from Mijingo.
You do use Markdown, right?
Blog Entry
In Episode 52 of the EE Podcast, Lea and Emily discuss the various ways you can create a mobile-ready website with EE. They talk about general web development best practices, including responsive design and development, talk about mobile EE control panels, add-ons that help detect mobile devices, and more, while using the EE Podcast site itself as its mobile-web guinea pig.
Short and sweet at 26 minutes, it also has its transcripts ready for you to read if you don’t have the time to listen!
Blog Entry
- VZ Picky (for EE2) by Eli Van Zoeren
VZ Picky will display a dropdown list of all the unique values for a particular custom field. Perfect for advanced search forms!
- TGL Twitter (for EE2) by Bryant Hughes (The Good Lab)
A port of the EllisLab Twitter Timeline plugin into a module, to allow for oAuth authentication.
- Glossary (for EE2) by dWise
Enables you to create a glossary out of channel entries.
- CG FileInfo ($, for EE2) by Conflux Group, Inc. (Jeremy Gimbel)
Currently, there is no way to access all of the file metadata from within the Channel Entries loop. CG FileInfo is a plugin which aims to solve this problem, by giving you direct access to the native File Manager’s metadata from within your templates.
- Eeless (for EE2) by Steven Milne
Eeless makes it easy to implement {LESS} CSS in your expression engine templates without having to rely on browser side compilation of your style.less into style.css.
- TwEEtlink ($, for EE2) by Environ-IT
This EE2 fieldtype, automatically posts its content on Twitter when the entry form is submitted.
- Current URL (for EE2) by Carter Digital
Returns the the current URL using the Codeigniter current_url() function.
- Social Login PRO ($, for EE2) by Yuri Salimovskiy (IntoEEtive)
Social Login PRO brings integration of ExpressionEngine sites with popular social networks to a new level!
- WB Freeform Campaign Monitor (for EE1) by Wes Baker
Add subscribers to your Campaign Monitor list using data from Freeform forms.
- EP Mega Error (for EE2) by Electric Putty
Mega Error from Electric Putty is a free Expressionengine Accessory available for EE2.x which will look across all tabs within a publish layout for errors and flag them up in a way no one will miss.
Blog Entry
The other day Marcus Neto tweeted (and EllisLab retweeted) a call out to web development shops who use ExpressionEngine:
If you are an #eecms Dev shop I want to help you sell more projects. If you need any assistance just let me know
I’m not exactly sure what Marcus means (I wasn’t the only one) but my best guess is that he’s trying to reach out and let companies know that he’s there to help with questions about EE that come up during project pitches and proposals. Want more information or have questions? Email him.
Marcus is the Director of Services and his role is to make sure you, you and you have what you need to succeed with ExpressionEngine. From his first blog post back in March:
As you have probably heard I was hired to bring an Enterprise Level of services to EllisLab for those working with ExpressionEngine. I would like to take this opportunity to say that if you are a developer that regularly works on Enterprise level work; or if you are a direct client and have a reason to be interested in Enterprise Services I would love to hear from you.
Have questions about EE Enterprise or want to know about how your shop can do more with EE? Marcus is the guy.
Blog Entry
Not the license kind, the kind that make writing code easier in your favorite editor.
Today, Matt Weinberg released an EE2 bundle for Sublime Text 2, which was forked from an existing EE2 bundle for Textmate. Textmate is, of course, Mac only, but Sublime Text 2 is cross-platform. I haven’t tried it yet but it looks promising (I recently switched from Textmate after 6+ years back to BBEdit).
For those using Coda there are also Coda Clip for EE2 by Stefan Rechsteiner.
Blog Entry
This is a on-going series of entries where I highlight EE experiences.
Dear @ellislab, the three pages of “New” bug reports is becoming worrisome. #eecms #development
Paul Burdick via Twitter
Paul’s tweet set off a small discussion on Twitter about the bug list, some talk of “perspective” and even a comparison of EE to a situation Drupal.
I looked through the list and there are definitely some bugs that haven’t been assigned that were filed back in August. It’s hard to say what this means, if anything, because I don’t have insight into how the development team at EllisLab handles bug reports and assignments.
There are definitely some bugs from EE 2.2.1 that weren’t fixed in EE 2.2.2. But let’s not forget that EE 2.2.2 was a maintenance update to fix an issue with how new member accounts are created. It only includes a small set of bugs compared to the previous EE 2.2.1. All that to say, I’m hopeful that the next release will contain an entire batch of fixes to address some of the minor yet annoying issues from EE 2.2.1 and previous.
What’s your take? Do you feel like you’re bug reports aren’t being addressed or that you’re fighting the same bugs in every release? Or are things running smoothly? My experience has been that EE 2.2.2 is a very nice release and has been running great for me at mijingo.com (Publish Layouts notwithstanding).
Blog Entry
It’s been talked about a lot over the last year: will add-on developers offer volume discounts or some way perk for people who buy multiple licenses? So far there have been a couple of developers offering that type of volume discount.
Today, EE Harbor announced unlimited licenses for their Safe Harbor add-on and service. For $200 you can back up unlimited sites using the add-on. So, if you’re needing to back up more than 5 sites, you’re better off getting the unlimited license.
Blog Entry
Mega Error by Electric Putty seeks to solve the problem of hidden errors across tabs in the publish form. In the forum post where Rob Hodges announced the free add-on he described it like this:
You have a channel with lots of fields. You’ve spent ages making a beautiful custom publish layout for your client to make their life easy. You’ve separated your fields across multiple tabs and everything looks great. Your client then creates a new entry and leaves a required field empty. EE captures the error and adds a warning, but the field is on the second tab and the client can’t see it. They have no way of knowing there is a problem; they don’t even know the entry hasn’t been saved.
Mega Error displays a giant message at the top of the publish page with a summary of errors and then an error with each field across all tabs.
(Image from Mega Error product page)
Mega Error is free and available now only for EE2 from the Electric Putty website.
Blog Entry
- dashEE (for EE2) by Chris Monnat
dashEE is fully customizable ExpressionEngine control panel dashboard alternative.
- CartThrob Tax Table ($, for EE2) by anjstudio
An ExpressionEngine 2 module for CartThrob that allows you to upload, manage and organize tax rates in an easy format. You’re also able to filter by State and Import CSV.
- URL Viewer ($, for EE2) by anjstudio
An ExpressionEngine 2 module that lets you display templates as well as external URLs in an iFrame.
- Segment Category Info (for EE2) by Trevor Davis
Return category info by passing in the category_url_title and channel_short_name.
- Is Ajax? (for EE2) by Trevor Davis
Returns true or false depending if it’s an AJAX request.
- Simply Order for ExpressionEngine (for EE2) by Mimo
Simply Order is a module for ExpressionEngine 2 that will easily allow users to customize entry order.
- Entry Age (for EE2) by Chris Rasmussen
Returns a configurable warning message if the entry being viewed is older than a certain age.
- Numeral to Roman (for EE2) by GDmac
Converts numbers to roman numerals.
- Chosen Selects (for EE2) by John D. Wells
An ExpressionEngine fieldtype: Chosen is a JavaScript plugin that makes long, unwieldy select boxes much more user-friendly.
- ED Related (for EE1) by Erskine Design
ED Related V2 EE Module for getting bi-directional related entries, and/or committing blocks of code if certain content doesn’t exist.
- ED Pagination Links (for EE2) by Erskine Design
More friendly pagination for ExpressionEngine 2.
- Image Editor (for EE2) by Benjamin David
The Image Editor add-on for ExpressionEngine gives you quick access to great image control : blur, brightness, saturation, text, and lets you edit, save and reopen construction files you’ve been working on. It adds 4 tools to the File Manager and allow users to get more control on their images.
- AB Entry IDs (for EE2) by Bjorn Borresen
Run SQL and get the results returned as a |-separated list of entry_ids which you can use as a parameter in another tag (ie. the {exp:channel:entries} tag).
Blog Entry
Billed as a complete replacement for the EE2 control panel, dashEE (here we go again with that naming convention) is an open source tool for giving you more control over how your control panel looks.
Announcing the add-on, the developer, Chris Monnat, writes:
The idea behind dashEE is to create a completely customizable EE dashboard where users can choose the kind of information they want to see and developers can add custom functionality through the development of widgets. dashEE allows developers to create custom widgets that can be installed by themselves or that can be packaged with your custom modules.
I installed dashEE to try it out and it does exactly as Chris shows in the video. There was some oddness when trying to access widgets (the homepage of my site was displayed); I didn’t dig deeper to find out what what was happening but I think this is a developers tool for right now. Maybe some developers will create their own widgets as well as fork the project on Github and add their own contributions to dashEE. Chris made it open source, so hopefully everyone will feel inclined to contribute.
If you want to try out dashEE, you can download the add-on for free from Github.
Blog Entry
There’s a thread in the EE Forums that has been going on since mid August. It started as a complaint that someone lost a gig because it required an open source CMS and questioned why EE isn’t open source along with some ideas on why that might be a good idea (growth).
Rather than go on a tangential rant about why making EE open source is a bad response to the problem, let’s just say I disagree.
I kept tabs on this thread because I found it interesting but it was mostly a lot of arguments and thoughts we’ve heard before. I certainly share some of the concerns that were laid out in the sprawling conversation but most of it felt like a rehash.
Until Leslie Camacho (EllisLab CEO) chimed in yesterday with a thoughtful response to some of the conversation. You should definitely go read it for yourself. Leslie had contributed earlier in the thread but this response hit a few points that I think have been sore spots for EllisLab and others.
First, on the popularity of ExpressionEngine and its growth. Leslie states that EE is one of the top systems (and the top paid system) and cites the Built With CMS Usage Statistics to back that up and that competing with open source is exactly the wrong thing to do.
In terms of selling EE vs. open source, its true that open source’s reach is way beyond EE. It always has been. However, I want to point out that EE is the #1 commercial CMS and 3rd party tools like Built-with back up this claim. This is especially true in the top 10,000 websites. Note that they count vBulletin in there, but its a forum system first.
Interesting to note that he also mentioned that the way EllisLab grows isn’t going to work forever.
Most websites use a custom system or no system at all. In terms of room for growth, its huge still. In other words, I’m most concerned with “how we grow” because that will make all the difference. I think our current business model and approach is at its peak and will stop being as effective as its has been within the next 12-18 months. We’re going to be ready to make that switch.
He didn’t really get into specifics about what would cause the growth to change but I’m sure the vagueness caused a few developers and businesses with a lot of skin in the EE game to get concerned. That being said, EllisLab wants to survive just as much (hell, more) than someone making her living selling related products and services, so I wouldn’t worry too much here.
On the exploding add-on development community and the intermittent whining on Twitter and elsewhere about how much EE costs with the most popular add-ons included.
I just didn’t anticipate that people would praise our community but hate on EllisLab for enabling the very thing they love the most about EE, a killer 3rd party professional dev community.
Some people then assume that we, EllisLab, aren’t doing anything significant. We don’t get credit for building and maintaining a platform that let’s things like Assets, Structure, Channel Images, Super Search etc… possible. Those awesome tools exist because we made EE in such a way that those tools could exist and thrive with no hacks and we work very hard to continue to improve it as such.
Leslie, you don’t get credit for this work from everyone but you certainly do get it from the people that can recognize the effort. Maybe we just don’t speak up enough against the haters. Honestly, battling the haters just gets tiresome after a while.
To wrap up, Leslie noted 4 things that EL knows are a problem with EE:
- The installer.
- The CP.
- Support.
- Stability (aka bugs)
I don’t think anyone can argue that those are 4 things that need some attention. I agree that the installer could use some work but it’s not that bad. Sure, installing Drupal is a nicer experience but installing EE isn’t hard…at all.
As far as the CP goes, it definitely needs some more tweaking but it has come a long, long, long way since the original beta release. Last month I upgraded Mijingo to EE 2.2 and it made a huge difference.
A quick anecdote on EE2. Recently I worked on a client project where we added an additional site to their EE1 MSM installation. The total sites now exceeds 20. Because they have an existing, stable system in place there’s no rush to upgrade them to EE2. So, I had to build this new site on EE1. And, let me tell you, it was a drag and I missed EE2 badly. I missed the great add-ons, the comfort of working in the CP and how much easier it is to create add-ons. In this case, the grass isn’t always greener on the other side. It’s greener on the EE2 side.
Blog Entry
It’s a popular topic but not always done well and without bias. This latest matchup between ExpressionEngine and WordPress is by Lab.Sixtyfive. It was posted early last month but it just came across my radar.
Gregor McKelvie is rebuilding the Lab.Sixtyfive blog in ExpressionEngine and jotted down some comparisons between the two systems. As was pointed out in the comments, judging ExpressionEngine by what it can do as a blogging tool isn’t a great way to approach things. For most simple blogs EE is probably more than is needed.
He did have some nice things to say about the community:
I have to say, I love the EE community. Ellis Labs [sic] get a hard time for not being as responsive as they could be – and that may well be true – however, the community is knowledgeable, quick to respond and helpful. They also follow up on posts to see if the issues were resolved. That’s not to say the WP community isn’t good – it is – but it’s large and I get the feeling that the EE community is more manageable and better connected to one another.
At our current size and with only a handful of major sites, we are definitely more connected. Twitter (and the #eecms hashtag) have changed this a little because there’s some great information being shared there and it’s more disconnected (and for people searching Google for help, harder to find).
Read Gregory’s entire writeup, which is just part 1 of hopefully more thoughts in later posts: WordPress vs Expression Engine - Part 1
Blog Entry
Add-on Bakery released a new add-on yesterday, US States & Cities, that assists you if need to create a US directory. The add-ons includes data for states, cities, zip codes, coordinates and even population. All of the data is full editable (you can add your own cities and edit existing ones) and it all hooks into Google Maps using the Google Maps API.
Template tags for this add-on consist of a tag pair to view all states in the database, all cities (filtered by state), city info, a tag that redirects to a specified page based on zip code.
Bjørn Børresen announced the add-on on Twiter as a “soft launch.” I haven’ yet used the add-on.
US States & Cities by Add-on Baker is available now and costs $129 per site license.
Blog Entry
There is only one new addition to the devot:ee add-on catalog this week. But that’s OK because there are 1,380 other add-ons to look at if you’re bored.
- Pvl Check If (for EE2) by Pv Ledoux
Check if a value is in a list (default separator: |) You can use global vars in parameters, they will be parsed!
Blog Entry
Christy Collins posted to the Solspace blog with a tip on tracking searches with Google Analystics using their Super Search module. I’ve worked on a site where we set this up (before we moved them to Google Custom Search because they needed additional functionality) and it works nicely.
To get it running, follow Christy’s instructions and be sure you’re using a recent version of Super Search.
Great tip!
Blog Entry
Before (and sometimes during) breakfast every morning, I sort through a pile of links to find stuff to post to the site. I do this using a combination of feeds, searches and good ol’ fashioned email. I sometimes miss stuff because it didn’t cross my radar. That bums me out.
So, here are the top 10 ways to get your news announced on EE Insider:
- Write or create something helpful or awesome and send it to me: info@eeinsider.com
- Did I say 10 ways? I meant one.
That’s it. Have you launched a cool, new site, created a great tutorial, built and released an add-on or done anything else related to ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter? Email me and let me know.
It’s that easy!
Blog Entry
Web agency Packet Tide posted an EE module template to Github. The module template gives you a starting point for your own module without having to write all of the basics from scratch.
You can find something similar at Pkg.io, too, which allows you easily create packages for all types of EE add-ons. The EE module template from Packet Tide, however, includes a couple of extras that you might find useful, like settings code and some breadcrumbs.
Packet Tide is also behind EE Harbor and the EE add-ons Safe Harbor, Polls and Transcribe.
Disclaimer: EE Harbor is an advertiser on EE Insider.
Blog Entry
Ian Ebden, the organizer of last week’s EEUK11, wrote a great narrative of his experience organizing and hosting the conference. The take-away? Organizing a conference can be stressful but watching the speakers deliver great talks made it all worth it. Congrats to Ian for going from design to conference organizer and making it all work!
As a long-time EE Pro Network developer, I was proud (and a little nervous) to have organised and hosted it. I suppose it’s one way I can give back to a community and organisation (EllisLab) that have given me so much. Either way, here is my account of EEUK11.
Having thoroughly enjoyed trips out to EECI in The Netherlands the last two years, I was disappointed to hear there would be no European ExpressionEngine conference this autumn. Foolishly, I tweeted the idea of a UK EE meet-up this summer, and the response was immediate and very enthusiastic – along with cries of “let us know when you’ve sorted it out.” Ah. Oh dear.
Ian isn’t sure if he’ll do it all again next year but maybe if others join in to help him plan it, we can convince him to do EEUK12.
Read Ian’s entire write-up on his site: EEUK11 is a Wrap
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