LibrarEE Brings Snippets, Global Variables, Specialty Templates into the Filesystem

You may have seen this come in across the wire last week in the Weekly Devot:ee, but I wanted to highlight it a bit more. LibrarEE is a new ExpressionEngine module which “helps designers and developers to interact with snippets, global variables and specialty templates as files rather than in the browser”.

What does this mean exactly? It means that lots of those annoying little things that you had to create and edit via the browser can now be done in code from your favorite text editor. With LibrarEE, all your snippets, global variables, and notification template are now editable via file-based templates. What’s more, they’re parsed as EE templates too.

My favorite example, and the reason I wanted to mention this on EE Insider, is the user message template. Ever seen the boring ol’ EE system status page that says something like “You’re logged in.” or “Please wait while we direct you to your search results.”? Awful, right? Well to edit those, you have to go into the control panel and edit the “User message” template. You can’t use any embeds or EE tags, which means if you want to include a global header and footer, you have to copy and paste in that HTML by hand: Yuck.

The promise of LibrarEE is that you can now treat those templates as real, live EE templates, with embeds and EE tags and whatever you like. Not only that, but if they’re in the file system, that means you can keep them in version control and out of the database. Handy!

It sounds pretty dang slick, and I can’t wait to use it. LibrarEE is just $30 and available exclusively through Devot:ee.