EE Podcast Nominated for .net Award

It was a nice surprise to see the ExpressionEngine Podcast nominated for Podcast of the Year for the .net awards.

This initial list will be shortened, so if you dig the EE Podcast, please vote for us! After you vote they will create a short list and from there the judges will decide the winners.

Can you help us out? Head over to the .net awards website and submit your vote for the ExpressionEngine Podcast. Thanks!

EE 2 Screencasts Available

Today I launched a brand new site, Mijingo and the new ExpressionEngine 2 Screencasts.

Mijingo is the new home for my training materials (minus the ExpressionEngine book, which is still available from my awesome publisher) and those of future authors at Mijingo.

Learning ExpressionEngine 2

That’s the title for the new series of screencasts on ExpressionEngine 2. They’re beginner-level screencasts that walk you through, step-by-step, how to build a basic website in ExpressionEngine 2. The sample site we build this time is for Channel University. Is it real? No. But fake schools need websites, too!

This series is 8 episodes and runs more than 4 hours. I went through the first series and distilled it down to only the most vital information needed to get up and running with EE 2.

If you’re looking for more advanced material, don’t worry, all of that will be coming soon!

Learn more: ExpressionEngine 2 Screencasts

EE 2 Screencasts: Get Notified and Save 10%

The next generation of the popular ExpressionEngine Screencasts, completely redone for EE 2, will be available starting next week. I’ve been working over the last several months planning the new screencasts and over the last month and a half recording, editing and exporting. We’re tying up loose ends and putting together a brand new site. And we’re excited.

Just like before, the screencasts will be full quality, downloadable videos that you can take with you and learn on your own time, offline or online. I put together a preview for you. View it here or watch the full version via the downloadable video.

I want to make sure EE Insider readers are the first to know about it. If you want to be alerted to the availability of the ExpressionEngine 2 Screencasts and receive a coupon to save a little bit of cash, sign up below for the email notification list. Only subscribers to the list will get a coupon, so don’t forget to click Subscribe!

This offer is now over. The screencasts are available for purchase over at Mijingo. Thanks to everyone for signing up for a discount!

See you next week!

24/7 Free ExpressionEngine Chat

I’m not sure how widely known it is that there is a free, 24/7 place to chat about ExpressionEngine: Curly Braces.

The chatroom has been in place for awhile now but I’ve neglected to mention it enough. It hasn’t been used a lot so I want to encourage anyone and everyone to please use the chatroom to discuss everything EE whenever you’d like.

Unlike our weekly EE Help Chat, this chat isn’t moderated so everyone is expected to be courteous, helpful and gentle to those new to ExpressionEngine.

See you in the chat!

Information Stream at EE Hash

This one has been making the rounds on Twitter but I wanted to make mention of it here on EE Insider. Kyle Cotter emailed me a while back asking if it was okay to use the EE Insider logo on his new site. Of course it was and I’m excited to see the useful site he’s put together: EE Hash.

EE Hash is all about streaming the latest ExpressionEngine news in an organized efficient way. Why visit your ugly feed reader sifting through non ExpressionEngine related content when you have EE Hash?

EE Hash streams a bunch of different EE information into one space. It’s an unfiltered look at what’s going on online in the world of ExpressionEngine. The stream includes headlines from this site, latest add-ons from devot:ee, showcases from Show-EE, Twitter mentions of EE and more.

Check out the site: EE Hash - Streaming the latest ExpressionEngine News

EE Help Chats Today

It’s Wednesday so that means it is time for the weekly EE Help Chats. It’s a great way to spend an hour getting help, talking shop and meeting some other EE users.

European EE Help Chat

The first one is our new European EE Help Chat, a self-moderated chat for people who are usually sleeping during the original chat time. It takes place at 19:00 GMT and if you follow @eeinsider on Twitter, I post a reminder about 15 minutes before. To access the chat visit this URL at the time of the chat to gain access to the room: http://eescreencasts.com/europe-chat

EE Help Chat

The original chat still takes place at the regular time of 9 PM Eastern at http://eescreencasts.com/go-chat. As with the other chat, I typically post a reminder on Twitter about 15 minutes before.

See you there!

37Signals Features WooThemes

On their blog Signal vs Noise, 37Signals featured WooThemes as part of the “Bootstrapped, Profitable and Proud” series, “which profiles companies that have $1MM+ in revenues, didn’t take VC, and are profitable.”

Adii from WooThemes was the subject of the write-up (you may have seen him speak at EECI in San Francisco; he is also an advertiser on this site) and talked about the history of WooThemes and how they’ve grown slowly from a side gig while doing freelance work to a profitable business with several employees.

The article is worth a read and we should be proud to have another successful start-up company in the EE community.

Entire article: Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud: WooThemes

EE 1.6 No Longer for Sale After EE 2.1

In a blog post today, EllisLab President Leslie Camacho announced some upcoming plans for EE 2 and the end of life plans for EE 1.6.

When ExpressionEngine 2.1 is released, ExpressionEngine 1.x will no longer be available for purchase. EE 1.x will officially become a legacy version.

So, you will no longer be able to purchase EE 1.6 licenses separately. However, EE 1.6 will still be available for people who own licenses and EE 2.1 purchasers will still have access to EE 1.6 (no longer bundled in but as a separate download).

Technical support for EE 1.6 will continue as long as necessary but EllisLab considers EE 1.6 a legacy product and you should expect them to encourage upgrades whenever possible. They also promise to give 6 months notice before discontinuing official support of EE 1.6. EllisLab expects this to be “throughout 2010 and a good deal into 2011 at the least.” I assume the forums will always be there for people who need 1.6 help a year or more from now.

Read the entire blog post yourself and be sure to post any feedback you have for EllisLab to the post forum thread: The End (of Beta) is Near: What You Need to Know

EE Panel at SXSW Ranked #8 Overall

Yesterday evening Kenny Meyers pointed me to the results of feedback cards distributed after each SXSW session. The good news? Our ExpressionEngine 2: Total Domination panel ranked #8 overall with a score of 4.87.

Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scoring system, with 5 being the most favorable rating and 1 being the least favorable.

Only sessions that received more than 10 comment cards and a score greater than 4.50 are included in this post.

Let’s hope this means the SXSW organizers will be more willing to have panels on our favorite CMS and not just the same old panels on WordPress and Drupal.

(A huge thanks to Kenny Meyers for not only putting the panel together but for also fighting for the panel with the SXSW people during the early stages.)

See all the results: The Numbers Are In: 2010 SXSW Interactive Attendees Rate Thier Favorite Sessions

Share Your Expertise on EE Insider

You might have noticed over the last couple of months that we’ve published several new feature articles. This is thanks to a group of EE professionals who had great article ideas and were willing to contribute those to the community.

As part of my goal of making the site even more useful, I’m re-investing some of the ad revenue into full-length original how-to articles. But I’m looking for more ideas and articles. Do you have one?

What it takes

If you think you have an article you’d like to contribute to EE Insider, please get in touch (tips@eeinsider.com) and include a short (one paragraph) description of the article idea. There are some rules: the article should not have been previously published and should be something that is general enough to appeal to more than just you and your cat (or dog, if you prefer) or that one client site you built last year. At this time, articles can cover both EE 1.6 and EE 2.

For examples of good articles, just read the archives.

After selection, articles will be taken through a editorial process starting with a first draft. I (Ryan) will act as the editor. If your article idea is picked, you’ll get more details on the editorial process.

Small Token of Thanks

If your article idea is selected and published, you will receive a $100 thank-you gift for sharing your expertise with the community. I realize that this won’t pay for all of the time and effort you put into the article, but I hope you find this small gesture helpful.

Additionally, you will have a permanent bio on the site on our Contributors page.

So, have a great article idea? Send it in! tips@eeinsider.com.

Introducing the EE Insider iPhone App

Yesterday during my talk at EECI 2010, I announced a new way to get EE Insider content: a native iPhone app.

This was possible because of a collaboration with my team Happy Cog and our work to create a streamlined process for our clients to make their site content available in a custom branded iPhone app.

The iPhone app is easily hooked into ExpressionEngine 1.6 and 2 using a custom module we built that allows the site admins to control which sections of the site appear in the app, what icon they use and more. The visual look of the content areas is also customizable from the server. We’ve made it simpler to go from EE to iPhone.

While the application is customized by Happy Cog, clients will still need to create a $99/year iPhone developer account so they can distribute the application under the company name or brand.

EE Insider is excited to offer this new app and to take part in the first launch of this new Happy Cog offering.

Let us know how you like the app!

EECI 2010 Coverage

To keep up on the latest information from the EECI 2010 conference in San Francisco, check out our special EECI page. We will be posting updates, photos, videos and tweets.

EE Insider EECI 2010 Coverage

Live at EECI 2010

Next week is EECI 2010 in San Francisco and EE Insider will be there covering as much of the conference as possible. We’ve set up a special EECI page to make it easy to follow our EECI-related blog posts and the @eeinsider tweets, photos and videos.

Until the conference starts, the page is pulling in previous EECI 2010 blog posts and the entire @eeinsider tweet stream. If you attended the EE 2 panel at SXSW, you are probably familiar with the setup I’m using to “stream” live event content using Twitter as the main vehicle of delivery.

Everything on the page is running through ExpressionEngine but I’m using Twit-ee for the tweets (filtering out the twitpic and twitvid tweets), Magpie plugin for the twitpics and my Twitvid plugin for the videos.

Bookmark the page and come back next week to get updates, photos and videos from the conference!

(Special high-five and thank you to Joey Pfeifer for his awesome design of the EECI page. Joey will be at the conference, so be sure to say hello.)

ExpressionEngine 2 Book Excerpt

I’ve been getting great feedback on my ExpressionEngine 2 book both in the form of suggestions but also (and most importantly) errata. Writing a book on software is always a challenge but writing on something so new and freshly baked can be, at times, a nightmare. I’m thankful to everyone who has submitted errata reports and suggestions. The book is getting ready to go into another round of printing and will include many of the items reported.

As a way to help celebrate the book, the upcoming EECI conference and…well, we don’t really need a reason to celebrate, do we? Right, didn’t think so.

So as a way to celebrate something, I’m posting here as a free download the first part of Chapter 9 on Advanced Templating.

In Chapter 9 I walk through some cool things you can do in your templates beyond just the standard use of Channel Entries tag pairs. The excerpt covers searching inside of custom fields and leveraging dynamic parameters to create a more customizable user experience.

Enjoy!

Free Download

Excerpt from ExpressionEngine 2: A Quick-Start Guide

Note: If you do decide to pick up the book directly from the publisher, you can get it as an ebook, which gives you a PDF version, an epub version for your iPad or iPhone and a mobi version for your Kindle. Lots of different ways to read the book!

Thank You, Advertisers

There are costs involved in running EE Insider and I accept a small number of highly relevant advertisers to help defray those costs and keep the site going. I’m grateful for the support of the advertisers, a couple of which have been with EE Insider for more than a year.

Thanks to:

• Leevi Graham & Newism - Better Meta and other great add-ons (the original advertiser on EE Insider)
• Pixel & Tonic - Brandon Kelly’s Wygwam, Playa and Matrix add-ons make EE more fun and productive (Brandon has been an advertiser for the last year).
• Structure - Building with Structure gives you a different way to build ExpressionEngine sites. I’ve used it on several projects and clients love it.
• Hambo Development - You design the site and they’ll implement it in EE. A great service for busy agencies or freelance designers.
• Vector Media Group - SEO Pros who are also EE pros. Get their help to make sure you’re getting the most out of your site’s SEO efforts.
• WooThemes - Quality themes for ExpressionEngine allow you to get up and running on EE while looking good.

If you’re interested in advertising your product or service, please get in touch to learn more!