When I released my new ExpressionEngine training videos last week, I also included a free installation video that walks through getting up and running with ExpressionEngine 2, including requirements, setting permissions and other considerations.
The video runs about 15 minutes and is just shy of a 40 MB download. New to ExpressionEngine and want a quick primer on installing EE? Download the video now.
Now if you’re already using EE 1.6 and want to upgrade to EE 2, I shared some information in my EECI 2010 (in San Francisco) talk about the upgrade process. The slides are available to everyone to read and learn from.
But if you’re interested in watching me give the talk, last week the talk was posted to the conference website but it’s limited to those who attended or purchased the DVD.
I have 2 invites to complete access to the EECI videos (of nearly every session) and I am going to give them away to two random commenters on this blog entry. In order to win you have to list something you love about EE 2 and something you wish it had. I’ll pick the two winners on Friday morning Eastern Time USA.
On October 22, 2010 ExpressionEngine Camp will take place in Denver, Colorado. It is being organized by Q Digital Studio and is a one-day event for EE developers and users.
EE Camp brings hands-on ExpressionEngine presentations, sharing, discussion and ideas to Denver, Colorado. ExpressionEngine is a flexible content management system that designers, developers and clients truly enjoy using to build beautiful and feature-rich sites.
It looks like they’re still working out the details but the date is firm and the venue is the Casselman’s Event Venue in Denver. Registration isn’t open yet so you might want to check the site regularly for more information.
Looking forward to seeing this happen. I hope more camps take place across the world.
Each year (it seems to be getting earlier and earlier) anyone can submit a panel to the SXSW committee for inclusion in the following year’s program. The panels are all placed in the “Panel Picker” and the public gets to vote on which panels they want to see at the conference. After that an advisory board will make the final selections based on the voting.
So, now it’s time for the community to speak out and post any panels they’ve proposed to the special forum thread. Support the members of our community and please vote for their panels!
Today I got an email from Whoooz! Webmedia about the first batch of session videos from EECI 2010 in San Francisco. The videos available are talks from Lodewijk Schutte, Greg Wood, Lea Alcantara, Simon Collison, Leevi Graham, Jamie Pittock, Jamie Rumbelow, Thomas Myer, Travis Schmeisser, Adii Pienaar and Matt Weinberg.
It looks like the videos are only available for attendees (or maybe also purchasers of the DVD, it isn’t clear) but there is the option to share the video page with up to three friends or colleagues. This is a nice way to share your EECI experience with some of your officemates. There are other restrictions to the videos: your personal URL can only be used in up to three locations and the videos are not downloadable.
The email notes that this is only the first part of the videos and the second wave will be posted online next week. If you attended EECI in SFO, check your email!
The next iteration of the EECI conference was announced yesterday with the initial launch of the website. It takes place from Sept 29 to October 1 in Leiden, The Netherlands (same city as last year), which is just a short train ride from the Amsterdam Schiphol airport.
The conference will feature a new venue and a refreshed list of speakers (I’ve long said that Greg Salt is the quiet master of all things EE and I’m glad to see him listed as a speaker). Also different is that lack of a CodeIgniter track. EECI has always been heavy on the EE (in terms of content and attendees) but now it seems the CodeIgniter piece is gone altogether.
On the site, Robert noted:
You CodeIgniter lot are an astute bunch, so you have probably noticed there is no separate CI track this time. There will of course still be plenty of CodeIgnited talk, but it will all be ExpressionEngine related. If that’s just not enough CI for you, there is the 100% CodeIgniter-only conference “CICON2010” in Britstol, UK this August, with some more fantastic speakers.
From what I can gather the first two days will be the standard conference lineup and then on day 3 there’s something called DevDay:
On Friday October 1st we’ll have a 12-hour DevDay planned for you. A team of highly experienced coders and designers will guide you on this day whilst developing stuff for EE. In between we have small sessions that will cover specific topics. Of course we won’t forget to feed you and serve you some drinks.
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.)
Another one of my favorite talks (and not just because of his dry humor) was Low’s presentation on using PHP in templates. Before the presentation I went up to Low and told him I know the answer: Pain. I’ve used a lot of PHP in templates when it was needed. However, I’ve always found PHP code in templates a lot of work to maintain going forwards&emdash;especially weeks or months later.
Low, however, showed some smart ways of using PHP, how the EE parse order works and, finally, how you can use both to make PHP in your templates pleasure, not pain.
On Wednesday afternoon, Matt Weinberg of Vector Media Group gave a information-packed talk on everything (and I mean everything) you need to know about doing e-commerce and doing it on ExpressionEngine.
Matt didn’t talk about Simple Commerce Module or how to use PayPal but instead focused on more robust implementations of e-commerce. He talked about payment gateways, merchant accounts (including suggestions for merchant account providers), PCI Compliance and some EE-specific solutions.
One of the highlights of the EECI conference for me was Jamie Pittock’s (Erskine Design) presentation on “How Erskine Rolls” when developing websites on ExpressionEngine. His talk was packed—from beginning to end— with great EE development tips and a bit of the funny for which the Erskine crew is known.
Jamie made his slides and materials available for download; he even included a sample path.php file, config.php file and some template components. There could be a book written on the material Jamie presented, so it’s worth your time to go through the slides and follow along (even better, you should buy the EECI 2010 DVD that should include Jamie’s talk).
On the second day of the conference, Leevi Graham gave a one-hour talk on how Newism plans, builds and maintains ExpressionEngine websites. Packed full of insightful information and handy tricks, Leevi showed us how to plan sites better, develop them faster and…profit!
Leevi has posted his slides and some assets (his Paper Plan) from his presentation. Grab them using the links below.
Soon, I hope to have an interview about MojoMotor with Derek posted but until I can get him the questions and his responses, we’ll settle for this interesting nugget from his personal blog:
Mojo is something that I’ve been working on since around Christmas last year, and its been nearly everything I’ve been up to professionally for 5 months. Anyone who’s watched my keynote at EECI2009 knows that I’m a “social coder”. I crave community; and I consider nerding-out with other people to be foundational to the way I work. Keeping Mojo under wraps for 5 months has been killing me! I want to share, I want to say “hey, check out this cool thing I’ve been doing”, but we decided very early on that we wanted Mojo to come as a total surprise. Now that its out there, I’m glad we did.
Response to the news of Mojo has been overwhelmingly positive. I’m really hopeful that people will end up loving it as much as they love CodeIgniter and ExpressionEngine. I few secret tidbits that not many people know about MojoMotor:
MojoMotor was a name that Rick grabbed years ago. He just liked the sound of it. As I was developing MojoMotor it started out with a much different name, but it was quickly apparent that “MojoMotor” was the right name for the little CMS.
“The publishing engine that does less…” and the concept for the logo both came about in less then 3 minutes during a Skype call between me and Rick.
Other parts of the software that I expected to come quickly took WEEKS. Funny how that works.
The graphic artist who helped us along was Ilina Simeonova. She did stellar work, and her dedication to a project that she had little invested in was inspiring.
As I posted previously, there is no release date set and the final product will cost $49.95 US per license.
On the first full conference day, Adii Pienaar gave a one hour talk on economics, entrepreneurship and making money in the world of ExpressionEngine. Adii is relatively new to EE so it was interesting to hear his take and observations.
On Wednesday afternoon Mike Boyink held a session on how to successfully hand a project off to clients. He posted his notes and resources from the talk. Bookmark this as a great reminder of what you should do to make client handoff as painless as possible.
One of the talks I unfortunately missed (Wednesday afternoon was packed with great talks and I chose to attend Mark Huot’s informative talk on debugging) was Erskine’s Greg Wood’s session on Editorial design with ExpressionEngine.
So, yesterday everyone was anticipating an announcement about EE 2 (which we got) but there was a big surprise, too: MojoMotor.
This new, lightweight content management system from EllisLab places them squarely in the same space as offerings like Perch. During the initial announcement EllisLab’s Derek Allard didn’t offer many details other than a preview video (which you can watch on the MojoMotor website) but later held an impromptu in-between session to answer more questions and share more information.
So, here are some details:
MojoMotor will cost $49 US per license
PHP 5+ is required
Can run on either MySQL or SQLite3 databases(great news!)
Requires a “modern” browser: Firefox 3+, Safari 4+, Chrome and Internet Explorer 8.
You can import a MojoMotor site into EE 2 if you need to upgrade to a more robust solution.
There is still no word on when the new CMS will be available as beta or final release. Hopefully EllisLab will be releasing some more information soon.
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