Recently I’ve been thinking that the EE control panel could use more robust logging. This is especially important for me during the late development stage of a project when the number of people with access to the control panel increases. It’s not really to expose and assign blame if something goes wrong, but at least have a complete record of what happened.
Natural Logic has written a fantastic post about the Geofinder add-on and location awareness.
I’ve been planning on adding location awareness handling to Geofinder for some time and recently did just that.
For this post, we will focus on using the iPhone to implement this functionality, but it can certainly be used for other webkit based mobile browsers. I use the Geofinder Music Venue demo as our example.
The post provides examples and shows the excellent end results. Geolocation and the Internet are the FUTURE!
I’ve been working on a site which users must register to gain access. I’ve removed the need for a user to create a unqiue username by using their email address for their username. This also removes the need for the email field on the registration form.
However, the screen name, which I’m currently using to welcome the user to the site in a personal fashion, has to also be unique. Luckily the verification for unique screen names can be removed, so John Smith doesn’t have to call himself JSmith79 just to be able to register.
If you are unfamiliar with clips they are an extremely useful feature that Panic has provided inside of Coda. Clips are essentially “snippets” of code that you can reuse to speed up your time for habitual coding tasks.
The forum post, which is dated September 2008, is actually up to date with the current links. Thanks to Jason for putting this together.
The biggest functional difference between 1.6.8 and 2.0 as far as plugins are concerned is the switch from global variables and methods to the super object. Most of your calls will still work the same, but they’ll be formatted differently and interact with ExpressionEngine in a new way. These changes first show up in the plugin constructor function, which is the first function in the plugin class.
The post is lengthy, well-written and full of great beginner information.
We know many of you use Panic’s Coda as your primary developer tool and for good reason. In the ExpressionEngine forums, there was a question about getting the Coda Live Preview functionality working. PeeTer asks the following:
Hi, I’m using EE 2.0 and since I upgraded the “live preview” trick mentioned in this blog post has stopped working. Has anyone figured out how to make live preview work again with Coda using EE 2.0?
One of the best EE add-ons for anyone with a blog, Low NoSpam is now compatible with EE2.
Low NoSpam Interface
We here at the Insider can not say thanks to Low enough for this excellent add-on, as it keeps our comments lean and mean while spam-free. This add-on is highly recommended.
I love cheat sheets. They provide great quick-references when you just can’t remember a little piece of code. I especially love well layed-out cheat sheets. I really, especially love well laid-out cheat sheets about ExpressionEngine development.
I began investigating the fascinating minutia of RSS when I couldn’t find a reasonable answer in the EE forums to why Google Reader was re-posting every updated post on my site even thought the entry dates hadn’t changed. As I went through the prevalent templates floating around the EE community line-by-line I noticed several things that could be improved upon. The only critical fix, in my opinion, is removal of seconds from the dates in the
section. If you want your feed to validate you’ll want to add the atom namespace. The rest are optional improvements.
If you’ve had these same problems, read this great article for knowledge and a solution!
Adam Spooner has written a great little article on managing CSS & JS with ExpressionEngine.
ExpressionEngine, hereafter EE, has great built-in support for managing style sheets and JavaScript. Here’s one simple way to manage your style sheets and JavaScript files with cache-busting and gzip compression using EE’s templating system.
A great write-up on using ExpressionEngine’s built-in asset-handling.
How many times have you been working on a site and poof! something doesn’t work the way you expected? For most developers this is just part of the process. There are some common ways to debug issues that are built right into ExpressionEngine. You just need to know how to use them. There are other things that aren’t necessarily tools but rather features that might be missed causing errors. Let’s dive in.
Leevi Graham’s mighty updating extension has been updated for ExpressionEngine 2.0. The design of the extension now allows for a much simpler xml format, making life easier for all developers.
This really is a must have for keeping your install up-to-date or implementing your add-on.
A form builder is a regular request for some clients when they are looking for a content management system. There aren’t that many CMS that have this kind of functionality built-in, and even if they do, the implementation is usually less than desirable.
If you follow along with what I’ve been up to, you can probably tell that I have been on a big ExpressionEngine kick. I’ve been using it on a ton of projects recently, and I love it for its flexibility. Although it does lack a true form builder, I figured out a simple way to build one.
The article incorporates a great little fieldtype called Freeform data select by Tim Kelty, which you should also look into.
This is a tool that no ExpressionEngine developer should be without. ER Developer Toolbar creates a beautiful bridge between the front end of your ExpressionEngine site and the control panel with direct links for things like global variables, template editing, cache clearing and more. It is there when you need it and gets out of the way when you don’t.
Lodewijk Schutte was kind enough to post his add-on roadmap. The great news is that the majority of them are hitting December 1st. You may have to wait a month or two until the excellent Low NoSpam is available, however, as Low places that in January 2010.
As far as additional features, Low has only mentioned one:
I’m planning on adding Google Site Search to the Google Mini Plugin, hence the later date.
He also reports the add-ons he won’t be replacing, so be sure to check out his blog post for more information.
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