I love Instagram. It is one of the best social services around. I use it almost daily to post photos of my daily happenings and see those of my friends and colleagues. So, needless to say it was great to see an add-on available for EE that allows you to pull in photos from Instagram. Enter Pic Puller.
There are two different version of Pic Puller available: Pic Puller Lite, a free version that only pulls in the Popular photostream from Instagram and the full version of Pic Puller, which allows you to pull in user photos, liked photos and photos by tag. The paid version is $15 is available at the Devot:ee store.
Here’s a video from the developer, John Morton, on how to set up the add-on:
Mighty Big Robot released Field Editor this week, a new add-on that gives you one screen to edit all of the fields in a channel field group and other cool features like drag-and-drop field reordering, import and export of field groups so you can easily reuse them without having to create them all again, field cloning and more.
The add-on requires EE 2.4, so make sure you upgrade or try it on a new site. At only $9.99 I can’t think why you wouldn’t buy this to try it out.
Today he released Responsive CP, an EE theme that makes your control panel a little more flexible.
Responsive CP is a custom ExpressionEngine theme that makes your control panel work better with mobile devices as well as look more professional. It also allows you to easily add your logo to the bottom of the control panel (good for branding client sites).
In keeping with the popular responsive design movement, Ben used media queries to adjust the control panel design to the screen size.
EE Harbor released this past week a new add-on for EE2 to help with making multi-language websites with ExpressionEngine. It’s called Transcribe. Creating a multi-language site is, without a doubt, still a task that has many, many solutions. EE Harbor and their Transcribe module are trying to be the solution.
From the product page:
Transcribe is a fully featured solution for creating multi-lingual websites in ExpressionEngine. Transcribe handles everything from word/phrase translation to channel entry translations and even url translation/routing!
Here’s a video walk-thru of setting up a site to use Transcribe:
Despite stealing my name, I’m a fan of Ryan Masuga and what he has built at Devot:ee. What started out as a collection of add-ons and links to download them has grown into the place to buy add-ons for your projects and find out what is best through ratings and reviews. It’s also given add-on developers a turnkey storefront to sell their own software.
So, it’s no surprise that 2011 has been a great year for Devot:ee. In a year end roundup (thankfully not called a YERP), Ryan talked about the steady growth at the site and how 50 add-on developers each month get paid by Devot:ee and they added a new developer to help work on some new projects.
While we were all watching sports or recovering from too much partying ringing in the new year, Low (who lives on a boat) released a brand new version of his popular and clever add-on Low Variables.
In a blog post, Low said this is his biggest update to the add-on and it features some new functionality that I think is pretty damn handy:
Save variables as files
Low Variables Fieldtype
Table variable fieldtype
Read that first bullet again: you can now save your variables as files. Yes.
Low Variables 2.0 is available now and costs €35 (or around $47 US).
If you’re not familiar with Low Variables and what it can do, browse Low’s articles and sample code for ideas on how the add-on can be implemented.
Today, Devot:ee announced the annual “AcademEE” awards and the winners named in a handful of categories. Devot:ee intern Jacob Russell wrote up a short blog post about the awards:
2011 has been another great year for add-ons in the ExpressionEngine community, as developers around the world continue to write great code for the benefit of all of us. We’re happy to see a mix of add-ons by established developers and a lot of ‘new blood’ creating awesome add-ons.
Yuri at intoEEtive is offering a bundle sale of his add-ons for $99. This includes 11 add-ons like Threaded Comments, rEEservation, and Member Categories.
The sale is only good until the end of the month, so if you’re a regular user of Yuri’s add-ons, this a good time to save a little cash.
It’s a logical combination because many of the sites that need the User module also need the Friends module. How do I know this? Other than because of my magical powers, it is because I just helped build a site that used those two modules together. Hand, meet glove.
They say it’s limited time only for the discount, so if you need the bundle you better take advantage.
Disclaimer: Solspace is an advertiser on EE Insider but this is not a paid advertisement.
Not all feature requests are created equal. Some are extremely insightful and far-reaching, and improve the add-on in ways you never imagined. Most are narrow, case-specific, and don’t belong in the core product.
Extension hooks provide a means of dealing with the latter in a way that doesn’t adversely affect the core add-on.
He continues with an example of his Campaigner add-on and how allowing for custom extensions lets him, in his own words, abdicate responsibility, for special features or customizations that a developer might need for their project.
Jesse Bunch describes a problem that you’ve probably faced before. You have a great workflow set up with Git, SVN or another VCS and then someone goes into the EE Control Panel and edits the templates, completely bypassing the workflow.
Obviously, this is a huge problem because our production severs don’t commit changes back to the repository for obvious reasons. So when someone edits a template on the production server, nobody knows it happened and when we deploy a change to that template, it is very likely that the change will be lost or our working copy will become out of sync (depending on how we deploy the project).
To help fix this problem, Jesse created an extension that disables the template editor in the Control Panel.
This extension makes the templates and template groups in EE read-only. It doesn’t affect things like synchronization, PHP input/output parsing, and access control.
You can get the extension at Devot-ee. It’s only available for EE2 right now (although a EE1 version is planned) and is free to download.
Yesterday, Barrett Newton Interactive announced that their add-ons will now be available under the MightyBigRobot brand. From the About area of their new site:
MightyBigRobot is the software development branch of Barrett Newton Interactive, a highly creative web design and development shop with deep roots in the ExpressionEngine community. Our addons have won awards, and our team itself was runner-up developer of the year in 2011, as voted on by our peers. In addition to our addons that we build, support, and maintain, we are also available for customization work, including the development of custom EE addons and ecommerce software.
Republic Variables hooks into ExpressionEngine’s global variables and give you an easy way to view, organize and edit all the variables you use on the site in one place.
The add-on doesn’t have to be used just for multi-language websites on EE but Republic Factory says Variables “really shines when used on sites with multi-language content.”
The beauty of using Sphinx is that you can write your documentation using ReStructuredText, a text format similar to MarkDown. You can then easily generate your docs in a variety of output formats, including HTML and PDF. It also helps to keep your content separate from design, and automatically handles repetitive tasks such as generating a table of contents / navigation, and linking between your documents.
The blog post walks you through the entire process of installing Sphinx and styling it like the official ExpressionEngine documentation.
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