Coverage of interesting new EE Add-ons that are released.
EE Harbor released a new license type for their add-ons called the Mega Pack. You get all of their add-ons for unlimited use for an annual fee.
There are two types of Mega Packs (Basic and Premier) and the only difference is the level of support you get (and, of course, the price).
Learn more about the Mega Pack
Posted on Aug 30, 2016 by Ryan Irelan
The add-ons that paved the way for so many others:
are now owned by EE Harbor.
From the Pixel & Tonic announcement:
Pixel & Tonic is best known for Craft CMS these days, but before Craft, we made a name for ourselves writing add-ons for ExpressionEngine. These add-ons are widely considered to be some of the best to ever grace the platform, and they’ve been influential across the entire EE add-on ecosystem—and even the CMS itself.
Over the years, we’ve continued to maintain and support them. But as Craft grows it’s getting harder and harder for us to find the time, especially for major efforts like porting them to EE 3. Frankly they deserve better than we can offer anymore.
It should be a smooth transition for current licensees, with support being handled immediately by the EE Harbor team (read their announcement for more details).
Posted on Jul 18, 2016 by Ryan Irelan
Pixel & Tonic released a new version of Assets that improves Grid field compatibility and other add-on support.
Read the release notes and update your sites.
Posted on Aug 19, 2015 by Ryan Irelan
It was soft announced a couple days ago in the ExpressionEngine Slack account (and on Twitter) but it’s now official: CartThrob is saved.
From the blog post from Vector:
We’ve got some exciting news: Vector is now the proud owner of the #1 ExpressionEngine eCommerce add-on, CartThrob!
For years, CartThrob has been our choice for implementing eCommerce on ExpressionEngine sites we’ve built for clients. We’re fans of its flexibility, data model, usage of native EE concepts like channel fields, and extensibility. We loved that no matter what a client needed, CartThrob could do it — including custom (and complex!) tax and shipping rules. We’ve also used CartThrob’s amazing API to integrate with every acronym you can imagine: CRMs, ERPs, DAMs, PIMs, and fulfillment vendors like warehouses and logistics providers.
Among the acquisition package is CT Admin and a handful of other add-ons.
Vector is a great company and employs a former developer of CartThrob and other add-ons. I’m sure this will be a good future for the e-commerce add-on.
Posted on Jul 24, 2015 by Ryan Irelan
If you are a customer of Solspace’s Facebook Connect add-on then you probably already received an email about this. They released a critical update that allows the add-on to work with upcoming changes to the Facebook Graph API.
Today we released Facebook Connect 3.0, which is a free, critical update for all customers using this add-on. The 1.x version of the Facebook API has been deprecated and will stop working after April 30, 2015. The latest version of Facebook Connect now uses the latest version of the Facebook Graph API (v2.2) and Javascript SDK. You need to act quickly and update to this version of Facebook Connect before April 30, 2015.
There are some important changes you should read about before updating.
Posted on Mar 24, 2015 by Ryan Irelan
In a blog post today, Solspace’s Mitchell Kimbrough announced that all add-on prices were being reduced. Permanently.
Over the years we have realized that the main purpose of our software products is to lead new clients to us. Our software products are profitable, but their real value is in their ability to demonstrate our expertise in building and launching market-worthy web applications. They have served this purpose well, but this purpose is served even better by getting these products into the hands of more developers, by making these products part of a developer’s standard package of tools to be used on every one of their client engagements.
A few examples of the amount discounted:
You can view all of their software here.
Posted on Dec 16, 2014 by Ryan Irelan
Have you tried out EE Blocks yet?
It’s a rich content field type for ExpressionEngine that allows you to add different types of content and then move that content around to your liking.
They posted a helpful how-to on using EE Blocks to create captions for images.
Captioned images. They seem like they should be so easy. Drop an image into a content field and add a caption, and you’re done, right?
But they never are easy, are they? I can’t even count the number of times a client has requested an easy way to add captioned images to a content area on a site.
Posted on Nov 13, 2014 by Ryan Irelan
Yesterday, Pixel & Tonic released a bunch of updates to the following add-ons:
Email
Comments
Post to Twitter
Post to Delicious{element_name} tags within Content Elements.All of the updates are free for current licensees. Grab the downloads in your Devot-ee account.
Posted on Nov 13, 2014 by Ryan Irelan
Just released on November 1st is a minimal theme for the ExpressionEngine Forum module. It’s called eeBootstrap.
By the name, it’s obvious that it is built on Bootstrap. It can be toggled to different Bootswatch themes (see the live example to try that out) if you want a slightly different look.
eeBootstrap is a professional theme for ExpressionEngine Forum Discussion Module, is developed with the latest version of Twitter Bootstrap framework, HTML5 e CSS3.
It’s also responsive and customizable the same way a Bootstrap-based site is.
You can see it in action here (looks really nice!) and test it out before you decide to purchase a license for one of your projects.
What I initially like about the idea of this theme is that might make more people use the EE Forum module. Theming it is a major pain and a lot of people shy away from it because of that. This theme makes using the module more appealing to me.
The eeBoostrap theme is $49.50 and available at Devot-ee for purchase.
Posted on Nov 04, 2014 by Ryan Irelan
Eric Lamb at Mithra62 just released a major update (version 2) to Backup Pro, which is an advanced backup add-on for ExpressionEngine. It makes it simple to regularly backup both your ExpressionEngine site files and database.
The backups can live right on your server but for even better protection, Backup Pro 2 uploads your backup to either Amazon s3, Rackspace Cloud, Google Cloud Storage, or any remote server via FTP. Even better, Backup Pro 2 allows you to use up to three remote locations at once, so you get redundancy and safety for your website data.
I personally use Backup Pro to handle extra backups for my important EE sites. I encourage you to check it out.
Get Backup Pro 2 for your site.
Posted on Oct 31, 2014 by Ryan Irelan
Today, Erik Reagan of Focus Lab was reminded of an experience he had almost starting his own add-on development company:
Related: each time I peer into the #eecms world I'm more affirmed by this decision. http://t.co/VmggDyqvUq #eeconf
— Erik Reagan (@ErikReagan) October 3, 2014
Some choice bits from the article:
There were a few questions I looked at while planning Sidecar’s business. The biggest of which was our market and how to sell to it. The most obvious concern was how to support the software and not allow the cost of support to kill us financially.
At this point everyone in the EE world was selling a license for anywhere from $10 to $100 and support just came with the purchase. This seemed unsustainable so my plan was to sell the two separately. The license would cost $X and support would be some type of recurring cost model based on the amount of support a customer needed. Interestingly enough, EllisLab announced that type of model not long after. This supported my view of the unsustainable model.
Just before he informed the company that the project was going away:
After reviewing everything I realized the opportunity cost was exceptionally higher than the probable revenue from Sidecar. Focus Lab is too small, too young and way too interested in maintaining an exceptional level of quality with client services. Starting this add-on arm was possible, but only at the expense of our current services. That was unacceptable.
The whole thing is worth a read.
Posted on Oct 03, 2014 by Ryan Irelan
Ryan Masuga gave a sort of State of the State of Devot-ee & EE Add-on Development today on the website’s blog.
He introduced two major changes to how Devot-ee operates:
Both make sense to me.
The timed downloads help address the ongoing support issue for add-ons. Effectively, a customer can purchase the add-on once and then the developers are on the hook for support for, well, forever.
The developers’ only recourse for recouping their time spent on add-on development is to release a paid upgrade version. They still have to support 1.0 of an add-on that is on 5.0. Not sustainable. Devot-ee is giving them a tool to try to help.
The revenue share is between add-on developers and Devot-ee. If you deem it too steep (it’s not), then you are not obligated to sell. Some add-on developers make the choice to sell add-ons exclusively on their own. Some others make the choice to sell exclusively through Devot-ee.
There was a good series of conversations on Twitter today about this. I am preserving as many as possible using Storify before they disappear into the dark canyons of Twitter.
Before you chime in, hear Ryan out. Read his post here.
Posted on Oct 03, 2014 by Ryan Irelan
DevDemon recently released their Subscription add-on for ExpressionEngine, which makes it easy to sell subscriptions through your ExpressionEngine-powered website.
I’ve been using this in beta over the Summer for some testing on a project of mine. It’s very flexible and, out of the box, it should do everything you’d need from a subscription add-on, including customizing through actions.
Subscriptions also delivers a very powerful Trigger and Action system. Utilizing almost 20 different triggers you can customize actions through an easy to use control panel. These triggers allow your administrator to modify and create new subscriptions without modifying template tags.
Visit the DevDemon site for all the details but here are my favorite features:
A nice addition to our selection of add-ons for EE and ecommerce!
Posted on Sep 03, 2014 by Ryan Irelan
Patrick Pohler penned an article on Medium on how to easily add an API to your ExpressionEngine add-on.
Adding an API can help you add-on be more useful and flexible because it can connect to other systems, and allow developer to extend it without hacking the add-on code.
So how are external apps going to communicate to our ExpressionEngine add-on? We’ll need to make sure we can expose API methods that respond correctly to GET and POST requests.
Patrick continues with API code samples for his “Mission Tracker” A-team sample add-on, including a detailed code walk-thru. Very helpful!
Read the entire how-to article
Posted on Jul 29, 2014 by Ryan Irelan
A couple of relevant updates for you on the changes with how ExpressionEngine 2.9+ handles conditionals.
Conditionals are parsed better, simple vs. advanced conditional is now a thing of the past, and there are some nice new operators; you can do simple math and more robust comparisons.
I was, admittedly, glossing over a big change in EE and one that impacts some third party developers. Fortunately, because of the Developer Preview Program all developers who participate had plenty of warning on this change. But it doesn’t mean that this will be a simple transition.
(A month ago, EllisLab wrote a good explanation of the changes to conditionals that is required reading for anyone working with EE.)
Already developers are posting updates for their add-ons to support the new conditional handling and they are trying to get the word out about how their add-ons are affected.
Low Schutte pondered:
Dilemma: update docs with the new conditionals & risk getting Qs from people not on 2.9, or stay with the old and risk the same? #eecms
— Lodewijk Schutte (@low) July 15, 2014
As I wrote in last week’s Content Mgmt Outlook email:
The forever problem of moving forward versus not leaving people behind.
Low also wrote up some instructions on how to use his Low Search add-on going forward:
Use the Matches operator instead of the IN operator in #eecms 2.9. Here’s how: http://t.co/5ecTN3O2CA
— Lodewijk Schutte (@low) July 16, 2014
And Mark Croxton, the wizard behind Stash, tweeted:
A note about conditionals in #eecms 2.9, and Stash: https://t.co/SDjR3cEd1F
— Mark Croxton (@croxton) July 16, 2014
Stash in 2.9 still works the same but Mark highlights an important workaround.
Mark also has an excellent explanation of the conditional parsing:
In 2.9 EE attempts to parse if/else conditionals before each pass and after the very last pass (or you can think of it as after each pass and before the very first pass), and will do so only if they are “ready” - the variables being evaluated actually exist. Previously, simple conditionals were parsed just before the first pass only, and advanced conditionals were parsed at the end of the very last pass only.
Some add-on updates may be backward incompatible (i.e. not support EE prior to 2.9), so always check the release notes before upgrading an add-on and not EE.
Posted on Jul 16, 2014 by Ryan Irelan