All entries filed under “EE Extensions”
Coverage of newly released EE extensions.
In the last EE Podcast, we talked about the problem of member spam and the steps you can take to protect your site and weed out the member spam. I jokingly said that Low should update his Low NoSpam to support member registrations. Well, now it does.
If you don’t know about Low NoSpam, here’s a description from his site:
This ExpressionEngine add-on will check comments to see if they’re considered to be spam by the chosen service, either Akismet or TypePad AntiSpam. But it doesn’t end there. It can also check incoming trackbacks (EE1), gallery comments (also EE1), forum posts, wiki articles and member registrations. Caught comments will be set to Closed for further moderation. Caught trackbacks, forum posts, wiki articles and member registrations will be discarded, since these do not have a proper native moderating system in EE.
Low NoSpam is free and if you find it useful consider dropping Low some beer money.
Erik Reagan has posted a new extension on GitHub, called CP Pad Lock, that allows you to easily lock all member groups out of your control panel except Super Administrators.
This extension is not intended to take the place of the normal member group access permissions, but instead as a way to temporarily block out member groups while some maintenance work or updates are happening.
All none super admin users would get the following message:
CP Pad Lock is only available for EE 1.6 and is a free download. Download now: CP Pad Lock
In a post in the EE forums, Brandon Jones released the reCAPTCHA extension.
reCAPTCHA is an ExpressionEngine 2 extension that replaces the built-in captcha with the reCAPTCHA system on member registration and comment forms. If you don’t already have reCAPTCHA keys, you can sign up and get them here.
With reCAPTCHA you can have CAPTCHAs that are accessible to the visually impaired, work with javascript disabled and supports multiple languages.
The extension is currently only available for EE 2. Read Brandon’s announcement post for some FAQs and a download link.
Today Pixel and Tonic released Playa 3, which (drumroll, please!) now supports ExpressionEngine 2! This is an add-on that a lot of people have been waiting for before they make the jump to EE 2. Well, it’s here, so what are you waiting for?
Until the next release of the EE 2 public beta is out there is a minor code adjustment needed to get Playa 3 to work on EE 2 but that will go away with the impending release of EE 2.02.
If you’re already a license holder for Playa 2, this is a free upgrade.
More to come on Playa 3 this week!
As of today Cartthrob, the latest venture in e-commerce for ExpressionEngine, is released and available for purchase. Cartthrob was developed to be as flexible as possible while still allowing you to control your inventory and e-commerce site with ExpressionEngine.
I exchanged a few emails with Chris Newton of Cartthrob and asked for his take on the new release.
Let’s first talk about the flexibility. Chris says:
CartThrob forces very little on the developer, there are very few strict rules on how things have to be built. For EE people this will be a godsend… we’re already used to getting it our own way with EE, and that is the spirit of our development efforts with CartThrob.
Rather than the typical feature-benefit focused cart approach: “your product must have a title, price, this option set, two pictures, and a shipping weight, ” CartThrob lets you create your store however you’d like. You can store data in weblogs in whatever format suits you, repurpose existing weblogs, or just hardcode product data in the templates. Most carts assume a structure and flow for a customer’s business, CartThrob doesn’t.
You can get an idea of what Cartthrob can do by reviewing the example uses they posted in the documentation. Donation site, simple t-shirt sales interface, integration with third party shipper are all things you can do with Cartthrob.
And all of this uses the regular weblogs or channels in EE (watch this video for details on how to set up weblogs for products). This means that even your existing EE add-ons should play nicely with Cartthrob.
Chris again:
Another nice feature is that CartThrob, once configured is not something your client even need be aware of. Once set up, all of the Items, Orders, and Purchased Item data can be stored in weblogs. It’s not some custom interface that the client will have to learn.
Mapping custom fields to Cartthrob
If your preferred payment gateway isn’t supported, you can create your own to interface with Cartthrob. The documentation has an example gateway that you can use as a guide when building your own.
Cartthrob is currently only available for ExpressionEngine 1.6 but they are going to start working on the EE 2 version soon.
I probably should give Stephen Lewis at Experience Internet his own category on the site. He’s back at it again with yet another software release for ExpressionEngine. This time it’s a rewrite of his most popular add SL Freshview Subscribe.
SL Freshview Subscribe has been connecting ExpressionEngine with Campaign Monitor since 2008. It’s now reached version 2.0, and been given a brand new name: Campaigner.
Campaigner has been completely rewritten from the ground up, with a bevy of new features, and a revamped user interface.
Campaigner is a paid add-on and costs $15 per site license. It is currently only available for ExpressionEngine 1.6.
We all know about the problem of comment spam on blogs and sites that accept comments. A lot of barriers have been placed in the way of spambots: CAPTCHAs, spam checking services like Akismet and vigilant moderation of comments.
But spammers are getting smarter and have moved their scum-of-the-earth practices to other places, like ExpressionEngine member profiles.
On EE Insider I’ve seen spammers create accounts with legitimate email addresses, activate by email and then log in and edit their profiles using the default member templates. In the member bios they add their spammy links in the hopes that the default member templates will be indexed by Google and other search engines.
Up until now I’ve been managing this problem by manually finding the spammers and zapping their accounts. Apparently, I’m not the only one having this problem. Purple Dogfish recently posted a blog entry about their problems with member profile spammers:
Reading the ExpressionEngine forums I note we’re not the only people getting hit with numerous spam registrations and loads of irrelevant linkspam. So it’s time to share what we’re doing and give Member Utilities a little plug now it’s been upgraded.
My previous entry about spammers seemed to strike a chord – in fact Member Utilities is being used to tackle spam effectively by a lot of people in the EE community (we love you all) but the behaviour of the spammers has changed so we’ve adapted Member Utilities to close the loop.
The new and improved version of Member Utilities (which I’ve purchased and installed on EE Insider) now notifies you every time someone updates their profile. This makes it easier to weed out the scumbag spammers who are trying to use your site to peddle their scams.
Read the entire write-up for details on Member Utilities and how Purple Dogfish is using it for their sites. For bonus points read the story behind why Member Utilities was created.
In the forums, user “lockwesmonster” released a new extension for EE 1.6.x that allows you to easily sort entries on the Edit screen by clicking on the column headers.
Edit Table Plus also lets you choose to hide some of the default data (like comments, trackbacks, status, date, etc). A very handy way to make your Edit screen cleaner and more user-friendly.
The extension is currently free and only works in EE 1.6.x. Read the forum post for more information and to download the add-on.
(Above screengrab taken from the original forum post.)
Last month, I quietly released the EE 2.0 version of my First Timer extension. It’s an exact copy of the EE 1.6.8 version with no new features added except (as mentioned last week) it now supports NSM Addon Updater.
First Timer allows you to point users to a specific URL upon their first login and the a different URL on subsequent logins. I plan to add more features (it still doesn’t support MSM) in the near future, as time allows.
Learn more about First Timer.
In a sign that the EE 2 momentum is increasing, yet another developer has updated their add-ons for EE 2. This time it’s Newism and they’ve released two new add-ons for our delight and nerdy pleasure.
NSM Addon Updater
This new accessory (was an extension on 1.6.x) keeps you up-to-date on your installed EE add-ons. The add-on does explicitly have to support NSM Addon Updater but adding it is simple and quick. In just a few minutes I updated my First Timer extension to work with NSM Addon Update accessory.
Displaying an update to the First Timer extension.
NSM Live Look
NSM Live Look is the EE 2 version of the popular LG Live Look, which allows you to easily preview your entries before posting them live. I use LG Live Look here at EE Insider to preview every entry before it appears on the site.
Previewing an entry before posting to the blog.
We’ve all seen the user and system messages that, if unaltered, appear in the standard ExpressionEngine blue. We see it when we log in, we see it when there’s an error. But beside some basic markup and CSS there’s little we can do to affect how they look. We certainly can’t add EE tags or use regular EE templates.
Not until now, that is.
Brian Litzinger today released Custom System Messages, a EE 1.6.8 extension that allows you to customize the messages and use normal EE templates.
This extension lets you define any 2 templates within your template groups to be used as the error page. You have access to all the usual variables from the Specialty Templates, plus a new one, {referrer}. So on top of any EE template tag you want to use in the error page, you have {title}, {meta_refresh}, {heading}, {content}, {link}, and {referrer}. {link} can also be changed to render without the JavaScript history.go() method if you desire. There are 3 options which I called Accessibility in the extension settings.
Read Brian’s forum post and download the extension: Custom System Messages Extension
Wiseup studios has been on a bit of a kick lately. Their latest release MX Multi Language Labels follows suit.
The extension, which lets you create separate per-language labels for the CP for your custom fields, look excellent and well thought-out. Congratulations on the launch.
fabEE, a Facebook connect extension, is here! Now you can integrate Facebook Connect into your site, leveraging your social network synergy. The extension is compatible with the 1.6.x series of EE.
Here are its respective links:
This is a great extension, so congratulations to Purple Dogfish on its release.
Fabee is on the way! The long promised extension, which allows you to connect to Facebook Connect with EE, is near release:
So, what’s been happening? Well, we’ve rewritten fabEE again (pretty much from scratch). This was due to the significant changes within Facebook in the past few months. The most obvious change is the way the publishing to Facebook now works; it uses the new(ish) Stream Publish method that now makes the whole process more straightforward. This method will also update a commenter’s Facebook status as well as post the content (as well as a link back) to their stream. This also means that your users now have to give specific permission to both receive email from your fabEE site as well as permission to post back to their stream – you’ll notice a little permission status under your login if you connect to this site using Facebook. The other significant change is that fabEE is now just an extension, there is no module component.
The extension will be release soon for $59.95. I hear rumors that a certain “owner” of a certain “Insider” may have been in on the private beta, so look for more news from this site on Fabee in the future.
Purple Dogfish has released a great new add-on called Member Utilities. The add-on, which looks fantastic, lets you do the following:
- Review Member Profiles – often spammers will sign up and post nothing, but their profiles contain spam links to whatever they’re promoting this week.
- Review Posts – you’ve identified that it’s possibly a spam sign up and you can see they’ve posted, but you have to search the forum to find it. Member Utilities allows you to find all forum posts from the control panel members list.
- Bulk move – select the members you want to move within the control panel members list and bulk move.
- Ban IP addresses – Option to ban the IP address if you’re moving into the banned members group.
- Ban email addresses – Option to ban email addresses if you’re moving into the banned members group.
- Delete all posts – Option to remove all posts if you’re moving into the banned members group.
The Extension is only currently available for 1.6.x and is available for $14.99. Congratulations to Purple Dogfish on the launch.
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