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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 great extension was just released called Google Analytics Panel. What does it do, you may ask?
The creatively-named Google Analytics Panel adds an overview of your site’s Google Analytics statistics to a panel on the ExpressionEngine control panel home screen. The panel displays quick stats for Today and Yesterday (visits, pageviews, average pageviews per visit, and average visit length), with increased stats for the past 31 days (visits, pageviews, average pageviews per visit, average visit length, bounce rate, percentage of new visits, top content and top referrers). The 31-day stats also include sparklines to visualize site activity. It’s all very pretty really.
I tried installing this on my personal site and the process was easy; the analytics display, beautiful. Also, it’s nice to see all 3 of you visiting my site regularly, every day when I login to my control panel.
Internet mogul Stephen Lewis has released Speakeasy the “anti-spam bot” extension. What does it do?
Speakeasy is a new ExpressionEngine extension and plugin to help in the ever-tedious fight against spambots.
It enables your visitors to self-moderate their comments via email, integrating seamlessly with ExpressionEngine’s built-in commenting system to defeat spam bots, and relieve the burden of clicking on all those viagra links.
This sounds like another great extension from one of the best developers in the community.
One of my favorite little FieldTypes, VZ Url, has just received an update. What’s changed?
The code for this version completely rewritten to (hopefully!) eliminate some issues with ajax calls returning in the wrong order, leading to false negatives. While I was at it, I made the errors display in a pop-up box, allowing for more verbose errors without breaking the layout.
Eli, VZ Url’s author, has also released a new interesting FieldType called VZ Members Fieldtype:
VZ Members is my second fieldtype for Brandon Kelly’s FieldFrame extension. I needed a way to select any number of site members to associate with an entry. In my case I am doing this to allow entry creators to set permissions on an entry-by-entry basis. You could also use it to link to the profiles of people mentioned in an article, or inside a Matrix field to create a list of events, each with a date, title, and the personnel who will be in attendance. If you find other creative ways to use VZ Members, please share them in the comments.
You can find more about this FieldType here. Congratulations to Eli for these releases.
Opus has written a great piece on faking single-entry pages with Fieldframe and FF Matrix. How do you “fake” single-entry pages?
I’m going to assume that you’re already using FF Matrix to set up a entry galleries, and that when a user clicks on an image in the gallery, you want the full-size image to appear on a new page (as opposed to having the image appear in a pop-up window or JavaScript “lightbox”). In this situation, you’ll need to “fake” EE’s single-entry view (as opposed to an “archive” view, which displays multiple entries on the same page).
The article provides a really interesting and clever way to use EE with FF Matrix.
Solspace has said goodbye to PHP 3 & 4. This can only be seen as a good move as PHP 4 is the equivalent of an ancient sumerian language on the web. PHP 5 has been out for 5 years! Here’s more:
Over the previous six months, Solspace has released new versions of its popular Add-Ons with many of these new versions requiring a minimum of PHP 4.3.2 and MySQL 4.1. This is because there are new features and abilities available in the more recent versions of PHP and MySQL that Solspace wishes to take advantage of.
The transition to PHP 5 has a similar justification, but it is also taking into account the fact that official support of PHP 4 has been over for quite a while now and nearly all of our long term clients and partners have finally made the switch to PHP 5 on their servers. We feel we can finally start updating our code without negatively impacting our clients and users.
8 characters have released a great publish button extension for ExpressionEngine. The extension makes it easier to save entries on long forms “by providing a Submit Toolbar that appears when the normal submit buttons are scrolled out of view.”
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