All entries filed under “EE in the Wild”
Sightings of and information on websites powered by ExpressionEngine.
Two sites recently launched on ExpressionEngine that I want to tell you about. The first is a site for locating dog walks in the UK.
It’s called Walkiees and was built by an officer in the UK Border Agency. He previously had no web development experience but learned as much as he could about EE and just went for it. He wrote about the site in the EE Forums:
A buddy of mine, who is a web designer, said that they had recently switched all their site builds to EE, and that I should look into it.
I started consuming as much tutorials, podcasts and information as I could. […] I’ve never touched EE before, and I had VERY limited knowledge of HTML/CSS, but with the great support that I received here, Solspace, gwcode, and many many more support forums, I finally managed to get the site ready for its initial launch.
The site uses Solspace User and Favorites, Navee, SEO Lite, CP Analytics Settings, Accessible Captcha and more. Read the forum post for all the details.
He also notes:
I doubt very much that I have put the site together in the most efficient way, and its somewhat simplistic at the moment, but I think I have a good base to keep working and developing on.
Well, that’s how everyone starts. My first site is an embarrassment. Hell, there are things on this site that I wince at. Welcome to ExpressioneEngine and congrats on the launch!
The second site is Gallery System, a site that sells picture hanging systems. The site was developed by Versa Studio. In a forum post they listed the following add-ons in use: Structure, Wygwam and Matrix. UltraCart powers the e-commerce part of the site.
Interestingly, this site was originally done in EE1 but completely rebuilt in EE2. From the forum post:
The site was a from-scratch rebuilding of the previous EE1 site. Since we were changing a lot of information, we found it easier to start fresh than try to adapt what we had, especially since we switched to Structure for the new site.
I missed this somehow when it was released in late March, but Viget redesigned their site and it is, of course, running ExpressionEngine. Front-end developer Trevor Davis wrote up a comprehensive article on how the site used EE to manage the blogs.
A couple of snippets from the article that I found interesting:
Well, we went from EE 1.6.2 to 2.4, and it was 100% seemless. Not once did we encounter an error. Pretty impressive if you ask me.
That makes me a bit more confident about a planned upgrade I have on my to-do list.
I can’t even count the number of EE sites I’ve built, but to me, the best way to define your channel structure is to use a whiteboard.
The best way to do anything is with a whiteboard!
They used a lot of the add-on you’d expect: Freeform, Wygwam, Low Reorder , Matrix, Playa, Template Variables, CE Image, Smartdown and more. The entire list is in the article.
Viget Design Director Tom Osborne also has an article from mid-March on the new Viget design.
A belated congratulations to the Viget team on the launch!
This one is personal to me because I worked on the project that first brought paidContent to ExpressionEngine. Today WordPress announced that paidContent re-launched on WordPress and their WordPress VIP service.
It’s definitely strange to see them move off of the ExpressionEngine platform after almost 6 years. I only worked on the initial launch and I know they had a lot of custom development work done in the years after.
So, why the move? paidContent is now part of the GigaOm network and GigaOm sites run WordPress and use the WordPress VIP hosting service. WordPress VIP is a service that host some big, big name blogs.
Over the weekend a group of designers and developers particpated in the Overnight Web Challenge, which is organized by The Nerdery. At this year’s event there were 18 different teams who all took on the task of redesigning and rebuilding a non-profit website…overnight.
One of the groups was Twin Cities EE, a “collective of local developers specializing in ExpressionEngine development.” The group included EE developer Brian Litzinger and Sarah Hicks, who wrote up a report of the event on her blog.
The Twin Cities EE group was assigned the non-profit Franconia Sculpture Park (old site).
The developers on our team gave them the moon using the Expression Engine CMS. Not only can the public book a tour online or view an interactive sculpture map, they can view BIG photos of the park. Everything at the park is BIG. There current site doesn’t give them enough credit nor come close to offering a BIG presence as so many of their beautiful sculptures do.
Read Sarah’s entire write-up to learn about the event, including photos and the finished product.
Nice work, everyone!
My post about Grist.org moving to WordPress received a lot of feedback from the community and a long response and explanation from Matt Perry of Grist (thanks, Matt, for taking the time to join the discussion). Matt wanted to clarify their continued involvement in the community:
We’ve loved being a part offended the EE community over the past few years, and plan on staying active as both EE/CI users and coders—we still have CodeIgniter apps in production. So—if our announcement sounded overly-brusque or dismissive of Ellis Labs or the community in any way, please know that it certainly wasn’t meant that way.
He noted that there were a couple of things that made them move:
- the availability (or not) of highly managed, platform-specific enterprise hosting. EE does not yet have a comparable, truly enterprise-scale hosting solution for media companies in particular (see http:vip.wordpress.com)
- Weaknesses in EE’s caching layer and scaling.
Read the thread to follow the entire discussion. I do, however, want to highlight part of a comment from Aaron Waldon:
To address the main issue about Grist.org moving to WordPress, good for them! At the end of the day, the CMS is a means to an end. If they feel the move will be advantageous, I am glad they are doing so and I genuinely hope it works out well for them.
As a community, we should not be offended when a company switches technologies. After all, it is not a personal attack on EE or its user-base. They didn’t pillage our proverbial village or threaten our livelihood. Not all companies are the same and not all end goals are the same. No big deal.
Agreed.
Environmental news website Grist.org announced on their tech blog that they recently relaunched their entire website on…WordPress.
Grist is adopting WordPress for two main reasons: WordPress has become the world’s foremost CMS, and is the locus for a whole lot of journalism innovation and experimentation. We want to be part of that community, and more able to take advantage of the latest online news technologies. Our other goal has more to do with who we are. We are small — really small — and as such want to focus our technical energies on news, design and innovation, rather than hosting, uptime and infrastructure.
ProPublica, powered by ExpressionEngine, are the innovators for online journalism and experimentation. In the past I’ve loudly praised their nerds and the awesome things they create. They create great tech for a good cause.
I’m sorry to see Grist go. They have been active participants in the community with add-ons and even sharing what they learned at conferences.
I found out about this newly launched EE site from a forum post by Brandon Richards of Brand Rich Media. He announced the new EE2 site for the Western Carolina Rescue Ministry.
For the past 30 years Western Carolina Rescue Ministries have been faithfully serving the poor, homeless and addicted in our community in Asheville, North Carolina.
Beautiful site.
In the EE Forums, Adam George announced a new website: Useful Gifts, a charity organization based in Australia.
Adam didn’t give many details but the site is built on EE2, uses Cartthrob for payment transactions and Social Login for Facebook integration.
Check out the site: Useful Gifts
Lodewijk Schutte (known to everyone as “Low”), who lives on a houseboat (known to everyone as “we’re so jealous!”), broke out his add-on development and sales business into its own website, which launched today: Go to Low.
Besides being known for his clever teaching of the ExpressionEngine Parse Order (grab the PDF), Low also makes some great add-ons like the über-powerful Low Variables and the popular Low Seg2Cat.
From his announcement blog post:
Turns out I enjoy working on add-ons more and more, while regular client work feels less satisfying than it used to. That’s why I decided to try and put more emphasis on add-on development, which inevitably meant setting up this site. From now on, if you need an EE add-on, you’ll know where to go.
If you previously bought an add-on from Low, you can create an account and get access to those purchases.
Congrats, Low and good luck!
If you were following along on Twitter, you might have heard about the 4-day long process that Ryan Masuga went through moving his EE add-on repository and storefront, Devot:ee, from EE 1.6.9 to the latest version of ExpressionEngine 2.
Because Devot-ee is such an important resource to the community, Masuga wanted to be as open and transparent as possible about the upgrade. He provided regular updates via their Twitter account and even detailed some of the problems he was running into. This long and tedious process was, unfortunately, taken by some to mean that upgrading a site from EE1 to EE2 is a messy process that takes 4 days.
I think Paulo Elias put it nicely:
I am puzzled at all of the negative “upgrade process’ tweets re the recent @devot_ee upgrade. Complex shit takes time to get right
Indeed it does.
According to Ryan, Devot:ee consisted of a lot of third party and custom add-ons. Every single one had to be updated and tested. Some of those were mission critical add-ons for e-commerce and other functionality that supported their business of giving add-on developers a place to easily sell their software. Ryan plans to eventually publish his log of what he had to do to make the upgrade happen.
I asked Ryan if he would spend a few minutes talking to EE Insider about the experience of upgrading a complex site like Devot:ee, what he learned and, most importantly: was it worth it? He obliged and below is a transcript of some of his answers during that conversation.
EE Insider: When did you start the upgrade process? There was probably a lot of planning that happened.
Ryan Masuga: We started in March and I wrote down every step because I knew that we had to do it all again in a final sweep to get any data we might have missed. Other client work got in a way, so it wasn’t like this was the only thing we were working on. We set it aside for weeks.
Was there one thing that you spent the most time working on?
RM: I spent a lot of time…on the sales reports for the developers because they need to be accurate.
The plan was to update Devot-ee over the weekend. Did you have a master plan?
RM: I ran through the 20-point checklist and it just didn’t work out that way. I thought the smart thing to do would be to make a static site first so people could still search. I set that up as a subdomain and checked out a branch that just had everything disabled, basically. You could still search the site, you could still download your stuff. You could do everything except buy stuff, really. I think that lessened the pain of our site being officially down for three or four days because people were able to, essentially, use the catalog. However, I was planning to be down maybe eight hours or something like that because I was taking my time with checklist.
When you were running the EE update wizard, were there any problems?
RM: I had zero errors going from 1.6.9 to 2, which was pretty wild. And then it was all about upgrading add-ons. Matrix, Cartthrob, Better Meta., converting Better Meta to NSM Meta, Favorites, Low Variables, Channel Ratings and then converting Solspace Ratings to Channel Ratings.
We spent a lot of time adjusting PHP in our templates and in our custom add-ons. [The extended downtime] had to do with that peripheral stuff.
Why didn’t you leave the site up and use a staging server, get everything upgraded and just flip the switch?
RM: We had to put a content freeze on the site…
Because of sales…
RM: Yeah, because of sales, rating, favorites, reviews…
And sales being the most critical.
RM: Yeah. We don’t want to recreate any of that stuff or merge data if we don’t have to. We ended up being down 4 days and we would’ve had to recapture 4 days worth of data from an EE1 database.
Was the upgrade and downtime worth it? What does it mean for Devot:ee going forward?
RM: The good work and the time [the community developers] are spending is on EE2 stuff. There are so many cool things out that we couldn’t use. I love Zenbu. I like Switchboard. None of this stuff was available for EE1, so it’s making my life easier in the Control Panel. The Control Panel seems nice and quick.
I know that EllisLab is putting a lot of dev time into EE2 and it’s just going to get better. We need to be there [on EE2] so we can take advantage of all of the stuff that EE2 provides.
And at some point if you wait too long the two versions of EE and any add-ons would be further apart and the upgrade would be even more difficult.
RM: Absolutely. We would be like a boat lost in the night with no paddles. Where do we go from here? We would be so far down a hole that we are basically going to have to rebuild the site rather than upgrade. Now we’re at a point that we’re at the latest of everything.
Now, it’s causing a couple of problems because we had some template syntax that needed to change but on the whole, it’s going to be better for everyone because we can make full use of SafeCracker. That’s a big part of the site because people can submit and edit their add-ons.
So now you can develop new features for the site without worrying that one day you’ll have to go back and redo everything for a big upgrade.
RM: Yep, we would try to keep new stuff to a minimum because we would have to do it in two places. We got a huge feature request list and stuff that we want to do. We want to vastly improve the image galleries on an add-on page. There are way too many clicks and it’s just lame. It takes the height of the highest image, adds a bunch of whitespace…it’s just kinda weird. We get a lot of emails about it. “Hey, we just want a previous and next button so I don’t have to close each one.” We can spend time on that stuff now without having to do it twice.
Thanks to Ryan for chatting with us. He’s inspired me to work on upgrading EE Insider to EE2.
Paramore|Redd had a chance to do revisit their original work with the Frist Center and redesign the site they worked on previously.
This time around we wanted to give visitors a better sense of all the activity that occurs at the Center. They have exhibitions, music, galas, events, theatre, classes and much more. Read on to understand how we took a fresh look at presenting this content to allow the site’s visitors to grasp all that The Frist offers.
In their blog post on the topic, you read through the thinking in their design process. Yesterday, however, their senior developer Jesse Bunch posted a follow-up to include more information on how they used ExpressionEngine to help them see through those original design goals and develop the Frist Center website.
Jesse used a custom callout module to “control the ordering of the call-outs, embed media directly in the call-out, and support some slightly complex filtering/pagination” and used “a cocktail of strategic Channels and Pixel and Tonic’s Playa module” to create flexible navigation.
He included a lot of detail (don’t even think about skipping over item 4) and some screenshots of the control panel, so be sure to read the entire write-up.
A redesign of The Morning News launched yesterday and, yes, it is running ExpressionEngine (handy work by Matt Weinberg and his Vector Media Group).
Matt Weinberg filled EE Insider in on some more details. They ended up migrating thousands of entries (over 11,000 URLs) and really focused on making the site easy to use from an editorial perspective:
Editorially we’re giving them lots of control to be able to create the
gorgeous article pages that Jason Santa Maria designed, such as this:
http://www.themorningnews.org/article/the-man-behind-the-window
Note the customized blue “highlight” color, chosen separately on each
feature; the divider stars that they don’t need to manually write HTML
for; the different styles and completely arbitrary/controlled by them
placement of pullquotes, without them having to deal with writing the
HTML.
Another great content site makes the move. Welcome, The Morning News.
A new Scottish government site about offshore wind opportunities launched and it’s powered by ExpressionEngine.
User “Robstero” posted in the EE forums and had this to say:
It’s been a great project and Expression Engine has been a really good fit for what we needed to do. We’ve got a ton of features built on the backend that minimise content editing chores for our client. At the same time the site’s super-configurable and extensible.
View the site: Offshore Wind Scotland
The latest issue of Net Magazine (May 2011), which just hit the newsstands and home delivery in the UK features a 4-page how-to article, authored by yours truly, on building a simple portfolio website with ExpressionEngine.
The article is definitely aimed at people newer to EE, who are looking for a real-world application of this ExpressionEngine CMS they’ve heard so much about. It includes all of the template code and assets you need to build the simple site on your own. But there’s certainly something there for everyone, even if you wanted to reaffirm how you approach building EE sites.
If you want to buy a digital version of the magazine (available only through Zinio), you can do that easily for $7.99 (they even have an iPad app, see below) The print version of the magazine will be available in the US in April.
EE Insider contributor Noah Stokes along with Phil Coffman and Trent Walton put together a new “extras” site for web designers: Method & Craft. The site features articles, interviews, videos and notes.
We like to think of Method and Craft as the DVD extras of design: the stories behind the work, who made it, how they did it, and the techniques people have developed throughout their professional career. We all use the same tools, but we use them differently. We strive to educate you on more efficient, creative, and engaging ways to create your design. This site will not only be valuable to creative veterans, but also educational to those new to the design field. It’s like looking over the shoulder of your favorite designer.
The site, which is powered by ExpressionEngine, launched with interviews with Naz Hamid andJesse Bennet Chamberlin, an article by Dan Mall and a lot more.
Check it out: Method & Craft
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