Fans of Solspace’s Super Search module will be happy to know that the module now supports ExpressionEngine 2. This is great news for me because I have a project coming up where Super Search is needed.
A bit about Super Search:
The architecture of the module borrows from Google’s model of constructing search queries. Anything that you might want to query for, keywords, weblogs, categories, statuses, custom fields, date ranges, custom field numeric ranges, etc. can be loaded into a single URI segment by using the Super Search syntax
In order to run Super Search on EE 2 you also have to install the Solspace Bridge Expansion (which is included with the module).
The people that brought you Cartthrob have another trick up their sleeve and they need your help. Barrett Newton built a new EE 2.1 add-on called SafeCracker. No, it doesn’t allow you to rob banks or find the secret treasure hidden in grandma’s attic; SafeCracker is a new way to create Stand Alone Entry Forms (SAEFs).
From Chris at Barrett Newton:
We’ve made it so that you can create an entry / edit form with the simplicity of a standard channel entry loop. In the past, people found it easier to use FreeForm to capture data than the built in SAEFs. FreeForm is great, but unlike FreeForm, all the SafeCracker data is stored as weblog entries, not as part of a module’s settings. Since that’s the case, entry notifications, statuses, and other standard EE systems work with SafeCracker, making it dead easy to build a contact form, or a sign up form, or job application form. The new custom field also makes it so that you can use 1 weblog to store lots of completely different types of data without having to pre-plan or pre-create new custom fields.
According to Chris, SafeCracker also allows non-logged-in users to submit content via SAEF, which isn’t possible with the standard EE SAEF. It also adds edit ability and outputs errors as JSON, so you can use it with AJAX.
I’m learning all of this from information from Barrett Newton. I haven’t yet tried the software but the description is definitely appealing.
Help Beta Test
Barrett Newton is in need of 10 beta testers with experience building EE sites and time to work with the add-on. They want you use to use it real world situations, not just running on a local sandbox site. You will be able to help shape the add-on; in addition to vigorous testing, they are looking for input on features, documentation and pricing.
Launched today is a new EE 2 module for remotely accessing Rackspace Cloud Files, FTP and even Amazon S3 right inside your EE 2 control panel: Remote File Browser by Christopher Imrie.
This fieldtype allows you to have a Rackspace Cloud Files, FTP and Amazon S3 file browser inside of your EE publish page. Flexible settings allow you to only show one, two or all three file browsers in a single field as well as customize your settings to have each field connect to different Cloud Files, FTP, or Amazon S3 accounts. The file browser also includes Caching to ensure your keep you Cloud Files and Amazon S3 requests to a minimum.
Christopher sent me a copy of the add-on and I plan to do a write-up about it soon. Stay tuned for that.
When the EE 2 version of Cartthrob is available, the team behind the e-commerce software will be offering no-cost upgrades for new licenses.
EE 2.1 still ships with 1.6x as an available option, so you can still buy and use CartThrob. When we complete the 2.1 compatible version, you will be able to download the new version at no extra cost.
If you’ve already purchased a Cartthrob license you’ll have the option to upgrade to the EE 2-compatible version for $49.99.
Anyone that purchased CartThrob before 7-10-2010 will be able to purchase the EE 2.1x compatible version of CartThrob for $49.99 when we release it. For now there are no upgrades available to purchase on the site. We will add an upgrade option when we release the 2.1 compatible version of CartThrob.
Cartthrob haven’t said when the new version will be released but noted that “it will launch before EE stops supporting 1.6x” and there won’t be any issues with forward compatibility with Cartthrob tags you’ve used under the EE 1.6 version.
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.
DigitalSurgesons released a new SEO module today that allows you to easily control some content metadata and hopefully improve your search engine optimization. It isn’t the first add-on available that does this but DigitalSurgeons says that this add-on “does just enough [for them] without a cumbersome implementation or code base.”
The SEO module a creates a tab (appropriately labeled “SEO”) and allows you to enter title, keywords and description for each entry. Similar to functionality we’ve seen in existing add-ons like LG Better Meta, you can set default titles, descriptions and keywords, include robots metadata and more.
The module is free and available on GitHub (Dear All Developers, not everyone finds it easy to download from GitHub. Please include a direct download link of a zip file for your add-ons. Hugs, Ryan).
If you’re not in need of a tool like Structure, which allows you to override how pages and the site structure is created in ExpressionEngine, but would still like a dead simple way of creating and managing multiple navigations for your EE-powered website, you should give NavEE from Booyant a look.
NavEE is a module available only for ExpressionEngine 2 and it “takes the typically painful task of managing navigation, and make it simple and (dare we say) enjoyable.” With NavEE you can manage multiple navigations, re-order items with drag and drop, apply classes to nav items, create breadcrumbs and use any HTML you want (NavEE uses nested unordered lists by default). There are a lot of ways to manage navigation in EE but I found NavEE enjoyable to use. It’s probably because of the playful interface and user messages but also because it is just so simple to use.
Playful welcome message in NavEE.
Nav Groups and Navs
Following along with how ExpressionEngine handles statuses and custom fields, you first create a navigation group and then individual navigation items inside of the group. Individual navigations are displayed in a tree view, so you can set hierarchy and order.
Viewing the items in a navigation.
Your existing navigations are always at easy reach at the top of the NavEE module screen.
Listing of existing navigations. Click one to edit it.
Click on a navigation group gives you a tree view of the navigation. You can easily drag and drop nav items to reorder them or click on their icons to edit them. Each item has a simple editing interface and a toggle to show advanced editing options. These options include whether the nav item is show in the navigation, CSS id and class, target and even regular expression matching. Very cool stuff.
Simple editing of NavEE navigation item.
Template Code
Displaying your NavEE navigation is just a matter of adding one EE tag.
This tag is the simple way of adding your navigation. It outputs a nested unordered list. The NavEE tag accepts several different parameters (like id shown above) and they’re all listed out in the documentation. The parameters give you all of the control you need to make the nav look exactly how you want.
Unlike Structure, NavEE doesn’t create site pages for you. You have to create all of your content and pages on your own and then create a navigation with them using NavEE. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s just the scope of the NavEE module. Some people don’t all of the extras that a module like Structure offers; they just want to create navigations and drop them in the templates.
To get started with NavEE I would suggest you watch the quick screencast Booyant put together. It’s helpful it getting that initial run-down of how NavEE works and what you can do with it.
My first reaction: this is great. A simple way to pull in external data without relying on a different add-on for each data source. Very, very cool. Some of this, of course, could be handled with other tools (like MagPie) or even with a wee bit of PHP in the template, but Phil’s module looks to be much more flexible. I’m looking forward to playing with this when it’s available. Update: this module is now available and costs $30 US.
You can see screenshots of the new Structure on their website. The price remains at $65 and the download will support both EE 2 and EE 1.6. Existing Structure license holders can download Structure for EE 2 for free for that license (new sites would require, of course, a new license).
The download comes with two directories (ee1 and ee2) along with some instructions for adding in a temporary hack pending the release of EE 2.1.
There is also a warning about upgrading your EE 1.6 site running Structure to EE 2: don’t do it yet. You should wait until the Structure guys have had more time to test the upgrade process. This shouldn’t be a problem, however, because I suspect most people are building new sites in EE 2 and not upgrading old ones.
If you have an EE 1.6 site running Structure and you would like to help Travis and Jack test the upgrade process, please get in touch with them. They want to make sure the upgrade from EE 1.6 to EE 2 is safe and smooth.
Yesterday, Solspace released a new version of their popular Tag module. The new Tag 3.0 has several changes (including a few new variables) but the most important is that they added support for Solspace Bridge, which means Tag will now run on your EE 2 websites.
This is just one more step towards all of the add-ons you need being available for EE 2. There aren’t many major ones left, so the momentum towards EE 2 replacing EE 1.6 is picking up steam.
Here’s the full changelog for Tag 3.0:
Added a simple search ability to the Manage Tags area of the Tag control panel.
Added a “cloud-like” clickable list of Tags to the UI (for EE 1.6.x) to easily add existing common Tags to an entry.
Added {count} and {total_results} variables to the Tag:Tags tag.
Added {subscribe_link} and {unsubscribe_link} variables to the Tag:Subscribed tag.
Changed wording for removing of tags from “Bad” status.
Upgraded module to use Solspace Bridge 1.0 with CodeIgniter, therefore allowing compatibility with EE 2.x.
Fixed a bug where Bad Tags were still being shown in the Tag:Tags tag.
Fixed a bug where the Tag_Name tag was ignoring the websafe_separator=”” parameter completely.
Fixed a bug where the inclusive=“yes” with multiple tags in tag=”” was sometimes treated as OR instead of AND in Tag:Entries.
ExpressionEngine used to have a database backup tool in earlier versions but it was stripped out when problems were discovered with the reliability of backing up large databases. Since then—in EE 1.6 or EE 2— there hasn’t been an easy way to back up your database from within EE. Until now, of course.
CodeIgniter guru, author and EECI speaker Thomas Myer released a new module for EE 2, Backup, that allows you to easily backup your MySQL database.
The Backup module allows ExpressionEngine site admins to easily and quickly generate a SQL backup file for their entire database. This file is automatically downloaded to their Mac or PC and can then be stored in an off-site location, such as a Dropbox folder, FTP site, or other file repository.
The Structure guys announced last week that the’ve begun private beta testing for Structure for EE 2. While the private beta is full, they did mention on Twitter that there will be a public beta “soon after.”
Here’s a screenshot they shared on Flickr:
Even if you’re not in the private beta, the good news is that Structure for EE 2 is coming soon. It is one of those key add-ons that is keeping people from making the switch.
SugarEE is a new module that allows you to easily display SugarCRM, a professional (with an open source option) customer relationship management web application, information in your EE templates. On the website it is described thusly:
The SugarEE module keeps CRM-related information where it belongs, in SugarCRM, and allows you to easily display exactly the information you want on your website.
The features list show some example uses of SugarEE, including pulling case records based on status, support of standard EE conditional statements and all of the supported parameters.
If you use SugarCRM and ExpressionEngine, you might want to check it out.
I’ve spent the last 8 months developing modules (and templates) for EE 2.0. Pretty early I got annoyed by some of the redundant manual tasks I had to do over and over again .. so I started creating some addons to help me out. Now I’ve bundled (some of that) functionality in this thing I’ve named DevKit for EE 2.0
This looks like a great tool to get started on an EE 2 module and save yourself from the mundane task of re-writing the same bits of code over and over. EllisLab has available an Accessory Generator that does something similar: gives you a shell of an accessory to get started. Maybe they should adopt Bjørn’s DevKit and put it on the site, too?
DevKit 2.0 is a free download on GitHub and available now. Read Bjørn’s write-up for all the details: Introducing DevKit for EE 2.0
Mark Reeves posted a beta version of a new module he’s working on that allows you to easily A/B test variations of your templates.
A/B Testing is a method of presenting variations in content or design around calls to action and tracking which perform better. Variations could be subtle: “Click Here!” vs. “Click This Link”, or “Learn More” vs. “Buy Now!” Variations can include drastically different color schemes, design elements or imagery.
A/B Test makes it easy to create test cases in ExpressionEngine simply by wrapping your variations in a few tags. As those variations are displayed, and as users interact with links or forms within, activity is automatically tracked and results displayed in your ExpressionEngine Control Panel.
Mark is soliciting feedback from people who download and try out this new module. It is available only for EE 2 and currently a free download.
Email
Comments
Post to Twitter
Post to Delicious
