All entries filed under “EE Plugins”
Coverage of newly released EE plugins.
The very useful Markdown Extra plugin has been updated. Here are the changes:
I’ve updated the markdown plugin with “Markdown Extra 1.2.4”—the latest version—and added a fix for block quotes. Every feature I’ve testing is working including blockquotes, tables, definition lists, images and links by reference, and all the basic stuff (of course).
This plugin is not compatible with EE2 (or hasn’t been tested at least). Someone get Joe a copy of it so he can update it!
We missed this last week, but Devot:ee has a great article on updating plugins from 1.6.8 to 2.0. The article covers plug-ins as well as some entry level development instruction.
The biggest functional difference between 1.6.8 and 2.0 as far as plugins are concerned is the switch from global variables and methods to the super object. Most of your calls will still work the same, but they’ll be formatted differently and interact with ExpressionEngine in a new way. These changes first show up in the plugin constructor function, which is the first function in the plugin class.
The post is lengthy, well-written and full of great beginner information.
Erik Reagan has written an article entitled “Building Your First ExpressionEngine Plugin”. The article, which goes into great depths and is very well written, discusses the following:
For this tutorial we are going to create a simple plugin that scans through the data passed to it and wraps certain strings with HTML tags. This is a very simple application of an EE plugin and should show you how easy it is to get started with plugin development. Our plugin will be used to search for and replace acronyms that we use as developers. For the sake of the example we will stick to three: HTML, CSS, and RSS. Let’s call the plugin “Auto Acronym.”
There have been very few articles about developing addons, so it’s great to see one done so well. Hopefully, we’ll see more and more of these types of articles as ExpressionEngine 2.0’s release date comes closer and closer. If you are writing or have written a great one let us know.
Nicolas Bottari has released a plugin for Google Analytics. The plugin is very simple, but the end result is cleaner code. Why did Nicolas create it?
Basically I was tired of hunting down for that short but complicated GA code on the web every time I needed to install the tracking script. Was also tired of always having to remember the Web property ID, and having to paste it at the right place in the GA code.
Its implementation is very simple and examples are available on the aforementioned forum page.
Marek Foss has written about automatically tweeting posts. He wrote a plugin to make it much easier.
What my AutoTweet basically does is, when called, checks your timeline for the given message and if it doesn’t exist – it tweets it. AutoTweet is also immune to URL changes, as they are stripped while performing a regular expression match against the timeline – this way there are no problems if the URL somehow gets shortened differently along the way.
Tweet away!
Mark Croxton has released First Child Redirect a plugin for Structure. What does it do?
It allows you to redirect to the first child page of any parent entry in a Structure tree.
I’ve always felt that an extension has reached new levels of greatness when people start developing for the extension.
ExpressionEngine guru Jack McDade has posted an excellent URI Prettify plugin. He “wrote a plugin to take any string, such as {segment_3}, and strip out the “_” or “-” delimiters and set words to title case.” This is an extremely useful plugin which solves problems I’ve encountered numerous times in development. Jack explains:
I whipped up this little plugin because I kept getting pinned into a corner when using Categories. For example, if an entry is part of more than 1 category, Blue and Red as subgroups of a Colors parent group for instance, and you’d like to list all entries in the Red subcategory… well good luck.
Thanks to Mr. McDade for making this.
Development on the web is predicted to shift quickly to the mobile space. While this transition has already begun, ExpressionEngine currently doesn’t have a built-in solution. Enter the MX Mobile Detect plugin.
MX Mobile Detect is a small and simple plugin (to) detect (if the) template was request(ed) by Mobile Device or not…
This looks like an excellent short-term solution to what will be a huge growth area in the upcoming years.
It’s Thursday and time to see what delicious morsels of add-on goodness Ryan Masuga has put in the oven at Devot:ee.
Thanks again to Mr. Masuga for his help with this list.
The MX Zip plugin was released today:
MX Zip add you capability to add files into into zip archive direct from ExpressionEngine
This could have some great combinations with FieldFrame and nGen File Field for creating custom zipped media packages on the fly. While untested here at the labs, let us know if you use it and what you think.
The ExpressionEngine forums are a very popular destination for all sorts of problems and issues. Over time, however, things get lost in the mix. Extensions, plugins, helpful tips: Not all are available easily in search results. This, and many other great reasons, are why we bring you: In the Forums
Forum user chronistin was struggling, like many do, with SAEF.
For a new project which makes excessive use of custom fields, I need the ability to
1.) Add and edit content from the frontend
2.) Customize the frontend forms (i.e. using the standard custom fields tag won’t work)
There was one major problem: she couldn’t “figure out how to get the values for the entry fields that have been defined as dropdown.” As with many of the downtrodden, sad and frustrated people that find their way to the EE forums, someone stepped in to help her. The result is the excellent Pops plugin.
To see usage examples and sample code, view wecreateyou’s excellent follow-up post.
The Erskine crew has been publishing some great how-tos and releasing some helpful add-ons of late. Their latest offering to the EE community is the Text Truncating Plugin:
A while ago I posted, on my personal site, a plugin that truncated text in ExpressionEngine without breaking words - it removed html, wrapped it in a specified tag and added some optional link text on the end. It has been revamped and released here under the “Erskine” banner.
There are some great features, like the ability to wrap the truncated text in a markup wrapper, class that wrapper and displaying a “read more” link.
The plugin is PHP 5 only, so be sure to check your PHP version before installing and attempting to use it.
Read Glen’s entire write-up: Erskine Text Truncating Plugin
John Donovan of (the newly redesigned) 5pieces posted an update (version 4.5) to his FLV Media Player plugin. If you’re not familiar with the plugin, here’s how John describes it:
This plugin manages the JW FLV MEDIA PLAYER 4+ and makes it easy for you to put music, videos or flash movies onto your ExpressionEngine posts and pages.
The FLV Player Plugin supports streaming video format ( .flv or .swf), sound files as MP3 and JPG, GIF or PNG grafic files.
The plugin page has three different usage examples (with sample code): single entry, YouTube and playlist. It’s a free plugin and available for download from the 5pieces website.
“bo-oz” on the EE forums posted a new plugin called CP Access, that allows you to determine whether a user has CP access with a simple tag pair.
{exp:cp_access}Only Visible to Members with CP Access{/exp:cp_access}
There are other ways to do this (that don’t require a plugin), but this is a handy, PHP-free way of checking for control panel access.
CP Access is free and available for download in the EE forums. I downloaded and tested the plugin in my EE sandbox running 1.6.7 and it worked as expected.
What do you get when you combine a Flickr EE plugin and a few jQuery plugins? A simple way to create a Flickr carousel on your ExpressionEngine website.
Darren Hoyt wrote up the quick tutorial (would’ve made a great EE Insider Tip!) on his blog. He came up this combination because:
Lately a few Expression Engine clients have needed to display their photostream dynamically in a way that’s compact and eye-catching, so the carousel format came to mind.
If you’d like to see what it looks like, Darren has posted a demo of the EE Flickr carousel.
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