Today on the EE blog Pascal Kriete posted that the first party Twitter Timeline plugin now supports OAuth. This is great news because tomorrow numerous EE sites around the web using basic authentication Twitter EE add-ons are going break.
If you don’t but need to fix a site that uses another add-on, consider pulling in the RSS feed of the user’s Twitter stream and displaying using the Magpie plugin. It’s not the same and it’s not perfect, but it’s a decent stop gap measure. In fact, with a little PHP you can make it do stuff like link URLs, remove the username the prefixes every tweet and more.
:nth allows you to dynamically generate a class name at specified intervals on Expression Engine elements. Perhaps you have a list that is being dynamically populated from an EE weblog and you’d like to create a grid layout, but the last column items need to behave differently than the rest of the items. Simply wrap the whole mess in a pair of nth tags and set the class and interval parameters to your desired class name and interval.
I’ve always used some PHP in the template for situations like that (and these situations happen frequently) but this seems like a nice way for non-PHP coders to achieve the same functionality in a straight-forward way or even for PHP coders who want to limit the amount of PHP they have to write in their templates.
Wouter Vervloet posted a new plugin to the forums this week for ExpressionEngine 2: Timetravel. It “makes navigating through entries by day, month or year a breeze. It behaves similar to the default pagination, except that it uses dates in the URL instead of page numbers.”
Timetravel lets you flip through site content by date and appends the month, day and year to the URL. Wouter has a nice write-up on the forums with some example code or you can jump right to GitHub and download the plugin for yourself.
Video Player by Dukt allows you to easily get the embed code for any one of many hosted video services. All you need to do is pass the plugin the URL to the video and it will do the rest.
The plugin supports Youtube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Veoh, MySpace, Metacafe and Revver. It is available for both EE 1.6 and EE 2 and is currently a free download.
And while I have you here, let me share with you my favorite YouTube video:
Max Lazar of WiseUp Studio has released another add-on. This time it’s MX QR Code, which allows you to easily create QR codes right in your EE templates. What is a QR code?
A QR Code is a matrix code (or two-dimensional bar code) created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. The “QR” is derived from “Quick Response”, as the creator intended the code to allow its contents to be decoded at high speed.
QR Codes are common in Japan, where they are currently the most popular type of two dimensional codes. Moreover, most current Japanese mobile phones can read this code with their camera.
MX QR code is free and available for both EE 1.6 and EE 2.
In last week’s EE Podcast, I wondered aloud whether someone had created a Markdown add-on for ExpressionEngine. It turns out someone had and, well, it was a long time ago (it was none other than my esteemed colleague at Happy Cog, Mark Huot).
SmartDown is more than a Markdown plugin. It is “a single-plugin replacement for the Markypants, Markdown, and SmartyPants plugins.” Three birds, one stone.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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