Chris Monnat, who previously brought us dashEE, released a new add-on today called Wufee.
Your favorite form builder now integrated with your favorite content management system! Wufee leverages the Wufoo API to bring all your Wufoo data into EE and allow you to view and integrate it with your website.
Wufee connects ExpressionEngine to Wufoo, the popular form creation and mangagement system from SurveyMonkey. So, how does it interact with Wufoo?
Wufoo users will be able to access their forms, fields, entries and reports all from within the EE control panel. The module ships with a full featured control panel interface (see video above), an accessory so you can access your form data anywhere from within the control panel, a custom fieldtype for relating your Wufoo forms with channel entries, template tags for displaying forms and entries on your website and dashEE compatible widgets so you can access your forms and reports right from your EE dashboard.
The other day I came across this older thread in the EE forums about maintenance packages for clients (EE updates, etc) and how different companies and freelancers approach this problem. That, it turns out, wasn’t the most interesting part of the thread for me. Instead, it was this paragraph from Kurt Deutscher about how he documents the add-ons and configurations for client sites so it’s easy to know what’s installed.
We store a little .txt file called aaUpdateNotes.txt in every hosting account where we work with an EE site. We list all of that site’s add-ons and who last updated the site and sometimes what version of an add-on was used (not typically though). Before we run an update on a site, we open this file and keep it open during the update incase we find something that needs to be added to, or removed from, the file for the next update. With well over 100 EE installs we maintain, that little .txt file keeps us sane when doing updates.
At a glance, Kurt knows all of the add-ons installed and perhaps any potential issues that may arise during an upgrade. It also makes it easy for people new to the site to get up to speed on the configuration. Nice idea.
Erik Reagan chimed in with a link to an add-on they’re working on called Dev Docs that allows you to have documentation within the site Control Panel. From the add-on description:
Dev Docs was born from a desire to have project-specific, developer-based documentation available within a site’s Control Panel.
At Focus Lab we have a file in each project’s repository root that is meant only for developers. This file is in Textile formatting and is meant to be the primary source of information to get “up to speed” on the project.
Has anyone been able to get EE 2.2+ working with MarsEdit? I have seen some support threads on the MarsEdit site referring to an “Invalid Access” error (which is what I’m getting) but point back to a problem with EE.
While I’m at it, how many of you even use third party tools for posting content to EE? Take the survey below and let’s find out. I’ll share the results after a few days.
Shine Slugger(for EE2) by Shine Marketing Shows or hides its content, depending on whether a specified string is found in the current URL. Ideal for use on development versions of sites (e.g. dev.website.com), or on specific pages (e.g. “contact/thanks”).
Login backup(for EE2) by Rein de Vries This extension will create a backup of the database on login.
Mailinglist Importer(for EE2) by Rein de Vries This module will extends the functionality for the mailinglist module. Sometimes you have a mailinglist that you want to completely replace with a new list. With this module it is possible, because you can replace a whole mailinglist for a new one.
In his announcement blog post, Thomas explained his idea behind the magazine and what his plans are. He’s also looking for help writing articles to put in the magazine.
The first issue is available now as a free download and it contains content from the Nordic EE Users website to get started. Thomas hopes the community will submit articles for future issues.
Sounds like a great intiative and good luck, Thomas!
For the last few days I’ve kept returning to the Corporate Culture statement at Ogilvy & Mather (yes, that Ogilvy). There is, of course, a lot of common sense information in there for businesses of any size. But there’s also some in there that applies to how we should handle ourselves, treat others and generally act in a community.
My favorite section is “What We Admire in People.” Here are the first two paragraphs:
We admire people who speak their minds. At the same time we admire people who listen more than they talk, and make a real effort to understand views that differ from their own. Candor is a virtue; arrogance is not.
We admire people who work hard, who are objective and thorough. Lazy and superficial men and women do not produce superior work.
This goes as much for an advertising agency as it does for an online community of web designers and developers. Especially the part about candor and arrogance.
I missed this when posting about the release of EE 2.4, but in the changelog for the EE 2.4 release the ExpressionEngine Reactor teams’ contributions to the release of called out (with [ExpressionEngine Reactor]) so everyone can see what the developers are working on. Excellent idea and a nice surprise.
Here’s what they worked on for EE 2.4:
[ExpressionEngine Reactor] Added the list of Channels to dropdown under Edit.
I love Instagram. It is one of the best social services around. I use it almost daily to post photos of my daily happenings and see those of my friends and colleagues. So, needless to say it was great to see an add-on available for EE that allows you to pull in photos from Instagram. Enter Pic Puller.
There are two different version of Pic Puller available: Pic Puller Lite, a free version that only pulls in the Popular photostream from Instagram and the full version of Pic Puller, which allows you to pull in user photos, liked photos and photos by tag. The paid version is $15 is available at the Devot:ee store.
Here’s a video from the developer, John Morton, on how to set up the add-on:
A special thank you again to the advertisers, who help keep the lights on here at EE Insider. Each month a handful of wonderful companies in our community share their products and services with you via advertisements on the site. The ads are always relevant to you, tasteful and the products and services trustworthy.
A huge thank you to:
Might Big Robot - They have been advertising their Profile Edit add-on and just recently released the Field Editor add-on, which makes it very easy to create custom fields in EE2.
Pixel & Tonic - The longest running advertiser on the site and well-known for the add-ons Assets, Playa, Matrix and Wygwam. They make some of the hottest add-ons for ExpressionEngine.
Solspace - By far, Solspace has the largest catalog of EE add-ons and is one of the original add-on developers. When an add-on comes from Solspace, you can trust that it’s going to work and that you’ll get the support you need. Their Rating module allows you to easily add rating functionality to your website.
Vector Media Group - Based in New York City, they are not only experts (and leaders) on ExpressionEngine, they are also experts in SEO. Matt and Lee at Vector Media Group are a valuable part of our community.
Structure - Travis and Jack have built and supported the easiest way to allow your clients to manage pages (with hierarchy) in ExpressionEngine.
EE Insider just started its fourth year online and it wouldn’t be possible without the help of our advertisers. Would you like to share your product or service with the community? Get in touch.
AJAX Mailinglist($, for EE1 & EE2) by Laisvunas This plugin allows you to display mailinglist form in ExpressionEngine’s templates and submit it without reloading of the page. This add-on has been designed to be fully compatible with AJAX Form Validator http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/ajax-form-validator.
Pic Puller for Instagram($, for EE2) by John Morton (SuperGeekery) Pic Puller is an Expression Engine Add on that integrates Instagram into any Expression Engine installation, version 2.3.1+. Pic Puller walks you through setting up an account with Instagram, creating an app, and integrating it into your own EE site.
TGL Instagram(for EE2) by Bryant Hughes (The Good Lab) This is an ExpressionEngine 2 module for interacting with the Instagram API and can be used to display instagram pictures and data in your templates. Currently, the module only retrieves information from the authenticated user’s feed and a specified user’s feed. The module has a CP backend, which directs the user through the oAuth process.
Local Calendar($, for EE2) by Biber Ltd. (Can Berkol) LocalCalendar fieldtype is datepicker plugin that currently supports a datepicker for both Gregorian and Hijri calendars. The fieldtype also supports conversions of dates of the two calendar types. The plugin provides the same conversion functionalities. Out of the box, LocalCalendar does support Arabic, English, and Turkish languages and it provides integration with our Multi Language Support Extension.
Field Editor($, for EE2) by Chris Newton (BarrettNewton.com) Breathe new life into EE’s channel fields editor! Adding & editing fields won’t be a chore anymore. Field Editor adds powerful features to EE’s standard field editor interface. Rather than laboriously clicking and editing each and every channel field or clicking and clicking and clicking to add new fields to a channel, you can now add, delete, re-order and manipulate your custom fields all in one simple interface.
Responsive CP(for EE2) by PutYourLightsOn (Ben Croker) Responsive CP is a custom ExpressionEngine theme that makes your control panel work better with mobile devices as well as look more professional. It also allows you to easily add your logo to the bottom of the control panel (good for branding client sites).
Workflow is a common topic among the EE community, and one important part of that is constantly emphasized: version control! Are you using it? Intimidated? Tune in to this week’s EE podcast where guests Ian Pitts and Adam Wiggall discuss how they use Git for version control with their EE projects, and hopefully their advice soothes your worries. Ian and Adam talk about their workflows, preferred tools and add-ons, and how version control has completely changed the way they work.
Mighty Big Robot released Field Editor this week, a new add-on that gives you one screen to edit all of the fields in a channel field group and other cool features like drag-and-drop field reordering, import and export of field groups so you can easily reuse them without having to create them all again, field cloning and more.
The add-on requires EE 2.4, so make sure you upgrade or try it on a new site. At only $9.99 I can’t think why you wouldn’t buy this to try it out.
Along with the annoucement about EE 2.4, EllisLab also mentioned that in the upcoming 2.6.0 release the MySQL and PHP version requirements will increase.
Lastly, I would like to note that our PHP and MySQL version requirements will change with the 2.6.0 ExpressionEngine release, giving you at least 3 months to prepare. Our PHP version requirement will be 5.2.4 and our MySQL requirement will be 5.0.3. Making the call now allows our developers to plan new features with optimized code while still giving our users plenty of time to make sure their hosting environment is compatible with ExpressionEngine’s future needs.
If you’re running on an older server config or your host is behind in updating PHP and MySQL, you have 3 months to get things in order. EllisLab is usually very conservative with their PHP and MySQL requirements1, so hopefully this won’t affect too many people.
The latest version of PHP at time of writing is 5.3.9 and the latest MySQL is 5.5. ↩
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