All entries filed under “ExpressionEngine Features”
The video from EllisLab featuring the new EE rich text editor is making the rounds and people are starting to chime in on what it means and how they see this playing out vis á vis third party add-ons.
I don’t think it does according to what we see in the video but I’m not sure if that’s planned or not.
What’s your reaction to this? Tweet EE Insider or hashtag your thoughts with #eecms and we’ll find it.
Last night in an email announcement, EllisLab pulled back the curtain on their new rich text editor. In a short preview video they give a look at some of the editor’s capabilities.
ExpressionEngine 2.5 Preview, the Rich Text Editor from EllisLab, Inc. on Vimeo.
Until I actually use this thing I can’t really comment much on it. Demos of software are different than actually using them. That being said it does look like this editor will be a nice default for ExpressionEngine and certainly has been a missing piece for a long time. Does it replace other third party editors like Wygwam? I don’t think so. If only for the lack of “Paste from Word.”
My full comment and review will be reserved for whenever it is I can use the editor myself. Until then, be sure to watch the video and leave your comment here about what you think (EllisLab closed comments on the video page).
As EllisLab announced late yesterday (and we reported this morning), a beta release of EE 2.1.4 is out for those already owning an EE 2 license. I downloaded, installed and quickly ran through the File Manager to capture and try out the changes. In his blog post Greg Aker said that they have stripped down the File Manager and built it back up but that they are “in no way done with the ‘building back up’ process and wanted to make that clear by designating this release as a ‘beta’ release.” Fair enough. There are definitely still some rough edges here, as expected with a beta release. The File Manager is simpler and feels much more like a throwback to the simple look of the EE1 File Manager.
I snapped some screenshots as I was checking out the new beta. The first two screenshots of the File Manager itself, the remaining are of the overlay when you’re uploading or selecting a file from the Publish form. The last image is the old upload overlay vs. the new.
Has anyone else tried the beta? What are your thoughts on this first pass at improving the File Manager?
Last week Rob Morris of Digitalmash put together a nice overview article, ExpressionEngine: Quick & dirty, which documented his experience as a new ExpressionEngine user.
Not surprisingly, Rob was confused by the “weblog” terminology that will be banished to the wasteland when EE 2.0 arrives:
In ExpressionEngine (pre 2.0) these groupings of information are called ‘weblogs’. Now this is a major source of confusion starting out, so if it helps you, think of them as ‘sections’ or ‘channels’. A weblog isn’t the whole blog in EE, it’s just a grouping of information. Of course, there are other things on my site that don’t fit into these 4 ‘weblogs’, but they’re ‘one off’ items like a contact form, for example, so we’ll leave them out for the moment.
Rob continues describing how he built the site, all the while having to fumble around with the terminology. This is exactly why I teach people to first change the term “weblog” to “section.” It makes much more sense to think of the content that way (and a lot to talk about it), especially since a lot of people use EE to build non-weblog websites.
It was nice to see Rob quickly pick up on the usefulness of embedded variables and all the things you can accomplish when you start passing them from template to template. Additionally, the recommendation of useful plugins is a great starting point for EE users looking to solve some very common problems.
One suggestion: to Rob’s list of Misc Handy Resources, I’d also add this site and my ExpressionEngine training videos.
Brad Dillon recently moved his very nicely designed personal site from WordPress to ExpressionEngine. He wrote up a blog post about it, ExpressionEngine, My New Hotness:
Expression Engine doesn’t jump through “hoops”. It just does what you want it to do, and it does it like you’d expect it to. It accomplishes this by way of a ridiculously intuitive yet powerful templating language. Yes, it has it’s own language, but it’s going to be ok, I promise. The EE language is made specifically for templating, unlike PHP which is much broader and more generalized. After a couple of hours working with it, EE’s syntax starts to feel like an extension of HTML. If you’re a front-end developer, you’ll feel right at home in no time.
Brad also offers up a few comparisons between WordPress code and ExpressionEngine. Be sure to read through his whole write-up.
Those of us that have built high traffic websites on ExpressionEngine know that you can’t just build the site, put it up on a server and hope it doesn’t buckle under the crush of visitors. All of us, I assume, implement some kind of caching in EE along with lean templates, as a way to keep the site nimble and quick. Well, we now have another tool at our disposal.
In the latest EE build, Ellis Lab has included a new feature: Tracking Preferences. There are four preferences for disabling some of the tracking that EE does on every page load: Online User Tracking, Template Hit Tracking, Weblog Entry View tracking and Referrer Tracking.
Derek Jones from Ellis Lab explains why these new preferences are so important:
MySQL’s default storage engine (MyISAM) is designed for efficiency with reading, which is good since ExpressionEngine is a read-heavy application in terms of database usage, not write-heavy. When writes are made to tables with the MyISAM storage engine, it must establish a lock on the entire table for the write to occur. ExpressionEngine has a few things that it tracks to provide bits of information to the site owner. How many times a template has been accessed. How many users are currently online. Where inbound links are coming from. How many times a particular entry has been viewed. On high traffic sites, or under extreme and unusual traffic events (i.e. Digg), these normally innocuous bits of tracking suddenly become a problem, as you have thousands of visitors hitting the site simultaneously, and for each one of those visitors, MySQL is locking the associated table to try to write to it. Before you know it, there’s a queue of table locks and MySQL just can’t keep up.
Unless you need these tracking features, you should disable them. You will save one query per feature disabled per page load. And while that doesn’t sound like a lot, multiply those queries times a large surge in traffic and it could mean the difference between a site that is up and one that crashes and burns. I’m pretty sure we’ve all had sites that have crashed and burned.
In my day-to-day use of EE, I’ve never used Template Hit Tracking or had a client use it, so it will be the first thing I disable on every project. I will also disable Referrer Tracking (although I’m guessing just uninstalling the module will have the same effect) since I and my clients normally use a third party website statistics system.
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