All entries filed under “Life as a Web Professional”
I’m sure a lot of us use quick launchers on our computers. Apps like Launchbar, Quicksilver, Alfred or Launchy. Mac or Windows, you can get set up with one of these quickly and for little to no cost. Now, thanks to the fine chaps at devot:ee you can also search for ExpressionEngine add-ons right from your computer.
This won’t work with the standard EE search because it uses POST and doesn’t accept search parameters in the URL. It looks to me like devot:ee is using Super Search from Solspace to power this. Well done, guys.
Read the tutorial: Search devot:ee From Your Desktop
Long-time EE development shop Solspace is looking to expand their team with a new EE developer contract position:
We seek a skilled ExpressionEngine add-on / CI / LAMP stack developer to help with both client jobs and our extensive add-on library. You will be employed on an hourly remote contractor basis with flexible hours, but we expect you to be generally available during regular business hours. Our need is immediate.
Does it sound like something for you? Read the details and get in touch.
Good things are worth waiting for. And that’s certainly true with the newest installation of Stephen Lewis’ series of articles on building an add-on for ExpressionEngine 2.
This time he covers designing the user interface and walks you through the process of decisions and ends with a working wireframe/prototype.
I don’t want to waste your time reading what I have to say about it, so please click over to Stephen’s site: ExpressionEngine 2 Add-on Development
I’ll admit that when I first came across this blog post by Jason Morehead on EE pricing that I rolled my eyes and quietly mumbled “Oh here we go again.” But then I realized who wrote it and then actually read it and, well, it was a nice change of pace in the conversation dominated by pricing complainers.
Jason talks through the common complaint that EE + add-ons is too expensive and WordPress is cheaper. We’ve all heard it a million times before and, honestly, I just ignore the topic at this point. I don’t give it publicity here on EE Insider and I don’t spend any time arguing with anyone. Why? Because if someone is approaching EE solely based on cost, they’re already missing the point of why EE is such a great deal.
In Episode 24 of the EE Podcast, we talked a bit about this. The topic was never supposed to be whether EE was too expensive (I say this because I noticed on Twitter that some people didn’t listen to the whole show before shooting off comments), but we did talk about it. One thing I mentioned is that I’ve found ExpressionEngine’s low price (compared to a lot of solutions that some of us regularly bid against) is the real problem. Some clients see that as a liability after years of paying thousands of dollars per year for some CMS that would make your eyes bleed.
In the comments of Jason’s post, I think Brandon Kelly summed it up nicely:
Pricing complaints are usually a sign that the pricing is spot on. If EE (and add-ons) were actually *too* expensive, people would stop complaining about it and just move on.
And Greg Ferrell wrote:
I think that’s the trouble that a lot of people have a hard time seeing. If you NEED those $430 worth of addons to get a website done, that’s a large website and needs to be upcharged accordingly. If you are charging $600 for a website that requires all of that, you might need to rethink your pricing.
If the cost of getting up and running in EE with basic add-ons is only $500, then I think that’s a great deal. If your site budget is less, then EE probably isn’t the solution for you.
A quick note to third party EE developers. There is a small change to EE 2.1 and it may break your add-ons.
I wanted to make a quick broadcast to third party developers about a potential issue in the upcoming ExpressionEngine 2.1 release with your add-ons, depending on how you were building file paths with CodeIgniter. If affected, your add-ons will break in ExpressionEngine 2.1, so it is very important for users of your add-ons to have updated code prior to its launch. If you have been building your file paths with PATH_THIRD or APPPATH*, you should not be affected.
Read Derek Jones’ entire blog post to get all of the details: Important 2.1 info for third party devs: Building file paths to your add-ons
Scott Robbin from Weightshift posted a spot-on article about how front-end developers can improve the performance of the websites they build. He has three basic concepts you should follow (fewer file requests, download files concurrently and keep cache as long as you can) and shows examples for each one. His write-up came out of his talk at WordCamp Chicago but the techniques apply to any CMS.
Though, the talk itself was WordPress-specific, the underlying concepts are applicable to any client site, whether it be coded in WordPress, Expression Engine, MovableType or none-of-the-above. At Weightshift, we have made performance tweaking a standard part of our development cycle on all projects. I’d like to take a moment to share our process, and some of the tools that we use.
It’s not just up to backend developers and server admins to make sites run faster. The performance concerns should be addressed throughout the entire project—from IA to design to development.
Read the whole article: Making Client Sites Faster
The Boston EE meetup group, BostonEErs, is having a EE Summer Hackfest on July 14th.
Bring your laptop, your EE project, your bizarre bugs, and your burning questions to this one-night hackfest & work session. Newbies welcome!
Take advantage of the summer lull to get ahead on that side project, or clear up those niggling EE-related questions.
We’ll provide the outlets, table space, a projector screen, pizza, beer, and geeky conversation.
Sounds like a live version of the EE Help Chat except they’ll have pizza and beer. Mmmm. If you live in Boston please try to go!
Recently, Noah Stokes discovered that his hosting account on Dreamhost had been hacked. It’s a good story of why you should always keep your software up-to-date as well as how to triage and treat this common type of hacking (they didn’t delete or destroy his site. The hack was only noticeable to the googlebot).
On June 23, my server on Dreamhost was hacked and 5 websites that I host were compromised with Pharmaceutical spam. Below is an overly detailed account of how I discovered the intruision, what I did to find the offensive code on the server, and how I gained a little bit of respect for the hacker who paid attention to the details. I think I’d like to hire this guy.
Noah used a solid debugging methods and a handy grep command to track down the affected files and disinfect his sites. Well done, sir.
Read the entire story (it’s a great read and very informative): My Server Was Hacked
At EECI earlier this month, I ran into Ryan Battles of Jovia Web Studio. Ryan, along with Andy Johnson of Shaping the Page, designed and developed the latest website for the burgeoning EE community: Director-ee.
When I first saw Director-ee I was struck by the gorgeous design but left wondering where it fits in and the idea behind it. So, during my conversation with Ryan at EECI, I told him that and invited him and Andy to do an interview here at EE Insider.
Interview with Ryan Battles and Andy Johnson
Q. Let’s start with the basics. What is Director-ee?
Andy: It’s an easy way for ExpressionEngine developers and designers to find and get to know each other better. We’d look for other EE users on Twitter and in the forums, and thought that it would be nice if there was a central location for the community to gather.
Ryan: With sites like Devot:ee, Show-ee, Train-ee, and EE Insider already providing various third-party services to the community, we noticed that nobody was focusing on individual profiles. We wanted to create something that would have that focus and mesh well with these other sites.
The site is gorgeous. Who’s responsible for the design and development?
Ryan: Andy is the mastermind behind the design, and I was spearheading the development. We had been brainstorming this project for a while and one Monday he fired up Photoshop and showed me what he had been working on over the weekend. When I saw the elegance of his design, a fire was immediately lit. We gave ourselves deadlines and launched the site less than a month later, just in time for EECI2010 in San Francisco.
Andy: I just reworked a Geocities template that I use for all my clients.
From what I can tell, almost 300 EE professionals added themselves to Director-ee. Has the reception surprised you?
Andy: Yes, we have been surprised. We didn’t really know what to expect, but we just knew that it would be fun to do, regardless of the response. But we’re happy so many people have been enjoying the site!
Ryan: I was excited when we had three members, and had no clue that it would grow this big so fast. We have found that the number of members raise some scalability issues. For example, our new Google maps feature has to place pins on the map for everyone registered on the site. As soon as we hit 22 members we had to completely rewrite that programming because Google was limiting us to a certain number of API calls at once. It certainly has been a learning experience as we go along.
Why should someone sign up with Director-ee?
Andy: If you want to make it easier for other EE professionals to find you, it’s a good way to go. It also gives you a place to promote your shameless plugs to the rest of the community.
Ryan: We were just looking for a service that would benefit the community, and posting a member profile provides links back to your own site, an opportunity to tell the world about yourself, and just a tool to find out who else lives near you, has the same interests, etc.
Are you aiming to make Director-ee a third party version of the official ExpressionEngine Pro Network?
Andy: Our intent isn’t to replace the Pro Network. Director-ee is more about connecting people WITHIN the community, rather than connecting companies with clients. We might have some of those features in the future, but our first priority is helping individuals within the EE community connect with one another.
Ryan: While we were inspired by some of the features that we wanted to see in the Pro Network, like Andy said, we realized that our target audience was going to be individuals within the community, not companies, and not clients. This makes us fundamentally different from the Pro Network.
Do you have any plans to commercialize the site with premium services?
Andy: We’re not sure. At this point we’d like to keep as many services as possible free for our members.
Ryan: From the beginning our goal has always been to simply make something awesome, that people will love. If we can successfully do that, then we can worry about finding a way to monetize it. We truly have no official plans to charge for anything on the site, and if we ever do, it will be in the spirit of providing a quality service to the ExpressionEngine community.
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Thank you to Ryan and Andy for taking the time to answer the questions and share their vision, inspiration and thoughts on Director-ee. If you haven’t signed up yet, it’s free. So, what are you waiting for?
On their blog Signal vs Noise, 37Signals featured WooThemes as part of the “Bootstrapped, Profitable and Proud” series, “which profiles companies that have $1MM+ in revenues, didn’t take VC, and are profitable.”
Adii from WooThemes was the subject of the write-up (you may have seen him speak at EECI in San Francisco; he is also an advertiser on this site) and talked about the history of WooThemes and how they’ve grown slowly from a side gig while doing freelance work to a profitable business with several employees.
The article is worth a read and we should be proud to have another successful start-up company in the EE community.
Entire article: Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud: WooThemes
If you’re looking for classroom-style training to get up-to-speed on ExpressionEngine, then you might be interested in another EE training event by Mike Boyink and Train-ee:
Train-ee is again hosting the world’s only public ExpressionEngine classroom training back where it all started in Holland, Michigan. Enjoy 4 days of hometown hospitality, great scenery and tasty food while learning about EE elbow to elbow with other like-minded folks.
Days will be spent in an informal yet informative learning environment, and evenings we’ll get out on the town and see the sights.
Mike taught a condensed version of his class during an EECI 2010 master class. The full class runs four days from 9 AM to 5 PM and cost $1495 (which includes breakfast and lunch each day). In my experience, these intensive, immersive learning environments are a great way to quickly get up and running with a new skill.
Interested? Learn more about the Train-ee class this July in Holland, Michigan.
A lot of ExpressionEngine users also use CampaignMonitor to manage and send their email lists (using the wonderful Campaigner add-on from Experience Internet), so I want to highlight a new book from the folks at CampaignMonitor on HTML email.
Create Stunning HTML Email That Just Works is available in both print and ebook format (PDF, EPUB and MOBI) and is for web designers looking to design and create successful email templates.
We’ve put this book together for web designers to help them plan, design and build HTML emails that are attractive and render reliably. If you’ve been using Campaign Monitor or reading the blog for a while a lot of the content will be familiar, but there is all new content and a completely reworked structure to bring all that information together.
The book is published by SitePoint and is $29.95 for either the digital or print version or you can get both for $10 more. If you want to try before you buy, you can download two chapters of the book for free.
EE Insider has not yet read the book beyond the two free chapters. From a read through of the Table of Contents, this looks like a great primer for designers on email template design and marketing.
This is a rare editorial piece on the recent dust-up over the release of “EE Matrix” which is a fork of the Creative Commons licensed FF Matrix by Brandon Kelly of Pixel and Tonic.
These are my views and I encourage you to dispute them.
FF History
Not everyone has been in the loop on this issue, so a recap is in order. First, back when Brandon was developing add-ons as a hobby he released several add-ons for free. One of these was the very popular FieldFrame extension, which allows you to easily create and install custom fieldtypes for ExpressionEngine. FieldFrame was released with a Creative Commons license. Along with this, Brandon began bundling FF Matrix, which is a fieldtype that allows you to create a, well, matrix of data.
Fast forward to 2010 and Brandon is in the early days of running his own business; he is earning all of his income only from the EE add-ons he builds.
At the end of February Brandon re-launched as Pixel and Tonic. One part of this launch was the “parting of ways” of FieldFrame and FF Matrix. Brandon noted the reason for this was because FF Matrix took up a lot of his time for support and, well, you can’t really earn a living spending your time supporting something that is free. Economics, math and all that.
Creative Commons to the Rescue
Before it became a commercial fieldtype, FF Matrix was still under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
This license allows one to share the code (“to copy, distribute and transmit…”) or to adapt it (“remix”). You are required to give attribution as specified by the original licensor (Brandon Kelly) and if you share your version of the work, you have to use a “similar or compatible license.”
This license is clearly stated at the top of the FF Matrix fieldtype file (ft.ff_matrix.php), so the intent is obviously there.
EE Matrix
So today, EE Matrix popped up. It is a re-release of the free version of FF Matrix (Brandon pulled public access to FF Matrix when he launched his new company). Alex Gordon is the person behind the re-release or “fork” of FF Matrix and stated in an announcement post on his blog his motivation:
Now the new version of FF Matrix is commercial, which is really sad.
So I’ve decided to improve the situation. The distribution of FF Matrix with Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 licenses up to the version 1.3.5 ensures the right of distributing this version respecting license rules. You can always download the original version 1.3.5 from here. Besides, I’ve decided to create the fork with the same license and support and develop it for free.
So, Alex is offering FF Matrix as a free download to anyone who wants it. He made no indication that he planned to charge for it, which would be a violation of the Creative Commons license.
From my read of the Creative Commons license and what Alex did, it seems he is legally on solid ground (as legal as you can be using Creative Commons. I couldn’t find an actual test of the license in a US court).
But is Alex Gordon keeping within the spirit of the license that Brandon set for FF Matrix? That’s where it gets tricky.
Creative Commons Revisited
Each CC license has a set of understandings. You can look at these like the fine print of an agreement. One of the understandings is that the license would not affect the “author’s moral rights.” In the full legalese copy of the license it states:
You must not distort, mutilate, modify or take other derogatory action in relation to the Work which would be prejudicial to the Original Author’s honor or reputation.
I don’t think this is being violated here. If the add-on was renamed something derogatory or somehow impacted Brandon’s other products, then, yeah, I could see it being an issue.
So, technically, Alex Gordon is in the clear. But this isn’t really about that, is it?
Let’s go back to Alex’s original statement:
This whole extension used to be free… till the end of February.
Now the new version of FF Matrix is commercial, which is really sad.
Although he later claims that he plans to continue developing the add-on for free, the spirit of his decision to re-release FF Matrix appears to be to keep it free, not to improve it. He seems to be upset that Brandon slapped a $35 price sticker on FF Matrix.
To me, this violates the spirit of the license. But even more importantly, it violates the spirit of the community.
Community, Community
It sounds like a cliche front-loaded with bullshit, but one of the greatest things about ExpressionEngine is the community.
The people who use ExpressionEngine have a lot of professional respect for each other. This is fostered by EllisLab, who shows a lot of respect and support to all of the EE professionals (myself included).
The EE forums are full of people helping each other. It’s where we all cut our teeth when we first started using the software. We all know how important the community was when we were getting started. This remains true each and every day as the community slowly grows.
Beyond that there is also a solid embrace of the “EE economy.” Unlike other CMS communities where everyone wants (or demands) everything built for the CMS to be free, we actively support and grow the EE economy with our money.
We’ve seen this with several add-on developers earning significant revenue from their add-ons. We’ve also seen this with education and training materials, like books, screencasts, classroom training and even our very own conference.
By investing in our own community, we help ourselves build better sites, get bigger clients and serve Filet Mignon on Fridays instead of frozen pizza.
When Alex Gordon took FF Matrix and made it free again, he may not have violated any licenses or laws but he certainly violated the trust of a community that puts a lot of value in supporting the people that build the stuff that makes EE so much better than other content management systems.
And with that I have a real problem.
What We Learned
Today was a nice exhibit of community support for Brandon, Pixel and Tonic and the work he does. It was a loud “thank you” for all of the free stuff Brandon built that we all benefited from (and still do with FieldFrame). The most outspoken members of the community came to Brandon’s defense and offered their opinion of what Alex Gordon did by re-releasing FF Matrix.
We also learned that you have to be careful about what license you use when you release your software. Right now you may have no intention of ever selling your add-on commercially, but slapping a free-for-all license on it may come back and bite you. So, be careful.
Finally, Brandon shouldn’t worry about this. He’s successful because he puts a lot of work and care into his add-ons—even the free stuff. People that do excellent work will find the support of—and be rewarded by—the community.
Add-on developers that create the most useful, user-friendly software will almost always win out. Anyone who values their own time (not to mention that of their clients) would rather shell out $50 for the well-designed add-on than use a free version that has a horrible user experience.
Marcus Neto wrote a comparison article, “Wordpress vs ExpressionEngine” on Webdesigner Depot about the differences between ExpressionEngine and WordPress.
This post has been a long time coming. Whether on Twitter or in the blogosphere, the question often arises, and I have been asked numerous times for my opinion on the ExpressionEngine vs. WordPress debate, and why one would choose one content management system (CMS) over the other.
My usual answer is that they cannot be compared. While WordPress had made huge strides in usability, for anything other than a blog it is an apple.
ExpressionEngine, with the release of version 2.0, makes for a lovely platform that is, as we will see, an orange.
His main point was (and I agree) that it’s an apples and oranges comparison. I do disagree, however, that WordPress is for tinkerers and EE is for designers or non-programmers. It’s a generalization that is true sometimes but hardly true all of the time.
But read the entire article and decide for yourself!
Taking a page from ExpressionEngine.com’s Showcase Feature, Devot:ee is now Spotlighting Developer Chad Crowell.
Who is “The Knife”?
Chad Crowell is a web developer who runs web marketing agency Encaffeinated by day and develops ExpressionEngine add-ons by night. His add-on credits include Direct to Structure and Friendlee Date, both popular and useful add-ons. He’s also so edgy that we had to blur sections of his spotlight images and it’s rumored that he stunt doubles for Kiefer Sutherland.
You can read the great spotlight interview here.
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