All entries filed under “Weekly Roundup”
Whoa, where did the weekend go? Let’s this week wrapped up before we start another week. Before we get to the news, can you do me a favor? The next EECI conference is happening this October and the folks behind it are looking for your feedback on session topics. Can you take 5 minutes and fill out the survey? It’ll help them decide what to choose as topics.
If you have news you want to be included in the Weekly Wrap, please tag it on Twitter with the #eenews hashtag or email us: info@eeinsider.com We like to share the news, give the links and help promote the great stuff you’re working on!
Okay, let’s get to it.
Tweet of the Week
Chosen by me, shared with you.
This Week on EE Insider
That’s a wrrrrraaaap!
Another one in the books and it is time to wrap up the community news, events and work over the past week.
If you have news you want to be included in the Weekly Wrap, please tag it on Twitter with the #eenews hashtag or email us: info@eeinsider.com We like to share the news, give the links and help promote the great stuff you’re working on!
Tweet of the Week
Chosen by me, shared with you.
This Week on EE Insider
It’s a short week next week in the US because of a holiday on Monday but we’ll back with news, links, and more.
As is always the case in the ExpressionEngine community, you continue to make awesome.
Here’s a round up of what happened last week.
EE Insider Tweet of the Week
If you have news, a site, article, or anything interesting involving ExpressionEngine, let us know! Have a great week.
Friday, the happiest day of the week, is upon us once again. Here’s what’s what in the ExpressionEngine community this week.
Exp:resso announced that they’re open sourcing RSVP, an event RSVP add-on, and CX Disqus Comments, an add-on for keeping comments in sync between ExpressionEngine and Disqus.
Solspace had another busy week. Favorites 3.1 includes bug fixes and EE 2.5.4+ compatibility. Rating 3.2 now offered commenting on reviews. Updates are available for Comment Uploads, Date Field Filter, Preparse, and Selected. And Comment Uploads, Date Field Filter, Preparse, Primary Category & Selected are all now free add-ons.
Rein updated Gmaps, now with support for standalone panorama maps, and a better JS API.
Nixon Design’s site for The Rosevine is up for a CSS Design Award.
Masuga Design updated Link Vault, now with S3 support, new parameters, and new extension hooks.
Ian Ebden and Joel Bradbury are back again with EEUK 2013. Scheduled for May 17, 2013, in Manchester, this conference is a great chance to catch up with like-minded ExpressionEngine lovers. With speakers such as John Henry Donovan, Ben Croker, and Carl Crawley, just to name a few, and a workshop from Low, you are in for a treat. Be sure to register today!
EE Insider Tweet of the Week
You got that right, Justin.
EE Insider Site of the Week
This week we’re featuring Sagmeister & Walsh, a unique ExpressionEngine site.
I had a chance to catch up with Liam Crean of South Pole Creative, the company behind the ExpressionEngine part of the site. (Design by Sagmeister & Walsh, front-end by both Emil Olsson and South Pole Creative)
Why did you choose ExpressionEngine?
A full set of design concepts were provided by the client and developed in-page by us (Emil Olsson / South Pole Creative). EE was the obvious choice, over Wordpress and Drupal (old site), for it’s simple and customisable UI and lovely way it steps out of the way of complex designs. The client said “it’s a joy to use” when comparing it to their previous CMS.
What were some of the tricky parts of the site?
Delivering mobile & retina ready layout: using a responsive grid and a diverse mix of elements including ‘@2x’ images, icon fonts and the brand new Detect Mobile plugin from Gareth Davies (https://github.com/garethtdavies/detect-mobile - we found this be more reliable for tablets than others plugins tested. It’s super fast, clean and he was extremely quick to debug and release a patched version for us). CE Image was used in conjunction with it to deliver different sized images depending on device - that’s a real time saver as the desktop version uses images +1600px which would have been A LOT of overhead for mobile visitors. For this we used a reusable snippet, containing the mobile detect tags and a matrix field for the image itself (Matrix lets us use the same column name for all img fields which is handy). This was reeeeeally fast in testing once the images were cached.
Managing high traffic: We knew there would be a lot of visitors on launch day, and we had some inevitable teething issues but on the whole EE stood up well and 99.9% of visitors got the full experience (at one point we had 700 new visitors arriving every second..!). Good hosting was key (DV4.0 from MT) but we also worked hard on the templates, caching and fine tuning tags.
Homepage navigation: works via a webcam which refreshes every few seconds and a large hard-wearing vinyl applied to the studio floor. This was a feature of their old site too which we updated for the new release - and proves a very popular element, their studio is both literally and figuratively transparent to their clients. Emil did some great JS work here, that grabs the next few images from the server and loads them in the background so there’s no delay/flicker when switching to the next shot. We also did some nifty “Night/Day” CSS for the Cam based on EST daylight. This style is echoed in the light and dark styles for work entries controlled by the client through a ‘P&T switch’.
Obvious question, what add-ons did you use?
As far as add-on’s go, we’ve quite a few running that we couldn’t live without. As mentioned Matrix was essential here (isnt’ it always?!) + Playa; both used to create galleries and related content. The ‘Matrix Multi-Upload’ accessory is brilliant - a super simple way of populating matrix fields with images - the client loved that addition which saved them hours creating their (huge) folio section.
Mountee was used extensively when developing the site - would have been a chore without it - our most used Module to date, and essential to all EE developers in my opinion. Last plugin that get’s a mention is EE hacksaw - what a great little device this is. Really handy for typographic control which was a paramount concern.
Any tips you have for those building ExpressionEngine sites?
We made a really good choice when we started this project: to get EE up and running right from the start. We worked on EE independently of the front-end initially to ensure all the key functionality was in place before adding all the bells, whistles and styling. This meant we could work side by side during complex CSS/jQuery UI development and allowed more input and adjustments from the client throughout. We’ve left the EE integration later on previous projects and that can mean time consuming re-engineering of functionality… an “EE first” approach helps to to get it right, first time.
This Week on EE Insider
As always, email kyle@eeinsider.com with any news, tips, or showcases. Have a great weekend.
Happy Friday! Hopefully the weekend means fun and relaxation for you. If it doesn’t, might I suggest you have some fun and relaxation this weekend. Seriously, do it. You’ll thank me later when you’re not burnt out by Monday of next week. (Actually, I’m keenly interested on where you draw the line on interacting with clients during the weekend, especially if you work for yourself. Feel free to post what you do in the comments.)
This week was pretty busy on the add-on front, as usual. Low released Low Events 1.1.2, which now offers custom date ranges. Low also updated Low Variables, with cache cleaning options, and more control over bending the parse order to your will. (Low also has this fancy training video on building an ExpressionEngine add-on, and I highly suggest you check it out.)
We had a little surprise from Stephen Lewis this past week. Stephen released Freeform Values, which offers better form error handling with the free version of Freeform. For a detailed use case, check out the README.
Pixel & Tonic updated Wygwam, which, when using it in conjunction with Assets, will save file URLs as {assets_X} so the URL will be automatically updated when fils are renamed or moved.
Bold Minded updated Publisher to work with Assets 2.
Solspace updated Friends and Rating, with offline docs, bug fixes, and ExpressionEngine 2.5.4+ compatibility.
Devot:ee talks about some of their new features on the site, including better reporting, a new license key API, and the addition of SSL in the members area.
Derek Allard launched the redesign of his company site Tunnel 7. I really like it! It has a great energy to it. And of course it’s powered by ExpressionEngine. Also, congrats to Derek on 10 years in business! Derek always seems to be working on some new ExpressionEngine project. Congrats on all the accomplishments!
EE Insider Tweet of the Week
Being grateful is a great quality to exhibit. Personally, I wouldn’t be where I am today without the help of everyone. The ExpressionEngine community is a unique bunch, in that you all enjoy helping each other (look at Stack Exchange for example.) Indeed, let’s make the web a better place.
EE Insider Site of the Week
A List Apart has redesigned, and when I say redesigned, I mean, really redesigned. With a “content first” approach, you’ll be greeted with large text, and a flat design. (I hope I didn’t start anything by saying “flat design”) After my eyes adjusted, I must say I quite enjoy the new site, and will continue to enjoy the fine content the authors posts. And of course, it’s running ExpressionEngine.
Conferences and Meetups
The final details for “ExpressionEngine Conference 2013” are being worked on by Turner Parscale. They’re currently taking requests for speakers, teachers, sponsors, and vendor tables.
Jessica D’Amico sent out a tweet regarding a community conference, named Peers, that she’ll be hosting.
The next two meet ups for EE PDX have been scheduled.
This Week on EE Insider
Have a great weekend! Contact kyle@eeinsider.com for any news, tips, or suggestions you’d like to see on the site.
Can you believe we’re already half way through the first month of the new year? You continue to push ExpressionEngine to the limits, and this is where we round up all the limit-pushing. It’s time for your Weekly Wrap.
The week started off with Jean St-Amand stating he’ll be speaking this weekend at Podcamp in Halifax, NS about content modeling and ExpressionEngine.
Then, Solspace announced the Redux of the EE Help Chat. I had the privilege of attending the chat (at its new time of 4:30 pm EST) and it was quite the turnout! There was a bit of nostalgia there for me, as some of the people who used to be in the chat when I first started attending (Brandon Kelly, Greg Ferrel, Kenny Meyers) were present. Then on the other hand, it was obvious just how much the ExpressionEngine community has evolved with all the new ones who came to the chat.
Static Interactive assisted with design from Knoed, launched a new site for Studio 1 Architects, Ltd. (Love the parallax effect).
There was some big news from Pixel & Tonic this week, that being the release of Assets 2.0. With Amazon S3 integration, a sleek new UI, and rebuilt from the ground up, that’s one big Assets update.
Solspace now offers a Salesforce and ExpressionEngine integration service. This product and service combo allows you to integrate your ExpressionEngine site with your Salesforce account. Check out their service page for full information.
Ian Pitts, with Stash assistance from Nathan Doyle, launched Pitney Bowes Small Business Solutions site, running ExpressionEngine of course. One of the things that stands out to me is how speedy it is, would love to learn more about the caching behind it. Great work guys!
Lodewijk Schutte released “Building an ExpressionEngine Add-on” on Mijingo!
This video will walk through Low’s entire add-on making process. Check out the preview above to see what’s in store.
EE Insider Tweet of the Week:
I’m sure Eric isn’t the only developer who wants to do better. So, in the event you need to return an add-on, why not tell the developer why, so they can make it better.
EE Insider Site of the Week
Antistatic Design redesigned and launched a responsive website for Cincinnati Pediatrics powered by ExpressionEngine. The site utilizes Redactee, Freeform and several other key add-ons to meet the staff’s content management needs.
Jobs Involving ExpressionEngine
This Week on EE Insider
Thanks for a great week everyone! We love providing you with the latest ExpressionEngine news, tips, and how-tos. Contact kyle@eeinsider.com for any news, tips, or suggestions you’d like to see on the site.
See you next week!
Hello ExpressionEngine Universe! It’s time for the Weekly Wrap! This is where we take what you’ve done this past week, and share it with everyone.
First off, Solspace released User 3.4, which includes offline docs, bug fixes, and compatibility with the latest version of ExpressionEngine.
Second, macprime.ch redesigned and is running ExpressionEngine.
Finally, Mark “The Stash” Croxton has been up to something:
We do the Weekly Wrap for the good of the community, so be sure to submit your news via Twitter, or the EE Insider thread that’s open at the beginning of each week.
EE Insider Tweet of the Week:
I hope you and MSM can work your issues out Low. Here’s to hoping you both can settle your differences.
EE Insider Site of the Week
Chrism Studios launched this pretty, responsive, ExpressionEngine site today for Strategic Planning Group, Inc.
Jobs Involving ExpressionEngine
EE Insider Recap
Here’s what happened on EE Insider this week:
Quite a busy week if you ask me! For everyone at EE Insider, thanks for being awesome, and have a great weekend. EE Insider still has ad spots open, so contact kyle@eeinsider.com if you’d like more information.
It’s a new week, and a new chance to make awesome involving ExpressionEngine. We’ll compile the Weekly Wrap this Friday, so make sure your news gets added.
To add your news, simply add a comment to this thread, or tweet using the hashtag #eenews.
We look forward to showcasing you and your news!
Can you believe another year has already flown by? We sure can’t. The ExpressionEngine community is a unique bunch. You always seem to push the limits of whatever you’re doing. It’s been a pleasure reporting on various news, releases, and hoopla the ExpressionEngine community has created this year.
Without further ado, here is the 2012 ExpressionEngine Community Wrap!
Back in January we asked you what your EE 2012 wishes were and a lot of you made yours known. Go back and review your wishes in the comment thread. Did they come true?
A big wish from this site (posted back on January 19th was to bring back EE Core. Well, wish granted. Thank you, EllisLab.
This year saw a total of seven ExpressionEngine releases from EllisLab. The year started with EE 2.4 on January 24th and ended with EE 2.5.5 on December 20th. If you have a spare minute while you’re waiting for midnight to strike, check out the entire changelog to read about everything that has changed with ExpressionEngine in the year 2012.
For a broader look at ExpressionEngine as a whole over the past years, Vim Interactive put together an info graphic that gives visual representation of who we are as a whole.
The ExpressionEngine CodeIgniter Conference
There were two EECIs this year. One in Leiden, and one in Austin, Texas.
Ryan compiled a round up of slides from EECI EU, and I had the opportunity to live blog a lot of EECI Austin.
A notable piece from EECI Austin was the Developer Round Table, which I was able to transcribe nearly 100%. It’s a good read if you want to get a vibe of how the top add-on devs think the community is doing.
And, as a result of such discussions, add-on companies have started making changes, for what I think, is for the best.
For a full look-back at EECI in Austin, check out our round up video.
EECI in Austin would the last conference run by Whoooz! Webmedia. Turner Parscale purchased the assets to EECI and will continue hosting events, though in a new format.
Ch-Ch-Changes at EllisLab
I think it’s pretty safe to say this was a big year of change for EllisLab. And it seemed a lot of these changes came all at once. They launched a brand new site. Ryan posted an opinion piece on all the changes at EllisLab.
The Affiliate Program was ended for various reasons. This definitely had an impact on community run sites, such as EE Insider and Devot:ee, which used the affiliate commissions to keep these sites going. Check out Ryan’s opinion piece on the matter.
Then there was the whole Professionals Network incident. Originally, Professionals Network links went to the Enterprise page on the new EllisLab site, but that has since been changed, and work on a new Professionals Network has started.
2012 marked the end of the EngineHosting/EllisLab relationship, which unfortunately, also resulted in a lawsuit and another lawsuit. EllisLab forged a relationship with Nexcess.
EllisLab transitions from a forum based support system that was included in an ExpressionEngine license purchase, to a separate, paid, private support solution.
EllisLab restructured the licensing and pricing for ExpressionEngine. One flat fee. Regardless of the project type.
ExpressionEngine
ExpressionEngine 2.5 introduced a new Rich Text Editor fieldtype. Described as “a very lightweight WYSIWYG”, the RTE fieldtype is useful to clients who need basic text formatting.
EE 2.5 also introduced the Cookie Consent Module as an optional download to comply with the EU Cookie Law.
The black magic that is Stash took the community by storm and became a powerful way to create more flexible EE templates.
Language packs for ExpressionEngine moved to Github to create a more centralized method for making sure they’re up to date. As a result, many add-on developers followed suit.
DevDemon Updater was released to streamline the update process for ExpressionEngine and add-ons.
Stack Exchange was a hot topic this year, leading to the public beta of the ExpressionEngine Stack Exchange site.
An Event Apart relaunched in a big way, and is now powered by ExpressionEngine.
Eric Lamb and Ben Croker talk about ExpressionEngine add-on development, and a whole lot more.
How-to Articles in 2012
Education and training are a big part of this community. Here’s a round up of in-depth training on EE Insider this year.
From everyone here at EE Insider, thanks for a great year!
Hopefully you all are enjoying some much needed time off and a nice cup of coffee (or hot chocolate, whichever you prefer). Here’s the weekly wrap for the week of December 17th.
Last week flew by really really fast. It’s already Monday again. Here’s what the ExpressionEngine community did during the week of December 10th. Be sure to add your news to #eenews on Twitter, and we’ll include it in the round-up.
Let’s have another great week!
It’s Friday. Again. Which means, it’s time for another edition of the Weekly Wrap. We put together this roundup for you, the community, so be sure to tag any of your ExpressionEngine news with the #eenews hashtag on Twitter.
Here are some notable pieces of information from this week in EE:
Objective HTML
Justin Kimbrell has been busy this week. First and foremost, he’s released Google Maps for ExpressionEngine version 3.1.
Justin describes it this way:
With over six months of development, 19 new features, and 21 bug fixes, this is the premium mapping add-on for ExressionEngine.
Also released, was an expansion pack for the Google Maps add-on. Google Maps Proxy allows you to quicky and easily enable your own proxy to re-route requests away from a cloud or shared hosting environment.
Zenbu Studio
Nicolas Bottari released Kyara 1.1. Kyara enables longer maximum characters in entry titles and other fields, easy conversion of tables to another collation/encoding, and simple database backup using CodeIgniter’s database backup tools.
Low
Low updated Low GoogleSearch to 1.1.0 with some new extension hooks and parameters.
Electric Putty
Better Workflow 1.5 was released, featuring official Matrix support.
Rein
Rein released Gmaps 2.4, which offers Twitter integration, JS events, and bug fixes.
Creat-ee
Creat-ee is offering a free intro to EE2 webinar.
From EE Insider
Have a great weekend, don’t work too hard! We still have ad spots open on EE Insider as well. Feel free to get in touch if you’re interested.
Well I’ll be, looks like I’m back to posting the FR…Weekly Wrap: the ExpressionEngine community news of the week.
This was quite an eventful week. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, here are a few posts to get you caught up (but I’m almost certain you know what’s up):
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s promote the awesome that you did this week.
Low Events Updated
Low has added Low Search, Zenbu support, and new tags and parameters to Low Events.
Isaac Raway Released More Entries
This free add-on lets you essentially nest channel entries tags without making ExpressionEngine freak out. Due to the fact the tag has a different name, you can embed it within a channel entries loop to pull in other content. This also eliminates the need for an embed or other method.
New Site for the Canadian Paediatric Surveillance Program
QB Marketing launched a multi-lingual site for the Canadian Paediatric Surveillance Program.
And that’s a wrap! See what I did there?
Make sure to tag your ExpressionEngine related news with #eenews on Twitter, and we’ll make sure to showcase it.
Have a great weekend everyone!
Other Posts on EE Insider this Week
To everyone in the USA, Happy Thanksgiving! I spent a few hours yesterday eating food, having a few drinks and spending time away from the computer. I hope you were able to do the same.
I am certainly thankful for the ExpressionEngine community and everyone that has been to supportive of EE Insider over the last (almost) 4 years. We celebrate our fourth anniversary in January and in the online world where things come and go quickly, I am thankful to still be writing on this site and grateful that you’re still reading.
As I mentioned in my EECI talk last month, some of the greatest things in the community come from outside the ExpressionEngine software and EllisLab. We have amazing choices of add-ons, software, and services. And, as I pointed out in my talk, many people in our community have great personal stories of how they came to the community and how it has helped them succeed. We should certainly be thankful for that.
The ExpressionEngine Stack Exchange proposal (and now beta) that kicked off right as EECI was wrapping up was the proof of what I tried to convey in my talk. We have a great thing going in the community and we should be proud of it.
So, as you’re winding down the week and easing into your weekend, here’s the community news from the week. Cheers to you!
Congressional Inaugural Committee website launched using EE
Brett Bearce reports that website of the committee that handles the US Presidential Inauguration was relaunched and now runs ExpressionEngine! Congrats to Brett on his hard work bringing EE to yet another high profile site!
EE Syntax Highlighter for Prism.js
Justim Kimbrell authored a Prism.js EE syntax highlighter for Prism.js, “lightweight, extensive syntax highlighter.”
Entry API 2.2 Released
A new version of Entry API was released and it added some hooks and bug fixes.
FreeForm Update
Solspace’s FreeForm module was updated with some bug fixes. Happy free forming!
DevDemon Updates
I’ll just get them all in one post this time. DevDemon updated Channel Images, Forms and Editor. Get all of the details on the DevDemon site.
Snaptcha Now Supports ProForm
Ben Croker’s Snaptcha add-on was updated to include support for ProForm.
This Week on the Blog
And that’s a wrap. See you next week!
Another week and it’s…wait a minute, it’s November? This week sped by me quickly and with Kyle’s absence (he was probably working on his tan on a beach somewhere), the posting was light. I’m glad Kyle will be back next week. I bet you are, too.
The last few weeks have been crazy. Personally and professionally, there is a lot going on and, as usual, the year always ends at top speed. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I hope any EE community members in the Northeast have escaped any major damage or injury during Hurricane Sandy. I also hope that you are all warm and safe. And that if your electricity is not yet restored, that it is soon. I have family in the northeast out of power for days now and I wish there was something I could do about it.
Since EECI the community has pulled together to push the Stack Overflow proposal closer toward approval. We continually show that we are a self-sufficient community that can organize itself, support itself and help each other, no matter what happens around us. I’m sincerely proud of that. You should be, too.
Okay, enough from me. Let’s get to the news.
Host-ee Launch
Garrant Consulting launched Host-ee, a hosting service tailored to ExpressionEngine.
Store 1.6.1 Available
My friends at Exp-resso released an update to their excellent e-commerce module, Store. They also made their language packs available on Github (following the lead of Solspace) for community translation.
Continuum Beta
Ben Croker (nice to meet you at EECI, Ben!) release a beta of Continuum, a real-time visitor tracking add-on.
Gmaps 2.2 Out
Gmaps 2.2 is out and adds geocoding support for EE templates and more.
Did I miss anything? Hit me up on Twitter and I’ll get the word out.
Have a great weekend!
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