Weekly Wrap: Week of January 28th, 2013

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

Fact of Life: Building an eCommerce site is not and should not be cheap. #eecms

— Justin Long (@RealJustinLong) January 28, 2013

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

• ExpressionEngine Add-on Versioning
• EE in the Wild: Montana CDC
• Your Weekly devot:ee - January 31, 2013

As always, email kyle@eeinsider.com with any news, tips, or showcases. Have a great weekend.