EE Insider

What They’re Saying About EE

This is a on-going series of entries where I highlight EE experiences.

#EEInsider censors tweets negative to #eecms. Not a good sign for the official news source. Good for business tho, I guess.

Randy Brown via Twitter

We sure do! Just look at recent posts we’ve made like this one or maybe this one, perhaps this one here but definitely don’t forget about this one.

Your Weekly Devot:ee - December 30, 2010

This week is the final Weekly Devot:ee for 2010. What a year for ExpressionEngine add-ons! Thanks to all the developers for their hard work. We hope 2011 is much like 2010 in terms of new add-ons being made available all the time. It’s a wonder to behold.

Per a user suggestion, this week we implement a little something new: if an add-on is commercial, you’ll see a dollar sign symbol ‘$’ just before the EE1/EE2 info.

We hope you had a safe and enjoyable holiday season, and wish you all the best for 2011. Happy New Year!

• Hon-ee Pot Captcha (for EE2) by Trevor Davis
  Honey pot captcha support for Freeform forms and comment forms. Validates to make sure that a field that is moved off of the page is left empty upon form submission.
• MC XML Decode (for EE1) by Michael Cohen (ProImage)
  XML Decoding plugin. Converts entities into reserved XML characters. This plugin is the reverse of Rick Ellis’s XML Encoding plugin.
• Edit Tab URLs ($, for EE1) by Laisvunas
  This extension forms URLS of entries which will be used in Control Panel’s Edit section.  Now clicking on “View” link in Edit section will display that entry rendered as it was intended. No more lame previews! The concept of this extension is similar to that of Entry Crumblink extension which displays a link on Edit page leading to the entry being edited.
• Member Birthdays (for EE2) by Mike Roling
  Member birthdays is a simple EE2 only plugin that returns an unordered list of member screen names whose birthday falls on the current day.
• Templates2Files (for EE1) by Vaya Design
  Templates2Files takes any templates that do not have the ‘save as file’ option set, creates the corresponding file and updates the database accordingly.
• Stand-Alone Member Register ($, for EE1 & EE2) by IntoEEtive (Yuriy Salimovskiy)
  Stand-alone Member Register module lets you display members registration form within your EE templates. Using it, you can give any look to your registration form, give it any URL address and use all power of EE tags.
• Filter By Comments ($, for EE1) by Laisvunas
  This extension allows you to filter by comments in Control Panel’s Edit Entries page. You can search for entries having comments or for entries without comments. Pagination and loading results by AJAX are supported.
• Channel Ratings ($, for EE2) by DevDemon
  Channel Ratings provides extremely accurate ability to rate and review ExpressionEngine entries. Now you can rate an entry on multiple levels and provide these detailed ratings or overall rating back per review. Channel Ratings finally bring full scale review, ratings, and like (helpful) functionality to ExpressionEngine 2.1+.
• Smugmug (for EE2) by Marc Tanis
  Creates embed code for Smugmug galleries to post in your templates.

ExpressionEngine 2010: A Year in Review

I don’t think it would be much of a stretch to say that 2010 was a huge year for ExpressionEngine. It wasn’t necessarily all good, but as a community we should be satisfied about where we are and hopeful to do better next year.

What follows is my take on 2010 in our community and my wishes for the next year.

ExpressionEngine 2 Beta (and beyond)

The year started off with the public beta of ExpressionEngine 2 in full swing after a early December 2009 release. After a long, long (long!) time in development, EE 2 was finally ready for the public. Or was it?

Anytime expectations are high there is bound to be letdown and the public beta of EE 2 was no exception. The software wasn’t as polished and bug-free as some came to expect from EllisLab; it was, after all, a beta. Many were still irritated about the whole thing taking so long. I was writing a book on EE 2 at the time, so I shared that frustration.

The public beta lasted until July of this year and throughout saw small, incremental improvements that added polish and some fine-tuning. The release of EE 2.1 in July was the launch of EE 2 and the first step into moving away from the old EE 1 software.

There has been a lot public handwringing about EE 2: the bugs, the pink control panel and the long delay. I can’t say I disagree with any of this but I do think the public complaining isn’t productive and makes the people whining look like, well, whiners. Do I love the new control panel design? No. Am I happy that EE 2 releases seems to always contain fairly major bugs? No. But I also want to support the company that has helped foster the small ecosystem in which we are able to work. Bitching on Twitter isn’t supporting anything except your own desire to be heard. Let’s use the new year as an opportunity to change this.

ExpressionEnigne 2 Wishlist for 2011

Bitching on your own website is similar, so let me try to be productive and make a wishlist for EE 2. This isn’t a complete list but just some of the more important items.

First, I’d like to see the Control Panel be continually streamlined and revised. Let’s do away with all of the unnecessary jQuery bling in the UI. It feels wrong and makes the Control Panel seems more complicated to use than it really is.

My second wish is for easier theming and that has been mostly addressed in a recent update called “cascading control panel themes” that allows you to only include the code you need in your theme files instead of the entire default theme with your changes.

Third, I’d like a simplification of add-ons. Let’s do away with all the different types and just call them add-ons. This also requires reducing the Control Panel interface to reflect the simplification. Erik Reagan has already made a feature request for this. EllisLab, please consider this!

As a fourth wish, I’d like to finally see enterprise support implemented. When you’re trying to sell a $300 CMS to a client for a project that has a large budget, eyebrows are raised. Price means something and so does the level of support. Posting to a public forum for support simply isn’t acceptable for a lot of people used to working with enterprise software. EllisLab needs to implement a private, ticket-based enterprise support system in 2011.

Finally, and this this is also posted at the top of the Forecast page, is improved QA and testing and, hopefully, the implementation of regression testing.

Some large bugs slipped through into EE 2.1 releases. It’s tough on people who upgrade immediately (tip: never upgrade immediately and never, ever do it on a live site) and each buggy release erodes away the trust we have that the software is stable.

Regression testing is a testing method that makes sure you didn’t introduce new bugs while fixing others or adding new features. I used to do software testing in a past life and I know firsthand that regression testing is time consuming and demanding; but it is also necessary.

Those are my top wishes for 2011. Now onto the rest of the year!

EECI 2010

This year there were two installments of EECI, the conference started last year by Whoooz! Webmedia. The first one of the year took place in San Francisco and the second back in Leiden, The Netherlands. After three conferences—and another one planned in 2011—the EE community now has a regular event to meet in person to share information.

The 2011 conference will take place in Brooklyn, NY. The conference website and final list of speakers will be posted after the new year.

Add-ons Volcano

One of the greatest side-effects of the new EE 2 is that we’ve seen a huge growth in the amount of add-ons that are available. So many of my add-on ideas have been done quicker than I could get to them. It’s a great problem to have! Coupled with coming of age of Devot:ee and their jump into the add-on resale business, it seems easier than ever to find the add-ons you need to get your project done on budget and on schedule.

Devot:ee is arguably the most important EE site on the web. Now, mind you, I say this on my own EE site; but as a person who also tries to serve a community, I know a good thing when I see it. Ryan Masuga and his sidekick Jacob Russell have created a wonderful one-stop add-on shop. The only big add-on developer still sitting on the sidelines is Solspace...I wonder when they will join in and make it easier for customers like me to get their add-ons while buying others.

EllisLab, Our Leaders

In 2010 EllisLab made a big push to include the community and its resources into their operations. At EECI in San Francisco, they announced official community partners, which included this humble news site and a few other resources. This means EE Insider news is streamed to the homepage of the EllisLab site and they work with us to make sure the community is aware of what’s coming and what to expect.

EllisLab also had a small breakthrough in communications this Fall. They were guests on the EE Podcast with me and Lea Alcantara to answer community questions in an attempt to be more transparent. I think that went well.

You can now follow what they’re working on their Forecast page. This will hopefully give everyone in the community a glimpse into the work the EllisLab development team is doing. Adding the Forecast page was a great response the community asking for more transparency.

In the title of this section notice that I referred to EllisLab as “our leaders.” This is true in the sense that EllisLab creates and maintains the product that allows all of us to do at least part (if not all) of our business. Whether you’re an add-on developer working full-time on ExpressionEngine add-ons, an author creating training materials for people looking to learn ExpressionEngine or a web design agency building client sites on ExpressionEngine, we all rely heavily on EllisLab to produce and maintain a stable and great product. Because of this I have a few wishes for EllisLab for 2011.

First, I want to see even more communication between EllisLab and the community. What we’ve seen this Fall is a great start but there are still times when I feel like there’s a weird veil of corporatism being dropped between us. In my mind, this makes EllisLab look timid. There are more people now bravely basing a large part of their business on ExpressionEngine (myself, Brandon Kelly of Pixel & Tonic, Solspace, Ryan Masgua of devot:ee and hundreds of web agencies). I know almost everyone on the team personally and I can’t say that they’re timid people but as a whole the company feels like they’re leaning back instead of into the wind.

Second, EllisLab needs to advertise more (the participation in the Fusion Ads Bundle is a big first step) and get their name out into the same spaces as other similar products. It’s disheartening for me to see every other CMS advertised throughout the web but almost never ExpressionEngine.

This is especially important for businesses that rely on growth of the ExpressionEngine user base to grow their own EE-based products and services. If ExpressionEngine grows by 10,000 users one year, that’s 10,000 potential customers for my training materials or for Solspace’s add-ons. Additionally, the more ExpressionEngine users there are, the more ideas there are for add-ons and the more motivation there is for people to create top-notch add-ons with excellent support.

It’s been a great year to be in the EE community. That’s my review and my wishes for 2011. What are yours?

Limited Schedule Over the Holidays

EE Insider news will be pretty limited between now and the new year. Ryan and I have agreed to keep an eye on the news, so if anything super-exciting happens over the break, we will most likely write about it. Apart from that, though, we are just going to spend some time with our families, sipping nog, wassailing, and whatnot.

On a personal note, the past three months of running the news desk has been a delight. I appreciate the warm welcome you have offered and wish you many good tidings for the holidays. Thank you all!

2010 Devot:ee AcademEE Awards

The third-annual Devot:ee AcademEE Awards have been handed out and a huge congrats from all of us at EE Insider to the winners!

Browsing through this list I’m so impressed with the quality of work that is coming out of the ExpressionEngine add-on community. I think back to when I started using EE just four or five years ago, and it feels like an entirely different era now. Sure, there were some great add-ons at the time, but they didn’t hold a candle to the level of stability, polish, and support that you see now. These developers deserve all the accolade they are getting, and I raise my glass to them! (It’s actually a mug of coffee. I’ve been up since 5:30am.) Cheers!

Check out Devot:ee’s AcademEE Awards for 2010 for a full list of the winners, runners up and commentary.

Your Weekly Devot:ee - December 22, 2010

Tomorrow it will be beer o’clock in the office all day (at least mentally) so we’re giving you this week’s newest add-ons today. Happy Holidays to ExpressionEngine users everywhere from devot:ee!

• Value Trimmer (for EE1) by Laisvunas
  This extension trims the values of entry, forum post and comment fields before saving them in the database.
• Edit Comments Link (for EE1) by Laisvunas
  This extension displays above edit entry form the link pointing to edit comments form. Just click it to reach entry’s comments!
• JG Breadcrumb (for EE2) by Jeroen Geusebroek
  JG Breadcrumb allows adding breadcrumb items for later use in the same or other template (embeds)
• Edit Alarm (for EE2) by Thanh Vuong
  Similar to Edit Alert for EE1.x - This extension alerts authors when another author is editing a resource they are accessing.
• EE Picasa Lite (for EE1 & EE2) by IntoEEtive (Yuriy Salimovskiy)
  EE-Picasa plugin enables you to integrate Picasa Web Albums within ExpressionEngine website. You can easily embed your complete Picasa gallery, album or certain picture in EE
• Dynamo (for EE2) by Rob Sanchez (Barrett Newton)
  Makes Dynamic Parameters play nice with Pagination.
• Category Bunch (for EE1) by Laisvunas
  This plugin allows you to output parent and child categories without iterating tagdata.
• Category Group (for EE1) by Laisvunas
  This plugin allows you to output categories which belong to a certain category group without iterating tagdata.

Basecamp-Style Subdomains in ExpressionEngine

Bjørn Børresen wrote a slick, one-step tutorial on how to get basecamp-style subdomains with ExpressionEngine. This would be handy thing if you wanted people to login using their own URL based on their username.

There is also a great lots and lots of steps tutorial on Nettuts+ about how to do the same with CodeIgniter, but you have to admit Bjørn’s solution is pretty dang elegant.

Help Chat Taking a Break Till 2011

The EE Help Chats taking a much-deserved rest until the new year. Imagine the two help chats on holiday vacation together, sipping hot chocolate, throwing snowballs and making ice sculptures together. It’s a beautiful thing.

The EE Help Chats will return, rested and ready for both helping and chatting, in the new year.

EllisLab Releases ExpressionEngine 2.1.3 to Fix Critical Issues

Just five days after 2.1.2 was out, we are now greeted with 2.1.3. It turns out that upgrading to EE 2.1.2 brought some pretty significant issues with the publish form for some people. Lisa posted a brief note about the update on the blog and of course you can consult the change log for details.

The error I saw the most reports of on the forums was about some sort of 500 error showing up on the publish form. If you’re experiencing that, or if you’re just running 2.1.2 at all, I highly recommend updating.

That being said, let me leave you with one public service announcement:
Make sure you back up everything before doing these updates. Using version control of course is one of the best ways, but if you’re crazy enough not to use version control, at least make a full site backup before upgrading. This means the database too! I have my fingers crossed that 2.1.3 is going to fix the issues with 2.1.2, but nobody should ever do an upgrade like this without having a way to roll back to the previous version. Sure, it was EllisLab who dropped the ball in letting some bugs slip through their testing, but even when I’m 100% confident a piece of software has been extensively tested in environments just like mine, I still back up everything before doing upgrades.

EE Podcast #37: Building Navigation in ExpressionEngine

EE Podcast #37 is up and Ryan Irelan is back hosting the show with Lea. They discuss the different methods and add-ons you can use to build navigation for your ExpressionEngine-powered website.

Listen and subscribe: EE Podcast #37: Building Navigation in ExpressionEngine on 5by5

Dynamo makes Dynamic Parameters Awesomer

We have written about dynamic parameters before, but this new add-on from Rob Sanchez called Dynamo really caught our attention. Dynamo solves some problems with dynamic parameters that I’m sure have plagued many over time:

Until now, it was impossible to have your dynamic parameters persist when using pagination. To alleviate this, Dynamo takes your dynamic parameters and stores them in the database, and assigns a search_id, which can be used in to retrieve your filtered results, without having to perform another POST request with your parameters.

Dynamo is free and available at GithHub.

Erik Reagan on Deployment

Deploying EE sites has always been a topic that generates some good discussion. Erik Reagan posted some of his thoughts on his blog about the topic. His deployment strategy is very similar to ours at Happy Cog so it definitely caught my interest. He does mention some great things they use Beanstalk’s deployment requests for that improve their process.

It’s a good read and should get your juices flowing for thinking about how you deploy and possible ways to improve it.

Your Weekly Devot:ee - December 16, 2010

This week I’d like to draw your attention to the latest version of Socialee (1.2) from Shotwell Company, which is compatible with EE 2. With Socialee, you can accept registrations via Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Gmail, LinkedIn and more. Socially publish custom comments, entries, or any page to users’ status updates. You can also fill out profiles automatically with Facebook Connect. If you’re looking to add that Social Media Special Sauce to your site, you owe it to yourself to give this add-on a look.

Here is the list of new add-ons to come out over the past week:

• Safe Harbor (for EE1) by Tom Jaeger (EE Harbor)
  Automated daily backups of your ExpressionEngine websites (Files & DB).  Also includes the ability to create manual backups of your site on demand.
• Kyara (for EE2) by Nicolas Bottari
  Kyara is an addon which performs small modification to your ExpressionEngine database to enable longer maximum characters in a number of control panel fields, such as entry title and custom field labels, changing database tables to specified collation/character sets, and backing up your database in an easy and flexible way.
• Mornin (for EE2) by ThoseGeeks
  Depending on the server time, returns the string “morning”, “afternoon”, or “evening” into your template.
• Google/Yahoo Sitemap Ping (for EE1) by Media Cow
  Pings Google and/or Yahoo.
• Static Fields (for EE1) by Media Cow
  Pre-populate static fields on your publish page
• Hidee (for EE2) by Cem Meric
  Hide some stuff in ExpressionEngine 2’s control panel
• Usability (for EE2) by Alex Kendrick
  Higher contrast, monospace text for input and textarea in the CP. Correct cursor type for clickable or draggable elements. Restores field re-order handles for NSM Morphine Theme.
• Last Updated (for EE2) by Alex Kendrick
  A simple plugin that returns the edit date of the most recently updated template or channel entry. Accepts EE date variable formatting.
• Mega Upload (for EE2) by DevDemon
  Mega Upload allows you to take a single field and upload files of any size to an ExpressionEngine entry. The field shows upload progress and does not require the entry to be submitted to upload.
• Edit This (for EE2) by Thanh Vuong
  Similar to Editor for EE1.x. This extension adds a little ‘one click away’ edit link or image next to your channel entries on your website.
• Current (for EE2) by Green Egg Media
  Creates {current_url}, {total_url_segments}, and {last_url_segment} global variables based on the current page.

Fusion Ads Holiday Bundle

The Fusion Ads network has put together what very well might be the most killer software bundle I’ve seen to date. Not only are there some really great apps for your Mac, but also a full freelancer license of ExpressionEngine. If that’s not enough, you get the entire Learning ExpressionEngine 2 screencast series by our very own Ryan Irelan.

The bundle costs just $79, so if all you care about is EE, it’s still a bargain. Heck, if you use a PC, and thus physically can’t even install the Mac software, you’re getting a deal—you still get some rad icons and the screencasts.

Anyway, I don’t normally get excited about the yearly deluge of software bundles, but this one caught my eye. I highly recommend checking it out.

ExpressionEngine 2.1.2 Released, adios PHP4

The latest release of ExpressionEngine, version 2.1.2 is out and ready for download.

ExpressionEngine 2.1.2, while not a very exciting version number, it does mark a big milestone in EE development: The complete removal of PHP 4 support. That’s not all though, Robin Sowell summarized the highlights in her post on the ExpressionEngine blog.

This release marks the return of the autosave, completely revamped since we saw it last, as well as saying goodbye to those pesky daylight saving time issues and a much more theme-able control panel.

All of these sound like great things and I’m encouraged by the work that the team is doing getting these releases out. Are there any of these updates which are particularly exciting for you guys, or are you just so thrilled about ditching PHP4 support that you don’t care about anything else?

Check out the change log or Robin’s post for more info on this release.