ExpressionEngine 2 Quick Reference Chart

Blog Entry

Over the weekend an updated cheatsheet for EE 2 was posted: ExpressionEngine 2.0 Quick Reference Chart.

It contains the most commonly used tags and their parameters and variables. It even has a handy list of date formatting codes (which for those of us who are forgetful is extremely useful).

Download the free PDF, print it out and tape it to your desk.

In the Forums: Snippets and Embeds

Blog Entry

There is a lot to be written about Snippets (new in EE 2) versus Embed Templates. But for now, I want to point you to a thread in the archived forums from earlier this year where Lisa Wess (EllisLab) explains some more about snippets and how they differ from Embeds.

[W]e recommend Snippets over Embeds unless you need to do something such as pass variables.  Snippets are treated exactly as if that code was directly in the template, whereas embeds are treated as entirely separate entities.  Embeds are absolutely “heavier” than snippets.

For more about Snippets, read the documentation for the why and what.

24/7 Free ExpressionEngine Chat

Blog Entry

I’m not sure how widely known it is that there is a free, 24/7 place to chat about ExpressionEngine: Curly Braces.

The chatroom has been in place for awhile now but I’ve neglected to mention it enough. It hasn’t been used a lot so I want to encourage anyone and everyone to please use the chatroom to discuss everything EE whenever you’d like.

Unlike our weekly EE Help Chat, this chat isn’t moderated so everyone is expected to be courteous, helpful and gentle to those new to ExpressionEngine.

See you in the chat!

New EE 2 Module: Remote File Browser

Blog Entry

Launched today is a new EE 2 module for remotely accessing Rackspace Cloud Files, FTP and even Amazon S3 right inside your EE 2 control panel: Remote File Browser by Christopher Imrie.

This fieldtype allows you to have a Rackspace Cloud Files, FTP and Amazon S3 file browser inside of your EE publish page. Flexible settings allow you to only show one, two or all three file browsers in a single field as well as customize your settings to have each field connect to different Cloud Files, FTP, or Amazon S3 accounts. The file browser also includes Caching to ensure your keep you Cloud Files and Amazon S3 requests to a minimum.

Christopher sent me a copy of the add-on and I plan to do a write-up about it soon. Stay tuned for that.

Remote File Browser costs $45, works only with EE 2 and is available now through the devot:ee add-on shop.

(If you’re looking for an EE 1.6 add-on for S3 integration in the EE control panel, check out the gorgeous BucketList by Stephen Lewis.)

EE 2.1 Overview at CMS Wire

Blog Entry

Travis Smith of Hop Studios posted part one of his ExpressionEngine 2.1 CMS Review article over at CMS Wire.

Discussing the new File Manager:

The file manager is sensationally powerful: it lets you upload files independently from creating entries; it lets you browse and preview items that have been uploaded, and it shows you file permissions and other file information, like when a file was uploaded. You can download and delete in bulk (but not upload in bulk).

And for images, you can now do basic editing operations — crop, resize and rotate — that were previously only available in the Photo Gallery module (more on that later).

The file manager is completely integrated with a new field type: the File field — which lets you upload or pick a file as part of a new entry. There’s no doubt that file handling is much, much easier in EE 2, and that a significant amount of thought went into the new system; in my testing, it worked fine with 10 file groups and hundreds of files.

Overall it’s a great overview of the new interface in EE 2 and the changes that were made compared to EE 1.6. He even includes a bit of history ramping up to the EE 2 release. It’s not really a review (in this part at least) but I guess the predictable snark at the beginning was a good way to keep some street cred with the Drupal crowd.

Read the whole thing yourself: ExpressionEngine 2.1 CMS Review

No more third-party add-ons in forums

Blog Entry

In a blog post today Derek Jones announced that EllisLab would no longer allow third party developers to use the official EE forums to host and support their add-ons. Instead they are encourage to self host the add-ons or use the best platform out there for add-ons: devot:ee.

I’m sure some will find this move harsh. After all, a lot of people visit the forums and developers have been posting add-ons to the forums for years. In fact, it’s how a lot of our professional add-on developers got their start.

But if you’ve ever visited the thread for a popular add-on you know that it can go on for pages and pages—maybe even hundreds of posts. This is makes it nearly impossible for add-on developers to provide real support which then makes it a frustrating experience for the add-on users. Additionally, a single thread could have multiple versions of the same add-on posted (although a lot of developers are great about updating the original top-of-the-thread file) leading to confusion.

So, a slight adjustment for the community? Definitely. But I think it’s a great move; it’s better for both the developers and the users.

This doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t promote or announce your new add-on in the forums. You can use the new Community News forum:

We encourage you to tell people about your add-on on the Community News Forum, and answer questions people may have about its purpose, but you must provide your own hosting and support for your add-on. We are confident that this is a win for you and the community.

Don’t forget that devot:ee offers free hosting of your add-ons. And if you want to sell your add-on, devot:ee is about as a close to a turnkey EE add-on software storefront as you’ll likely get.

Read Derek’s entire blog post: Third Party Add-on Policies for the New Forums

Enabling SAEF Edit Functionality in EE 2

Blog Entry

It appears that Stand Alone Entry Forms (SAEFs) in EE 2 are not able to be used for editing functionality (like I have set up for the EE Insider Tips section of this site).

Ty Wangsness of eMarketSouth posted a work-around you can use while the editing capability is missing from EE 2.

Unfortunately in the latest version of EE 2.0 (2.0.1 Build 20100121 as of this writing) the SAEF core files are incapable of supporting edit functionality… this post will show you how to correct that shortcoming (and hopefully the core hack required here will be implemented in some future version of EE).

Ty notes in the comments that this work-around is still needed for the newly release EE 2.1. I’m not sure that using the SAEF as an edit form has ever been officially supported by EllisLab but it is definitely a useful feature.

The fix, I want to note, requires a hack to the core EE code. Anytime you alter the core code you run the risk of your site breaking during any future upgrades. So, if you do implement this just keep a note of it.

Follow the instructions in Ty’s post and you should be set: How to Create Standalone Edit Forms in ExpressionEngine 2.0

Learn Principles of UI Design

Blog Entry

Last month, Stephen Lewis at Experience Internet (and purveyor of fine EE add-ons) posted a survey asking what you wanted to know about add-on development. Stephen, you see, was planning a series of articles covering this nebulous topic.

The second post in his series is up and it covers the principles of UI design when doing add-on development. And just in case you were looking for a copy-and-paste article down the easy road to the EE Add-on Hall of Fame, you’ll be disappointed. Stephen has a higher goal:

The goal of this series is to give you the tools necessary to create shimmering add-on edifices of your own imagining, not simply to walk you through the creation of some ropey Twitter module. With that in mind, it makes sense to cover a few basic principles of good UI design, prior to doggy-paddling through the murky waters of my hoary-old design mind.

He walks through the principals of simplify, disambiguate, differentiate, prioritize, embrace conventions and be alert. It’s a nice read with information from people who have had success designing UIs for add-ons.

Give it a read: ExpressionEngine 2 Add-on Development : UI Design Principles

ExpressionEngine Addons Launched

Blog Entry

Leevi Graham and Newism have launched a new home for all of the LG and NSM add-ons: ExpressionEngine-Addons.com. The site features a lot of the add-ons you’re familiar with from Leevi.

They shared some details about the site with EE Insider:

• The site is running ExpressionEngine 2.1
• All of the docs were revised
• 3 commercial add-ons: NSM Better Meta, NSM Live Look and NSM Replace.
• Lots of free stuff!
• Pricing is now in Australian dollars, which gives you a slight discount on Better Meta for EE 2

Congrats to Leevi and his team on the launch! Check out the site for yourself: ExpressionEngine Addons

Cartthrob Announces EE 2 Upgrade Options

Blog Entry

When the EE 2 version of Cartthrob is available, the team behind the e-commerce software will be offering no-cost upgrades for new licenses.

EE 2.1 still ships with 1.6x as an available option, so you can still buy and use CartThrob. When we complete the 2.1 compatible version, you will be able to download the new version at no extra cost.

If you’ve already purchased a Cartthrob license you’ll have the option to upgrade to the EE 2-compatible version for $49.99.

Anyone that purchased CartThrob before 7-10-2010 will be able to purchase the EE 2.1x compatible version of CartThrob for $49.99 when we release it. For now there are no upgrades available to purchase on the site. We will add an upgrade option when we release the 2.1 compatible version of CartThrob.

Cartthrob haven’t said when the new version will be released but noted that “it will launch before EE stops supporting 1.6x” and there won’t be any issues with forward compatibility with Cartthrob tags you’ve used under the EE 1.6 version.

Read the forum post with the entire announcement: Cartthrob and EE 2.1

Low NoSpam Now Supports Registrations

Blog Entry

In the last EE Podcast, we talked about the problem of member spam and the steps you can take to protect your site and weed out the member spam. I jokingly said that Low should update his Low NoSpam to support member registrations. Well, now it does.

If you don’t know about Low NoSpam, here’s a description from his site:

This ExpressionEngine add-on will check comments to see if they’re considered to be spam by the chosen service, either Akismet or TypePad AntiSpam. But it doesn’t end there. It can also check incoming trackbacks (EE1), gallery comments (also EE1), forum posts, wiki articles and member registrations. Caught comments will be set to Closed for further moderation. Caught trackbacks, forum posts, wiki articles and member registrations will be discarded, since these do not have a proper native moderating system in EE.

Low NoSpam is free and if you find it useful consider dropping Low some beer money.

Looking for the EE 1.6 docs?

Blog Entry

A lot of us are still working in EE 1.6 and referring to the documentation (even those of us that wrote a book on EE) but upon first glance the EE 1.6 docs are missing. After the site refresh the URL for the docs is now occupied by the new EE 2 docs.

Don’t fret, however, the docs aren’t hidden from you.

Bookmark the new URL: https://expressionengine.com/legacy_docs/

Multi-server Setup for EE 2

How-to Article

Now that ExpressionEngine 2 is growing closer to a non-beta release, and EllisLab has published a timeline for phasing out new distributions of ExpressionEngine 1, our Vector Media Group team has been choosing EE2 for more and more client projects. One of the first difficulties we ran into when we started using EE2 was the same one we ran into when we started using EE1 many years ago—how to handle our multiple server environments gracefully.

At Vector (like many other development shops) we’re typically concerned with three primary servers: the local machines we use for day-to-day coding, the staging site where we deploy releases for the client to see and build new features, and the production server where the live site actually exists. These machines all typically have completely different URLs and file paths. While one common approach is to keep different config.php files on each server, we’ve found a single dynamic configuration file works better for our workflow.

Read the Article

Ask the Readers: Will you upgrade now?

Blog Entry

A lot of people have said that they are waiting for such and such add-ons or the final release of EE 2 before they upgrade. Well, most of the popular add-ons have been ported to EE 2 and the final release of EE 2 is here.

Now that you’ve had time to wait it out, we’d like to know: will you be moving to ExpressionEngine 2 for your websites?

Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

ExpressionEngine 2.1 released.

Blog Entry

Late this evening (US EDT), EllisLab unwrapped a brand new site design and ended the 7 month EE 2 public beta.

Yes, you read that correctly. EE 2 is now in its final release form and ready for you. A lot of you have been using EE 2 since the public beta, so what’s different now?

There is a long list of changes including a lot of bug fixes but also some notable changes like:

• PHP 4 support is deprecated
• Removed deprecated Display class
• Added two variables to the Simple Commerce Module ($debug_incoming_ipn, $debug_email_address) to allow debugging of the incoming IPN data.

and a lot more.

The new website sports an updated design and a new Community page, which is dedicated to making sure people new to EE get the information on what is available to them in our vibrant community.

In addition to the new site and the final release, there is also a brand new forum with a clean slate and geared towards supporting the new EE 2. Don’t worry, the old forums are still intact but they’re just archived and in a read-only mode.

Read Leslie Camacho’s entire release announcement for yourself: ExpressionEngine 2.1 Released!

New Module: SEO for EE 2

Blog Entry

DigitalSurgesons released a new SEO module today that allows you to easily control some content metadata and hopefully improve your search engine optimization. It isn’t the first add-on available that does this but DigitalSurgeons says that this add-on “does just enough [for them] without a cumbersome implementation or code base.”

The SEO module a creates a tab (appropriately labeled “SEO”) and allows you to enter title, keywords and description for each entry. Similar to functionality we’ve seen in existing add-ons like LG Better Meta, you can set default titles, descriptions and keywords, include robots metadata and more.

The module is free and available on GitHub (Dear All Developers, not everyone finds it easy to download from GitHub. Please include a direct download link of a zip file for your add-ons. Hugs, Ryan).

Learn more: ExpressionEngine 2 SEO Module

Streamlined Asset Serving

Blog Entry

Aaron Gustafson of Easy! Designs posted how they handle serving up multiple asset files (CSS, javascript) in the most efficient way possible. They are particular about organizing their CSS and javascript into multiple templates but serving that up as a dozen individual files isn’t very efficient.

A while back, it was not uncommon for us to include each of these assets into the document separately, but, as website optimization and performance folks will tell you, all of that separation leads to a lot of additional overhead because the browser must request each of those files individually. In the interest of streamlining the download process, we decided to merge all of the stylesheets together at the template level before sending them over the wire.

I keep all of the assets of sites I build outside of EE templates, but I really like this way of leveraging EE templates. It’s almost slick enough for me to rethink my ways.

Read the whole article: Template-based Asset Munging in ExpressionEngine

You Weekly Devot:ee

Blog Entry

Attention comrades!

It is time again for us to join together and celebrate another week of awesome EE add-ons. Now, for the list!

• EE Hash by Kyle Cotter (Cotter Web Design)
• Royal Titles by Wouter Vervloet (Baseworks)
• Last Editor by James Smith
• Bitly for EE by Bjorn Borresen
• TinyMCE for the CP by Scott Jones
• Variables by Yorick Peterse
• Rest by Phil Sturgeon

My favorite? Rest by Phil Sturgeon. So sweet.

At ease!

A Closer Look at NavEE

Blog Entry

If you’re not in need of a tool like Structure, which allows you to override how pages and the site structure is created in ExpressionEngine, but would still like a dead simple way of creating and managing multiple navigations for your EE-powered website, you should give NavEE from Booyant a look.

NavEE is a module available only for ExpressionEngine 2 and it “takes the typically painful task of managing navigation, and make it simple and (dare we say) enjoyable.” With NavEE you can manage multiple navigations, re-order items with drag and drop, apply classes to nav items, create breadcrumbs and use any HTML you want (NavEE uses nested unordered lists by default). There are a lot of ways to manage navigation in EE but I found NavEE enjoyable to use. It’s probably because of the playful interface and user messages but also because it is just so simple to use.

Nav Groups and Navs

Following along with how ExpressionEngine handles statuses and custom fields, you first create a navigation group and then individual navigation items inside of the group. Individual navigations are displayed in a tree view, so you can set hierarchy and order.

Your existing navigations are always at easy reach at the top of the NavEE module screen.

Click on a navigation group gives you a tree view of the navigation. You can easily drag and drop nav items to reorder them or click on their icons to edit them. Each item has a simple editing interface and a toggle to show advanced editing options. These options include whether the nav item is show in the navigation, CSS id and class, target and even regular expression matching. Very cool stuff.

Template Code

Displaying your NavEE navigation is just a matter of adding one EE tag.

This tag is the simple way of adding your navigation. It outputs a nested unordered list. The NavEE tag accepts several different parameters (like id shown above) and they’re all listed out in the documentation. The parameters give you all of the control you need to make the nav look exactly how you want.

If you want to get a little more complex, you can use the custom tag to use your own markup for displaying the navigation.  This is also very simple to do and includes several parameters to customize the output.

Wrap-up

Unlike Structure, NavEE doesn’t create site pages for you. You have to create all of your content and pages on your own and then create a navigation with them using NavEE. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s just the scope of the NavEE module. Some people don’t all of the extras that a module like Structure offers; they just want to create navigations and drop them in the templates.

To get started with NavEE I would suggest you watch the quick screencast Booyant put together. It’s helpful it getting that initial run-down of how NavEE works and what you can do with it.

The NavEE module for ExpressionEngine 2 costs $35 US and is available now.

Thanks for the folks at Booyant for sending over a copy of NavEE for me to play with for this write-up.

EE 2.1 Change for Third Party Devs

Blog Entry

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