If there’s one thing I learned at EECI in Leiden last week, it’s that devot-ee.com is slow. Fortunately that doesn’t rub off on you EE developers, who are busy as bees churning out new add-ons at a record pace. Here are this weeks’ additions:
I’d like to announce that this week Travis and Jack made the popular Structure module available for purchase on devot:ee. If you haven’t yet built a site using Structure, you might want to check out this incredible add-on.
If you use the brilliant do-all application Alfred on your mac, you’ll be every excited about the following tip from Tony Geer. Using the custom searches feature of Alfred, Tony shows you how to set up a search for ExpressionEngine’s documentation. I did it in all of 60 seconds after seeing his tip. Do yourself a favor: Download Alfred, read Tony’s tip, and set this up!
Some clients can’t live without a Microsoft Word toolbar in every text field, some prefer to write all the HTML themselves, and others live and die by Textile or Markdown. Maybe you quote all your projects with a WYSIWYG editor for text formatting, or maybe you train clients that What You See is Not Quite What You Get.
Now that there are some really good options for text formatting in ExpressionEngine, what do you prefer? Do you always use a WYSIWYG for your projects or do you prefer some other option like XHTML or Textile?
It’s Wednesday and that means it is time for the weekly EE Help Chats. It’s a great way to spend an hour getting help, talking shop and meeting some other EE users.
European EE Help Chat
Our European EE Help Chat takes place at 19:00 GMT. If you follow @eeinsider on Twitter, you’ll find a reminder tweet about 15 minutes before. Visit this URL at the time of the chat to gain access to the room: https://mijingo.com/europe-chat
EE Help Chat
The original chat still takes place at the regular time of 9 PM Eastern at https://mijingo.com/go-chat. As with the other chat, we typically post a reminder on Twitter about 15 minutes before.
Environments for Humans is hosting Engine Summit 2 on October 26, 2010 from 9am to 5pm ET. Engine Summit 1 was back in March and from all accounts was a great success. Engine Summit 2 looks to be an equally great, if not better, experience.
Our very own Ryan Irelan will join Mark Huot, Fred Boyle, Lea Alcantara, Erik Reagan, Chad Crowell, and Leslie Flinger for an all-day extravaganza covering a wide range of topics. Check out the Engine Summit 2 page for details on all of the talks and to register.
Use the discount code EE2RYAN to save 10% on your registration for the online conference.
It was a good testing ground before we start moving our client projects from EE1 to EE2, which we’re now confident to do. Just a few add-ons used for the site:
We are looking for a few beta testers who could use this on a live EE 2.x website, and provide feedback to us. Once this is complete we will be offering the module for sale in the Devot:ee store.
This could be an interesting module that could help fill out ExpressionEngine’s somewhat lackluster events support. If you have a site that you can test this on, send Adrian a PM or respond to the thread he started in the forums.
The current list of add-ons includes Mapper, Text plugin, HTML plugin, Widgets and Multi Language Support. They are all pretty inexpensive, ranging from $7 to $27. The Widgets module looks particularly interesting!
The comparisons to the venerable Devot:ee are unavoidable, but hopefully CodeCanyon will grow and the EE add-on marketplace can enjoy a little healthy competition. Check out CodeCanyon’s ExpressionEngine Add-on store to learn more.
It’s the first Monday in October and that means it is Brian Warren’s first day as Guest Editor at EE Insider. Welcome, Brian!
Brian is a Senior Designer/Developer at Happy Cog (in the Philadelphia office) and moved there last year from snowy, sunny, mile-high Denver, Colorado. He writes on his personal site Be Good Not Bad and is a beer and coffee connoisseur. Reliable sources tell me that he likes to don a kilt from time to time. Brian, kilts are not proper work attire here at EE Insider World Headquarters. See your company handbook for further details.
Having already contributed one how-to article (Simplifying How Content Works) to the site, Brian isn’t new to EE Insider. He will be trying his hand at posting news and updates from around the community. Keeping you informed and updated during the week is his goal, so if you have news tips or announcements, please let Brian know by emailing tips@eeinsider.com.
In an unusual blog post, Derek Jones (CTO) from EllisLab addressed issues with the last few releases of EE 2.
I’d like to take a moment to speak about the speed and quality of the past few release cycles. There’s no point in mincing words: it’s been less than what you and we have come to expect from EllisLab. If this has concerned you, double or triple that concern, and that’s how we feel. And we have a plan in motion to fix it.
I don’t think it’s a big secret that the EE 2 Control Panel feels slower than EE 1 and that there have been plenty of bugs in releases. Expectations were high for EE 2 so every issue is magnified tenfold. It was, however, surprising to see the EE 2.1 release go out the door with the date bug but it didn’t strike me as outrageous. I didn’t think EE 2 was doomed. If you’ve written software 1/100 as complex as ExpressionEngine, you know how easily bugs can work in— especially bugs that surface after changes and are not caught during regression testing.
Derek didn’t give specifics about plans but did say that they need to scale the company to keep up with the growing community.
Right now our biggest challenge is scaling our internal structure concurrently with the new growth we’re experiencing while sticking to our roots (no “going corporate”, no VC money). We want to keep the same spirit that EllisLab enjoyed when there were just three or four of us, while making adjustments to staff and work practices that will allow us to succeed alongside this significant growth (which we are thankful for).
I truly hope that part of this scaling includes adding “enterprise” support that gives people implementing for large corporations a dedicated support line that isn’t the EE Forums. If I or my clients could have an account manager or dedicated support person, it might ease the apprehension we sometimes see when pitching ExpressionEngine as a CMS solution.
Derek mentioned that they’re focusing now on hiring another developer to help maintain and improve EE 2. This is definitely a good thing but please don’t forget about scaling support!
I’ll keep it short and sweet; I’ve had eight hours of sleep in three days because of the time change, attending EECI conference sessions and meeting a ton of great people from the ExpressionEngine community. Enjoy this week’s new submissions!
I’ve been beta testing a new iPad app and have been using it to create and publish collections of tweets from Twitter. The collection I’ve been working on today is one for EECI 2010 in Leiden.
Throughout the day I’ve been going through Twitter and adding new tweets to the collection. I’ve been mostly relying on hash tags and searches to get started. This is the first time I’ve tried to curate collections of tweets and it’s definitely a lot harder than I anticipated; however, having a good tool is making it easier.
So, if you’re interested, please check out my EECI 2010 Tweet Library. I’ll be adding more throughout the three days of EECI, so check back often. If you’d be interested in more EE-related tweet collections, let me know!
EECI Leiden Day 2 gets started in a few hours. I heard a lot of great feedback from attendees both directly and through Twitter. The talks from Day 1 looked fantastic and I’m looking forward to seeing the slides and related materials. Day 2 is looking like it also will not disappoint. Here’s the lineup for today.
Jamie Pittock (Erskine Design): Opening Keynote
Fred Boyle (nGen): Abstract to Absolut(e)
Greg Salt: Spam-Me-Not (I wish I could be there for this one. I’ve been talking to Greg about member spam for a while and if there’s an authority on it, Greg is the one).
Matt Weinberg: Ecommerce and ExpressionEngine: Moving Past PayPal
Veerle Pieters: Polish your design with CSS3
Brandon Kelly: (unknown)
Chad Crowell: IsEEforMe? The Business Case for ExpressionEngine
Travis Schmeisser: UI Principle & Tips
This is the last day of conference talks. Day 3 is the DevDay event.
I was still sipping my morning coffee but Ryan Masuga had already delivered his talk on the Git version control system at EECI in Leiden. His talk, subtitled “Everyday version control for ExpressionEngine using Git,” walks through the basics of Git and then how to apply it to ExpressionEngine. He also covered the workflow they use to manage changes on devot:ee.
Ryan’s slides are well annotated, so even if you weren’t able to be there (like me) for his talk, you should get a lot of out them.
Just released is a new accessory from the folks at Made by Hippo. Snippet Files “[a]llows you to create snippet files (*.snip) in the same way that you generate template files and sync them back to the database for a much more streamlined and rapid development cycle.”
This is a great way to edit your snippets in your favorite text editor and use them inside a version control system while developing a site. The snippet files will sync back into the database. I’m looking forward to trying it out.
EECI 2010 in Leiden, The Netherlands takes place this week from Wednesday to Friday.
The conference gets underway while most of us in the US are still sleeping but here’s the schedule for Day 1:
Stephen Lewis: Add-on Development Grows Up: Pain-Free Unit Testing in ExpressionEngine
Leevi Graham: expressionengine-addons.com - a case study in selling, supporting and marketing third party software.
Greg Wood: Editorial design on the web
Ryan Masuga: Let’s Git It On: Version Control for ExpressionEngine with Git
Wil Linssen: Safe Sex with Git
Joel Bradbury: Tuning your Engine
Jonathan Longnecker: Customizing EE 2’s Publish Area
Day 2 has a lot more great talks scheduled. The third day is dubbed “DevDay” and is a 12-hour event where attendees can “learn how to successfully design, build and market ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter driven websites and webapps.”
I’m not in attendance for this installment of EECI but EE Insider will still try to bring you as much coverage as possible. Have photos, feedback or information from EECI? Get in touch.
If you’re thinking of attending ExpressionEngine Camp in Denver, you might want to register in the next day or so. On September 30th the early bird ticket price ends. At $40, it’s a steal for an entire day of EE nerdery and bunches of prizes and giveaways.
The registration includes the full day sessions, lunch, beverages, free wifi, parking and a happy hour afterward. You’ll also have the chance to win some cool prizes, like the Mijingo bundle (Learning ExpressionEngine 2 screencasts series and the Securing ExpressionEngine 2 ebooklet by Mark Huot), an EE 2 license, CartThrob licenses and more. I’m also sending over about 20 EE Code t-shirts for them to distribute.
I wish I was able to attend this event, so I hope you don’t miss out. One-day conferences are a great way to spend time with like-minded people, learn a bunch and, most importantly, better than raking leaves in the yard all day.
At the BostonEErs meetup (Boston’s ExpressionEngine meetup group) this past week, they gave a presentation on the basics of performance tuning your EE website. Ruthie BenDor emailed to let me know about the presentation and said that it “[m]ight be useful for folks running EE sites under small or medium loads who want to make sure their sites don’t slow to a crawl.”
The popular Mac text editor TextMate may never see an update but at least people are still creating useful bundles that make using the abandonware even easier.
Ed Finkler (affectionately known as “funkatron” on the Twitters) created a TextMate bundle for MojoMotor templates and markup. Version 0.1 was released back in June and you can grab the bundle from GitHub. (Psssst, Ed, make a proper download under the Downloads section on GitHub. It’s easier for non-GitHubbians to grab the bundle). I still use the original TextMate bundle for EE template code and add-on development. Has anyone created EE 2 version of those?
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Some clients can’t live without a Microsoft Word toolbar in every text field, some prefer to write all the HTML themselves, and others live and die by Textile or Markdown. Maybe you quote all your projects with a WYSIWYG editor for text formatting, or maybe you train clients that What You See is Not Quite What You Get.
