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This is a on-going series of entries where I highlight EE experiences.
If at first you don’t succeed try adding dynamic=“off”
Justin Long via Twitter
Sage advice! Of course it’s dynamic=“no” with EE2, but the spirit of the message is still very valuable!
Posted on Nov 17, 2010 by Brian Warren
Filed Under: What They're Saying About EE
It’s Wednesday, and that means we have some EE Help Chats today!
EE Help Chats are a great way to spend an hour talking shop, getting help figuring out something you’re been working on, or just spending time with the ever-so-helpful EE Community.
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
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.
See you there!
Posted on Nov 17, 2010 by Brian Warren
Filed Under: News
ExpressionEngine 2 brought some great customization capabilities to the publish page, including the ability to save different publish layouts, but Brian Litzinger’s Blueprints takes that a pretty big step further.
Blueprints lets you take control of your Publish Layouts and take Member Groups out of the equation. It is designed let you create Publish Layouts based on templates, not Member Groups.
No longer will you have to tell your client “Ignore this custom field, it won’t display in Template A, but works in Template B” or, “Ignore all these templates in the drop down, just use Template B or Template C for this Channel”. Nor will you have to create different channels for different page layouts. You can create a single “Pages” channel, assign it custom fields, and use that one channel for all your page types.
Sounds pretty clean and simple, but if you watch the video on Devot:ee you will see some other nice features like enhancements to the Edit menu and having a searchable structure list in the control panel sidebar. Another feature is the ability to limit the templates that the user can select for a page, along with thumbnails for those pages. Handy!
Check out Blueprints on Devot:ee or on Brian Litzinger’s add-on site, Bold Minded.
Posted on Nov 16, 2010 by Brian Warren
Filed Under: EE Add-ons
Michael Boyink is bringing his Train-ee classroom training to Atlanta, GA. This time it’s called “ExpressionEngine on my Mind” and looks like it will be a great program.
The dates are January 11-14, 2011. Early Bird registration price is $1195. The price after Friday, December 10th, 2010 is $1495. Registration isn’t open yet and the venue hasn’t been announced, but if you’re in the Atlanta area, definitely keep your eyes peeled for the rest of the info. For schedule and more information, check out the details at the Train-ee site.
Posted on Nov 16, 2010 by Brian Warren
Filed Under: Training
Garrett Winder posted a new version of Chris Ruzin’s ExpressionEngine TextMate bundle, with updates for EE2.0 tags and syntax. This is a handy thing to have if you’re an EE developer, and TextMate’s phenomenal bundle support is what keeps people sticking with it.
But wait, there’s more! Garrett also linked to Wes Baker’s ExpressionEngine 2 TextMate Bundle on GitHub, saying it’s even “more feature-rich” than his own.
Hey readers, which one’s the best? Are there more that I don’t know about? Post up any ideas you have in the comments.
Posted on Nov 15, 2010 by Brian Warren
Filed Under: Development Tools
EE Podcast #35 is up where Ryan and Lea discuss some recent EE news and share their thoughts on the Better CMS gimmick. Join them for 30 minutes of news and maybe a rant or two.
Listen and subscribe: EE Podcast #35: News Roundup, Better CMS on 5by5
Posted on Nov 15, 2010 by Brian Warren
Filed Under: EE Podcast
Greg Aker posted on the ExpressionEngine blog that the next ExpressionEngine release “will mark the end of PHP 4 support in ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter”.
I know many add-on developers have stopped supporting PHP 4, and I wasn’t alone in being surprised that EE2 supported it at all. Now mere months after EE2 has been out of beta, they are dropping PHP 4 support.
Do you see this affecting you? I know it won’t change anything in my world. I imagine we’ll see some indirect benefits as the EllisLab developers won’t have to spend as much time on backward compatibility.
Read the rest of Greg’s post as he outlines a few things you might want to be aware of, and if you’re worried at all that your server might not support the next release, check out the server wizard, which he links to from his post.
Posted on Nov 15, 2010 by Brian Warren
Filed Under: ExpressionEngine 2, News
New add-ons this week for everyone’s favorite #bettercms, known to all of us on Twitter as #eecms:
Posted on Nov 11, 2010 by Ryan Masuga
Filed Under: Weekly Devot:ee
Last week EE Insider contributor Noah Stokes ran into an issue with custom input fields in EE not allowing him to enter anything at all.
With the help of a friend (*cough* me *cough*) he remembered that he had blanked out the max length when he created those fields (no value at all) and apparently EE just makes the value 0 (instead of a usable default like 128).
Read his short write-up on it at Es Bueno: ExpressionEngine Custom Field Gotcha
(You might also be interested in Noah’s EE Insider article A Primer on Relationships in ExpressionEngine)
Posted on Nov 11, 2010 by Ryan Irelan
Filed Under: EE Add-ons, EE Fieldtypes, ExpressionEngine 2
Yesterday I posted a link to a post on Design Litmus about creating screencast user guides for your clients. That got me thinking: I wonder what other people do for user guides? I’ll bet others wonder this too, and what better venue to find out than making an Ask the Readers post!
The options for user guides are myriad. Some people create rich PDFs, like the ones from Headspace Design. Others, like Matt at Design Litmus, shoot screencasts and include them as accessories in the control panel. Then again, David in the comments from yesterday maintains that you’re “doing it wrong” if your client needs anything more than a well-organized site with simple inline documentation.
I’m sure there are more ideas than these, so today’s question is simple: How do you equip your clients to use the ExpressionEngine site you built for them?
Posted on Nov 11, 2010 by Brian Warren
Filed Under: Ask the Readers
My buddy Matt Crest at Design Litmus posted a great article about how to create screencast user guides for your clients. In the past, as I’m sure is the case for most people, he created written documentation or did in-person training to help clients get the hang of managing content on their brand new website. Neither of these solutions is particularly ideal, so he tried something else:
A better setup, however, is to create simple screencast videos of each capability or action a client would use. This way, they can see every hover, click, and keystroke so they know exactly how to do something. You can’t leave out a step in a video demo.
I think this is a stellar idea. I even mentioned this during our EE 2.0 talk at SXSW this year. Imagine a client who only needs to do a couple simple tasks on the site once every month or two. How annoying would it be for them to have to consult their notes or your long-winded how-to PDF just to try to re-remember how to do these things? A simple screencast is definitely the better option.
Matt goes on to explain his setup for doing screencasts, followed by a clever “Choose Your Own Adventure” feature in his post, letting you chose which way you want to embed the screencasts on your site, either in the front-end templates, or as an EE Control Panel Accessory. Your choice determines which tutorial you get. Awesome.
Design Litmus: ExpressionEngine User Guides with Screencasts
Posted on Nov 10, 2010 by Brian Warren
Filed Under: EE Add-ons, EE Accessories, ExpressionEngine 2
In ExpressionEngine it is easy to move entries between channels. But unless you have your Channel Assignments set up properly, it just won’t work! Watch this short (1m16s) video to learn how to move entries between channels in ExpressionEngine 2.
For more ExpressionEngine video tutorials, visit Mijingo.
Posted on Nov 09, 2010 by Ryan Irelan
Filed Under: Channels, Content Migration, Custom Fields
This is a on-going series of entries where I highlight EE experiences.
EE2 sends Super Admins an email if the index.php file was modified and the change not accepted in the CP. Nice touch!
Nicolas Bottari via Twitter
Posted on Nov 09, 2010 by Brian Warren
Filed Under: What They're Saying About EE
Leslie Doherty posted on the ExpressionEngine blog that they are already gearing up for EECI2011. They are taking a different approach to getting speakers than they have done in the past:
We’re taking applications for speaking topics. You’ll have the chance to give us input in what topics you’d like to hear as well as offer to speak, or suggest a speaker, and help shape the ExpressionEngine/CodeIgniter event of the year!
She includes a list of suggested topics and encourages submitting your own. If you have some good ideas and a bit of speaking chops than definitely apply. If you have some ideas about what should be talked about, then send them in!
Information about how to submit your ideas is all in the post.
Posted on Nov 09, 2010 by Brian Warren
Filed Under: Conferences, EECI 2011
Rob Sanchez released a plugin for EE2 that lets you use the CodeIgniter Active Record pattern in your templates the same way you use the standard query module. The syntax is pretty dang elegant, and if you’re at all used to active record I imagine you’ll find this a welcome improvement over the query module. I’d even say if you don’t use ActiveRecord at all and want something that feels more like native ExpressionEngine template tags, you should check this out.
More information and documentation can be found on the Active Record plugin page on Devot:ee.
Posted on Nov 08, 2010 by Brian Warren
Filed Under: EE Add-ons, EE Plugins
Our fearless leader Ryan just sent me a great tip that Lisa Wess wrote on her blog about Member Profiles:
One of my favorite new features of ExpressionEngine 2 is that the member templates are run through the full template engine. This means you can use add-on tags, channel entries tags, etc. Anything you can use in a template, you can use in your member templates.
So, someone asked if one could use nofollow links automatically in EE. Yes, you can, using the NoFollow plugin.
I love tips like these. It totally makes sense, it’s easy to implement, and it makes me wonder why this didn’t occur to me before. Check out the rest of Lisa’s post for details about how to implement it.
Posted on Nov 08, 2010 by Brian Warren
Filed Under: EE Add-ons, EE Plugins, ExpressionEngine 2
As usual, there is a whole slew of new stuff this week. To my mind, one of the most interesting items is NDG Flexible Admin which allows you to fully customize the control panel menu per member group. You can rename, re-order and remove menu items in order to create a more intuitive menu. Sounds pretty interesting if you’re using EE2.
We’ve also heard that people are fond of Beech, which is a simple extension for ExpressionEngine 2.x that closes the CP sidebar by default for all users.
Posted on Nov 04, 2010 by Ryan Masuga
Filed Under: Weekly Devot:ee
This is a on-going series of entries where I highlight EE experiences.
O.M.G. Seriously ExpressionEngine? You didn't auto-save my blog post? Die.
Evan Hamilton via Twitter
I feel your pain Evan. I’ve lost more than my fair share of posts to crashing browsers and lack of auto-save. I’ve lost enough stuff that I’m pretty paranoid now: Nearly everything I write for the web, including Basecamp and EE posts, is jotted down in a little app called Notational Velocity first.
Posted on Nov 04, 2010 by Brian Warren
Filed Under:
The Latest EE Podcast about Multiple Site Manager got me thinking that MSM would make a great topic for an “Ask the Readers” feature. I remember when EllisLab debuted MSM and it kind of blew my mind. What a wild idea, being able to run lots of websites from the same installation. What a dream! Over time, though, I have only had the opportunity to use it once or twice.
My questions to you the reader: Do you use Multiple Site Manager? How is it working out for you? Anything in particular EllisLab could do to make it better?
Share your thoughts in the comments.
Posted on Nov 03, 2010 by Brian Warren
Filed Under: Ask the Readers
The latest EE Podcast with Ryan and Lea has been posted, and it’s an interesting one about the use of Multiple Site Manager. They have a guest, John Rogerson, Director of Web at Sewanee, who currently manages over twenty sites at Sewanee, all using MSM on a single installation of EE.
If you’re at all curious about using Multiple Site Manager, or have used it for awhile and are just looking for some more insight from a pro, I recommend taking the time to listen!
Listen and subscribe: EE Podcast #34: MSM Sites with John Rogerson on 5by5
Posted on Nov 03, 2010 by Brian Warren
Filed Under: EE Podcast
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