Get your wishlists ready! This Friday is BLACK FRIDAY, and we’re having a store-wide 40% off sale for 24 hours only (midnight to midnight PST) on this Friday, November 26, 2010. Use the coupon code “turkey.”
It’s a great deal on so many well-respected learning materials and too good to pass up!
The weekly EE Help Chat that takes place at 9 PM Eastern on Wednesdays will be not take place tonight because of the Thanksgiving holiday tomorrow in the USA. This is a week off we take every year but we’ll be back again next week.
However, the European EE Help Chat (3 PM EST) will take place as usual, so people who need help can always pop in. No EU citizenship required.
Part of the appeal of a Tumblr-style blog are the variety of dedicated post types for entries, making it quick and easy to post a snippet of information or a link, vs. committing to a full blog post. For our Journal we decided we’d be using five different post types: a full entry, a link, a photo, a quote, and a video post type. Like with most things in ExpressionEngine, there are multiple ways to accomplish this.
Andy’s writeup includes step-by-step instructions and even some template code to get you started. I’ve long considered doing something just like this, but Andy’s post saved me all the hard work. Nicely done! Check out his post to see how Andy did it:
Remember earlier this month when we told you about the Call for Papers for EECI 2011? Well the deadline is here, and if you have been putting off writing up a proposal, you need to get on it and submit that brilliant idea today. Robert Eerhart tweeted yesterday that he’s received a lot of good proposals, so it sounds like there is some great fodder for next year’s EECI.
If you want yours in the mix, you better act fast! Check out Leslie’s post for the details.
Unfortunately, we don’t all live in that dream world where everything is possible. In the real world we all know publishing platforms can be more confusing than the HTML they output. As you add functionality to your publishing platform you also add complexity.
I’m sure we’ve all been guilty of adding an extra field or two that we didn’t need to, all in the name of making things more dynamic and manageable. ExpressionEngine makes this so easy! But sometimes this makes the entire system less client friendly and even more prone to bugs.
What do you guys think? How do you strive for “responsible development”?
The 2010 AcademEE Awards are on! Vote for the top ExpressionEngine add-ons and the Developer of the Year. We have a short news item about it, or you can jump right in and vote. Thanks to all ExpressionEngine developers for their hard work over the past year!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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Garrett Winder 
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