Blog

ExpressionEngine Site Strategy with Dev Docs

Documentation First! Wait, Documentation First?

You hear it often enough - “Documentation First!”, but for an ExpressionEngine project?

As the Community continues to amaze with the quality, depth and breadth of sites developed in ExpressionEngine, the need for a centralized dev doc repo becomes more important. The nature of projects being built with EE edge ever closer to web apps, with incredible add-ons that are almost apps in their own right!

Documentation may be the least...

Building an ExpressionEngine Fieldtype

For my turn driving the EE blog, I thought I walk you through the creation of a new fieldtype.  Before we get started, I should probably give you a heads up about the approach I’m taking.  One of my professors once described an absolutely brilliant lecture he’d attended where a physicist was explaining some uber-high level ‘physicy’ stuff to an audience of laymen.  He did it by starting with the simplest of analogies.  Of course, the simplest of analogies was totally wrong.  But once...

The state of ExpressionEngine 2.5.0…

The ExpressionEngine 2.5.0 release has been moved from late March so that we can incorporate a first party solution for the “Euro cookie” law in 2.5.0 instead of having two releases within a very short time frame.

For those unfamiliar with the “Euro cookie” law, here’s a brief summary of the situation and why its important that an official first party solution is available.

As part of the European Parliament’s Directive 2009/136/EC, storing information on a user’s computer (through...

Building a Plugin: Replacing Magpie

Writing add-ons for ExpressionEngine isn’t terribly difficult once you know what you’re doing. However, before you know what you’re doing it can be a frustrating tangle of guess and check. I vividly remember writing my first plugin, and then my first extension, trying to wrap my head around how hooks work. Then I tried my hand at writing a Multiple Site Manager compatible extension and there was more confusion there.

I want to walk you through writing a plugin, the best first step...

So Long, Farewell PHP 4

Our next ExpressionEngine release will mark the end of PHP 4 support in ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter. For most of you, this should be a non-issue. PHP 4 was originally released in May of 2000 and reached End of Life in December of 2007.  If you think about it, PHP 4 is to us what Internet Explorer 6 is to you.

We will be requiring PHP 5.1.6. The easiest way to see if your current host meets the requirements is to download and test using the Server Wizard. If your host does not meet...

Will the Real SAEF Please Stand Up?

It’s no secret that the release of ExpressionEngine 2 revealed some limitations in our current Stand Alone Entry Form (SAEF). In large part, this is due to our new approach to custom fields and the resulting variety and potential complexity of new field types. Believe me, we are as frustrated with it as you are.

The current approach just isn’t cutting it and putting band-aids on the code isn’t a ‘fix’ we find acceptable. We also have to acknowledge that Add-ons have been...

Acknowledge, Identify, React

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.

Solving this problem first required that we identify exactly what the cause was.  We have talented developers who love our products and our community, so this was...