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...

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...

Download Content Plugin

We just pushed a new, very simple free plugin to our GitHub account.  Download Content is handy if you are using channels to manage information that you want to have available as file downloads for your visitors.  It’s essentially a very simple way to utilize CodeIgniter’s download helper within an ExpressionEngine template.  It takes arbitrary content, and sends it to the browser with the proper file type headers for download.

For example, we’re using it on our intranet to have...

Outstanding Search Engine Optimization with ExpressionEngine

Editor’s Note: Lee Goldberg is President of Marketing and Strategy at Vector Media Group in New York City. He leads the online marketing initiatives in many Vector projects, including for companies like Nielsen and About.com. Some of you may know Vector’s President of Development and Technology, Matt Weinberg, from EECI 2010 in San Francisco and EECI 2011 in Amsterdam. The vast majority of Vector’s projects are built on ExpressionEngine.

Devot:ee Launches, 16 Prizes Up for Grabs!

Devot:ee is the brainchild of ExpressionEngine Pro Net member Ryan Masuga who defines it as “a website devoted to learning, teaching, tweaking, extending, and having fun with the ExpressionEngine CMS.” So far Ryan’s made good on all those statement.

Devot-ee.com has two unique things that set it apart from the growing number of ExpressionEngine community sites. First, it has the most comprehensive collection of ExpressionEngine Add-ons anywhere (including ExpressionEngine.com). I...

ExpressionEngine Tutorial in Web Designer #156

Paramore|Redd’s Brad Haynes wrote Adding dynamic styles with CSS for Web Designer Magazine #156 available now in the UK and the US (available in print only).

The tutorial guides a person through downloading ExpressionEngine to creating pages based on Paramore|Redd’s beautiful Us section. The tutorial provides a download location for the template and the PSD. Check it out (hint, pages 56-59)!