Forum Regulars may have noticed that the Official EllisLab Announcement Forum is gone. It was getting redundant to post things in the EE Blog, have the discussion in the Forums, and then post it again in the Official Announcement Forum. For the few of you who may have relied on it as your news source, please follow the EE Blog instead. That’s what it’s here for.
We are very pleased to introduce Agile Records, the ExpressionEngine 2.0 Example Site created by Erskine Design (they just launched their redesign).
We’re not going to go into a lot of detail about the Example Site yet or provide more screenshots at this point. After all, we want to keep some things a surprise. But we did ask Simon Collison and Greg Wood to give some insight into Agile Records development.
Why a record label?
Colly: It was Jamie Pittock’s idea, and we all agreed. In some senses it comes from a background working on music sites. Back in 2004 I was learning what EE could do way beyond the documentation, simply because I often had to in order to cater for the ridiculous requests of record companies. It was music sites that helped me realise the power of EE. Discographies, relating news items to releases, tour events using future entries, forums for obsessive fans - all that stuff was possible with EE, even with version 1.1.
Greg: We did consider quite a few other concepts for the learning tool, things like an educational institution or something more government/business based, but ultimately a record label was more fun and something a little bit different.
Colly: A record label is an ideal catalyst for learning EE approaches that would be applicable to many other models. It was also fun to invent the half-dozen stupid band names, album titles and cover artwork we supplied with the finished site.
Leslie: I’m inserting myself into this particular question. We (EllisLab) loved the idea of a Record Label because it lends itself well to a diverse audience. It shows that EE can be used at the enterprise level but being a record label meant that we could let Erskine have a grand time with ideas, really personalize it and stay away from the “stuffed shirt” boring design that can typify a “business” website. The idea is easily interpreted for what a person needs it to be - a business website, personal website, something in between, portfolio, etc…. A Record Label would naturally make use of many of EE’s out-of-the-box features which is important to a learning tool.
How did you come up with Agile Records specifically?
Greg: We’re all music obsessives and big fans of independent record stores where prices are handwritten, everywhere is dusty and covered in stickers and posters and the staff are so snobbish that you dare only ask about certain bands. The inspiration for Agile was something like the “Championship Vinyl” store from High Fidelity - a mixture of that and cool UK indie labels like Rough Trade or Creation.
Colly: Greg calls it a “metaphor”. It was important for it to feel authentic, so we actually created personas for the staff, and invented band biographies and so on. Because our “metaphor” was carefully created and felt real, we had a good understanding of how to build a website for it. The name “Agile” is a specific reference to how adept EE is at handling any challenge one might throw at it.
How did you approach the actual design of the site in terms of what would go in it?
Colly: Very meticulously. Old skool EE users like us will always go on about the learning curve for more advanced builds, or the Eureka moment - the time when you suddenly realise just how incredible EE is - how you can go way beyond the manual and build an entire business on it!
As a team we invest a lot of time in process and research. So, we spent a few weeks thinking about the key features of EE - both the nuts and bolts, and also the things we think are utterly cool. There were lots of charts, diagrams, lists and sketches being thrown around the office.
Greg: As advanced users of EE, we all remember the Eureka moment Colly mentioned, and we were passionate about building a site that could go some way to speeding up that learning curve for users, and also show newcomers that its way, way more than just a blog tool or blog-standard CMS.
Colly: We were aware that we couldn’t do anything too ambitious, so we keep the focus on smart use of weblogs (can I say “channels” yet?), categories, statuses, dates and fairly basic relationships. We also didn’t want to give Derek Jones too hard a time building our vision with EE 2.0!
What was your approach to the HTML & CSS for the site knowing that a wide variety people, from standardistas to people brand new to HTML would be viewing it?
Colly: My entire approach was to let Greg build it.
Greg: I like to think that the HTML and CSS is simple enough so beginners can go into the source and learn something about classes, IDs or floats, but also has something to offer more advanced front-end developers; they may finally get their head around CSS positioning or realise more creative ways to use alpha transparent PNG images. It doesn’t do anything particularly amazing, but it’s always nice to think that someone can learn something from what you’ve created.
Colly: I’d encourage anyone to view the source and CSS of the Agile site and look at how Greg labels the HTML and CSS, and orders his styles and makes the CSS work so hard, encouraging lean HTML. Its a window into how we at Erskine build all our sites, and the carefully-honed conventions we use.
We worked very hard to ensure that the Example Site also promotes current best practice and encourages all EE users to wave the web standards flag. Hopefully people will spend time picking it apart and seeing how certain effects are created.
Greg: Although Agile is a tool for learning EE as a leading CMS system, we hope it also opens a few eyes to what is possible with intelligent CSS and visual design.
Devot:ee is Ryan’s (Masuga Design) upcoming site dedicated to “everything ExpressionEngine”. Devot:ee hasn’t officially launched yet but if you follow @devot_ee on Twitter you can get updates, such as The First Annual AcademEE Awards.
This year we came up with a few basic categories and picked the winners ourselves. The nominating and voting process for the 2008 awards was entirely not fair and subject to our whim, but next year we would like to get you involved in nominations and voting, and be able to offer the winners something for all their hard work….
A hearty congrats from EllisLab to this year’s winners! Oh, who won? Go find out!
Be sure to sign up for Devot-ee.com’s official launch on the home page.
Its the 19th and we promised a 2.0 update. Work on 2.0 continues to progress smoothly. There are now 1 and a half 1.x modules to convert to 2.0. One of them will be fairly straight forward, the other is tricky because we’ve set a new direction for it and we’re working through the best way to implement it.
Since we’ve given ourselves some extra time to round 2.0 out we also added a major new feature to the Control Panel. We’re not ready to say what it is yet except that it works great with the new File Manager and Derek Allard did most of the heavy lifting. You can bribe him with cookies and beer to tell you what it is. He won’t do it, but he’ll appreciate the cookies beer!
Here’s what to expect next in terms of 2.0 news.
We introduced the Example Site in our last update. We’re still working on the interview with Erskine. The holiday makes everyone’s schedule crazy so while we hope to bring you the interview before Christmas it may wait until early January.
Speaking of Christmas, we’re taking a much needed break. The whole company will be off December 24/25 and December 31/January 1st. Sales and support will be very scaled back during that time but like always we will be able to deal with any emergencies that come up.
First week of January Derek Jones (CTO) is flying in and we’ll have our traditional World Domination Summit with Rick here in Bend OR. This means you can expect the next major 2.0 update to happen second week of January.
I don’t want to leave you completely without something to discuss in the forums so here is a preview of the Example Site…
Happy Holidays!
Nicholas Rivera, Beth Berry, and Angela Wood! Congratulations to the three of you! You’ll be joining Mike and the rest of the class for EE training in January down in San Antonio Texas.
While the Scholarships are gone there are spots left for the class. You can register right away or head over to Train-ee for more information.
Once again we’d like to thank Airbag Industries and the EE Gurus in our Professional Network who made these Scholarships possible. If you haven’t been to their sites yet, please check them out, subscribe to their blogs, and post a thank you note on the forums for the tangible way they give back to the EE Community:
bGlobal Sourcing
Clear Fire Studios
EE Coder
EE Templates
Hambo Development
Lealea Design
Made by Fresh
OnWired
paramore | redd
Slim Kiwi
Yellowseed Design
For those of you using ExpressionEngine in high traffic environments: political/government sites like Change.gov or gov.ca.gov, social action groups like We Can Solve It, daily newspapers like Periódicos Zócalo, entertainment sites like iLounge and the Sundance Film Festival, business sites like BMI and paidContent.org, or even high profile blogs like Subtraction and Veerle Pieters, there’s a hidden treat in the last build of ExpressionEngine, released this past Friday. Ok, well maybe not hidden, but as we don’t normally add features to ExpressionEngine in build updates, this one’s a bit under the radar.
The impact that the feature can have though is profound, and if you don’t actively enable these features, there’s no functionality change, so we made the decision to release it now instead of waiting for a version update. What am I going on about? Tracking Preferences, and an associated and highly technical page in the user guide for handling extreme traffic with ExpressionEngine.
MySQL’s default storage engine (MyISAM) is designed for efficiency with reading, which is good since ExpressionEngine is a read-heavy application in terms of database usage, not write-heavy. When writes are made to tables with the MyISAM storage engine, it must establish a lock on the entire table for the write to occur. ExpressionEngine has a few things that it tracks to provide bits of information to the site owner. How many times a template has been accessed. How many users are currently online. Where inbound links are coming from. How many times a particular entry has been viewed. On high traffic sites, or under extreme and unusual traffic events (i.e. Digg), these normally innocuous bits of tracking suddenly become a problem, as you have thousands of visitors hitting the site simultaneously, and for each one of those visitors, MySQL is locking the associated table to try to write to it. Before you know it, there’s a queue of table locks and MySQL just can’t keep up.
Now certainly hardware, infrastructure, configuration, and monitoring play a huge role in whether or not the environment can handle this when it occurs, but sometimes it simply may not be able to, or there’s not a budget for the toys that need to go into place to do so. And these bits of data may not be meaningful to you anyway, particularly if you are using third party traffic analysis software. With the exception of Referrer and Entry View tracking, prior to this build, you would have had to hack the core files to disable these features. Now you can disable them temporarily or permanently in your control panel or your config file (handy if the sudden traffic burst prevents you from being able to access your control panel!). There’s even an emergency “switch” you can put in your config file that will shut them all off at once.
Additionally, if you have a highly capable server administrator, the “master switch” can be triggered dynamically based on your traffic. For instance, in your environment, if you and your server admin know that these locks start to become a problem anytime you have more than 800 online users, you can dynamically disable all tracking when that threshold is reached; no manual action required, no more emergency pages when you’re on the beach sipping the refreshing beverage of your choice, ExpressionEngine will take care of it for you.
The Scholarship Applications for the January Train-ee ExpressionEngine Class are due by 5pm Pacific today (Wednesday, December 10th). The ExpressionEngine Scholarship page has all the information you need to apply.
If you know of any last minute people who haven’t applied but should or are taking their sweet time finessing their apps, give them a reminder that time is running short!
These Scholarships are made possible by Airbag Industries the EE Gurus in our Professional Network:
bGlobal Sourcing
Clear Fire Studios
EE Coder
EE Templates
Hambo Development
Lealea Design
Made by Fresh
OnWired
paramore | redd
Slim Kiwi
Yellowseed Design
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