ExpressionEngine Community Forums

A Present for Your Friday

2008-07-04T13:47:40-06:00

Some of you may be aware that Derek Allard and I spent the last two weeks at a make-shift office in Bend, working on some of the more difficult challenges in developing 2.0. Or maybe you just noticed our absence from the forums the past few weeks. Either way, we continually get asked “How is 2.0 coming along?” Well, the three-day weekend seems as good a time as any to give a micro-update on the progress of the next major version of ExpressionEngine.

ExpressionEngine 1.6.4 Maintenance and Security Release

2008-06-26T18:33:53-06:00

Development of 2.0 is still in full swing, and we know everyone is looking forward to the new version, but we are still committed to keeping 1.x best in class, and keeping our high standards for quality and security. With that in mind, we are today releasing ExpressionEngine version 1.6.4, a maintenance and security release and is recommended for all users.

Tweet TwEEt

2007-04-13T17:27:05-06:00

I’m sure if Mr. Wilson creates a Twitter ExpressionEngine add-on, he would name it TwEEt, so I will not step on his established naming convention. Some recent reactivity to a thread about Twitter led me to go ahead and make a plugin for fetching and displaying Twitter timelines today. I’m really rather surprised that no 3rd party developers had already done so.

Show Us Your Mug!

2008-07-02T13:21:24-06:00

Its time for a little fun with video! We’re adding a new video section to the ExpressionEngine Showcase. If you use ExpressionEngine in your business, organization or for personal use, we want to hear why, and we want to see your face and hear your voice when you tell us! Smile big, take a deep breath, and in 2 minutes or less, tell us why you choose ExpressionEngine. We’ll add your video and a link back to your website.

Post Permalink or Show Us Your Mug page for details.

Build Engine City Times with Ryan Irelan, Feedback Wanted

2008-05-27T14:01:04-06:00

This morning The Pragmatic Programmers released a series of ExpressionEngine screencasts developed by EE guru Ryan Irelan. The screencasts follow Ryan as he builds Engine City Times, a fictional newspaper site.

Post Permalink.

SEO: Meta Tags

2008-01-24T21:28:57-06:00

Another part of SEO that many people place importance on is the ability to have appropriately populated meta tags. Using ExpressionEngine, it is extremely easy to have page-relevant meta tags by making use of the ability to set up your own custom fields, categories, and even tags.

Onwards!

It’s My Life, Don’t You Forget

2008-06-04T00:07:45-06:00

For those of you old enough, you might be humming a tune in your head right now, one of the more pop-flavored releases by the 80’s band “Talk Talk”. And now my abrupt segue into Talking.

We like to talk. Online communities thrive when people of similar interests find ways to talk to one another effectively. Discussion forums are a natural product of that desire. This is great in situations where conversations are the best way to communicate the information we desire. But at times there’s a need for greater structure, something more akin to a reference, but still one that grows from the vast knowledge of people with similar interests and varying levels of skill. Hence, the wiki model. Wikipedia is so successful (in terms of contribution anyway) because people who are deeply interested in a topic are given a sense of ownership of the content, and strive to make it the best it can be.

But wikis do a poor job with the former type of communicating, the conversational variety. And as a glance at any of the Wikipedia discussion pages shows, there is a close tie to the quality of the content with the participation in the discussions. But blech, it’s just another article, editable by anyone, cleverly disguised as a discussion with headings, indenting, and a table of contents. Why don’t wikis let us talk with the sophistication of a discussion forum? Thanks to ExpressionEngine’s extensible nature, the wiki and forum modules can talk, and now, so can you.

ExpressionEngine 2.0: fully CodeIgnited!

2008-03-14T06:45:27-06:00

At South by Southwest during our “ExpressionEngine 2.0 sneak peek” I got a chance to reveal some big news about the future of ExpressionEngine that I wanted to explore in some more detail here for anyone who wasn’t able to attend.

ExpressionEngine 2.0 is built on CodeIgniter.

CodeIgniter (http://www.codeigniter.com) is our Open Source PHP based framework. You can learn more at CodeIgniter.com, but in a nutshell it’s the toolkit that many powerful applications are built on, and now we can add ExpressionEngine to that list.

This is great news if you’re an ExpressionEngine user, a CodeIgniter user, or both. As an ExpressionEngine developer you will have a greatly expanded community of talented developers working with you, and for you. I said during my talk, “The nerds are excited, and you should be excited that the nerds are excited”. As a dyed in the wool nerd, I stand by this!

Read on!

Building a Bug Tracker: Filtering by Assignment

2008-06-19T20:08:08-06:00

Within a bug tracker, it can often be helpful to see who the bug is assigned to. For this reason, we set up the bug_tracker_assignment custom field. Now we’re going to implement filtering by that custom field.

In fact, the structure is already in place, so this will be extremely easy to add; it is just a matter of a few conditionals and a few links. Ready?

Onwards!

Building a Bug Tracker: Filtering by Status

2008-06-06T00:04:32-06:00

Along with filtering by severity, and viewing one’s own bug reports, it is also important to be able to filter by status. This allows developers to see what still needs to be worked on, and allows users to see what may still be open and what may already be fixed.

For this purpose, we’ll use the same methods that we used in the article on Filtering by Severity.

Ready? Onwards!