Thread

Just a quick one, does anyone know of a good community for expression engine developers, where people share their knowledge and answer expression engine related questions?

I know the doh bit, *this* forum, but I’ve posted a few questions in the how-to forums (one under this account and a couple under my bosses account) and no one seems to know/care.

It seems that the only way to get help is to go to the pre-sales area, but as I did the stupid thing and actually bought the full license, I don’t feel right posting there.

Hope this doesn’t sound offensive and thanks for the links.

I’ve been lurking in these forums for a while now and understand how you feel. Over the last year the technical discussion has went way down and you’re not the first to notice (http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/142717/).

The community is split between the big developers and the brand new users. The middle group, users who have a knowledge of the software, development and hacking e.t.c., has pretty much disappeared. Something needs to be done to encourage more users in the middle group.

I think the whole EE scene is too closed for many people, at least that’s the appearance of it.

Personally, I have a license but don’t actually use EE for a number of reasons. I like to keep an eye on this community for some reason though.

I am really regretting convincing my boss to use expression engine for this project, as I have just wasted 3 weeks working with it and now understand that I would have built a custom CI powered solution ages ago instead.

What’s extremely funny and sad is the fact that you pay all this money (ee 2.0 + forums + MSM = A LOT) and you end up with a dead end.

I miss the CI forums.

I think EE is a fantastic cms but the obvious problem is that you have to pay. It’s not so much the price that’s the problem it’s the fact that charging anything is a huge barrier to entry. Most people who have some development experience would rather just hack at an existing cms than pay for a little bit of convenience.

That is why there is that gap in the middle. Moving EE to CodeIgniter was a brilliant idea but it’s not going to bring the developers they hoped to bring.

well… if you have bought a license then you get the technical support associated with that…
I have always found the how-to forums very quick and responsive for all directly EE based questions.

Where i have seen it be a little slow is when i have wanted to start developing add-ons, etc, and asking technical questions along these lines - but i have always felt that this is not their responsibility - but admit help in these areas would be nice… i likened it to owning a computer, i get support if it breaks and how to use it, but not on how to develop software for it…

what questions are you stuck on anyway?

I agree with McFly, I’m a CI / non-framework-php dev and the single reason I wanted to use EE is because it’s based on CI (and I thought, that if something goes wrong, I’ll just use CI stuff within it…), not quite the case and I’m really regretting it.

My issue is that I need to build a fairly complex site that will be available in 9 languages.

After reading through various tutorials and how-to’s I figured out how to do that, however, the only feasible approach that I can take (and still please my clients requirements, when it comes to the backend data entry) is using cookies for the language selection, not using the language selection in the uri and using a single template for every language.

This is still pretty simple in my book, it’s heavy on the server, but still does the job.

How I intend to do this (I’m usign EE 2.0):
1. The user clicks an area, that sets a cookie (gonna use jquery, as the site relies heavily on it and does not care about non-js users) and reloads the page.
2. The page checks if the lang cookie is set, if it is, defines the content of the cookie as a variable.
3. The variable is read by every single bit that requires text, something like this is used:

{if title_<?php echo $lang; ?>} {title_<?php echo $lang; ?>} {if:else} {title} {/if}

This way the required language is displayed if the related custom-field is populated via the backend, otherwise English is displayed as a fallback.

Now the only place where this collapses is the list of categories. I have no fricking clue how to change the names of the categories themselves, depending on the required language.

A product will be associated to a category and then the list of categories will be displayed as a nav list. This nav list, at least as far as I know will have to be in English across all of the languages.

I have no clue how to work around this :(

EDIT
Custom fields for categories :D enough said.

well a quick though from my head would be to not use categories! use a weblog/channel for your categories, and then Playa or a similar relationship option to connect them…

is this not then problem solved???

Personally i would use either subdomains, or other URI based bits for the multi-language part - but then again i do not know the requirements, ins and outs, of this project, etc. I also originally came form CI before EE2 existed so at this stage i would still be using 1.6.8 and not 2.0 - but if you have enough history with CI then this should not be a problem, just that some of the plugin, etc will not be available.

Why don’t you contact Ben and ask him how he did this multi-language site and consider as well whether his multi-language module might suggest a 2.0 solution?

it would be useful if we could separate the parts of this post that pertain to your how-to thread from the parts that are complaints about not getting free help within 15 hours of posting about a rather complicated topic.

daulex, not to be dismissive of your issues, but I think you are in the same boat I was in about 13 months ago when I first started using EE: you’re a good developer with experience doing complicated things elsewhere using other frameworks/rolling your own/etc.  The problems you have aren’t going to be typical problems of the EE community… and when you ask a question there won’t be many people who can answer it.  Those people are scattered all over the world and probably don’t have time to check the forums continuously while they’re at work anyway.

That was my experience here… because it is very frustrating, I try my best to weigh in on the questions that aren’t easy to answer when I have some experience with the topic.  You’ll probably be best served by reading the developer docs to understand what is available to you under the hood, and writing quick plugins when EE doesn’t want to do something you need.  I came up with a number of incredibly complex solutions to what should’ve been easy problems using nested template tags, embedded templates, and PHP in templates before taking the plunge into plugins… life has been much simpler since then.

ender, that’s precisely my point, the simple things that the high end ee devs know off the top of their head are dead-ends to me. I run a web design forums board and I’m often annoyed by the “stupidity” of the questions people ask, however it being my board and if none of my moderators are up for helping, I feel compelled to write the answer, that is why I sort-of expect the same here. I do understand how stupid this “hope”.

On the free help subject, I also posted the same question on experts-exchange (with a good bounty) and on stackoverflow, neither of the sites helped, that is why I wanted to whine about it for a bit. This place seemed like the best spot to do it 😉.

nevsie, thank you for the help man, however I solved my problem and I’m still using categories. The bit of code that I am using there (the one I posted above) can also be used for categories (feeling teh power of EE), given that I create custom fields for the categories in the required languages.

for whatever it’s worth I saw the question on stackoverflow as well (I subscribe to the expressionengine tag in my RSS), but having not done a multilingual site before I really didn’t have much to say on the subject. 😉

ender, you know what I find weird? Building a multilingual site has nothing to do with multiple languages, it’s just pulling custom fields that are related to a defined variable.

I mean this is some really basic stuff, isn’t it?

What about something like this:
http://sundaymorning.jaysalvat.com/

or the plugin already mentioned?

Nah, that wouldn’t work for long text or tricky category names. Google translate is awesome, but is not suitable for sites of respectable companies *yet* 😊

I wont go into it…it is tough to break the ice in Any community 😊
Have you considered this: http://expressionengine.com/wiki/Multi_language_site_alternative/