Thread

In past “lives” I’ve been a United States Marine, a schoolteacher, a professional musician and a nonprofit executive. All these fields were suffering from shrinking budgets and/or mind-share in one way or another during the entire time I worked in them. So about 5 years ago I started looking for a career field that was growing and I found it online. It’s called the Internet and in the time it will take me to write this post, 100 new people will likely go “online” for their first time.

At the same time, I was also fascinated with the idea of a career where you could fit an entire million-dollar business into a laptop computer and a cell-phone. No inventory, no offices, no uniforms, no on-site staff, no fleet of vehicles and no commute; just a laptop, and a cell-phone. Well, ok. . . maybe a rack of speedy servers somewhere, but you get the idea.

About a year into my research on the web I found some website that looked pretty cool and at the bottom it had a little button; “powered by pMachine”.

I read every page of that website at least twice and my brain started to explode with ideas. I was a little intimidated by how cool pMachine was, and it wasn’t until my birthday in 2003 when I had the courage to take the plunge and buy my first license of pMachine. I spent about four weeks reading forum posts in the community and looking at the files and the code in pMachine before I tried to install it. Thankfully they’ve been erased by now, but there was a series of posts in the forums with Rick trying to explain to me how to install this software with FTP on a server? At the time this was all smoke and mirrors to me, but after several hours and a few dozen support-requests, both to poor Rick, and my ISP/Host, I had pMachine installed.

It took 100’s of support tickets in this community to help me get my brain around this software, this market and the people in it. Rick, Paul, and Chris (who’s moved on) spent hours and hours helping me in these forums the first couple of years. 

As I built my company, nearly everyone on the staff at EllisLab contributed something to it. Nevin and Julie continue to teach me about web hosting, Paul and Derek J. have added new features to the software and changed others to help meet my needs. Leslie and Rick have both referred clients to me over the years. Robin re-wrote a little navigation script for me years ago and I’m still using it in about half of our sites. Sue and Lisa and Derek A. have helped me problem solve dozens of challenges I’ve coded my way into, and I can’t tell you how many scrapes Jamie has pulled me out of. And there are 100’s of folks here in this community that have contributed to my personal knowledge base, coding ideas and general know-how with ExpressionEngine.

Fast-foreword five years from the day I purchased my first software license from this company and I’ll be on the team at EllisLab. Thanks to the EllisLab team and this community (is there over 49,000 of us already?) I’m well on my way towards my professional and personal goals, and through NetRaising I’ve been able to contribute something meaningful to a few of the organizations that are working to make this world a better place. I honestly couldn’t ask for a better experience, or a better opportunity than the one EllisLab is granting me.

I would just like to say a heart-felt and sincere thank you to everyone here for all the contributions, large and small you’ve made to NetRaising, to my family, and to my success in this new career. I’m really looking forward to what 2008 has in store for all of us, and looking forward to serving you.

Thank you!

Congrats to everyone. I thought 2007 was good…I can’t wait to see what you guys do in 2008. And I think Leslie should be Emperor.

As long as we don’t get any of his video blogs with him in his Emperors New Clothes!! 😊 😊
No offence Leslie!! 😊

Well done to all in their new positions. Really good names being added to a really already strong team. 2008 is looking very very rosy indeed!! 😊

Best wishes,

Mark

Indeed, congratulations to the EE team!

I’d be interested in seeing a top 20 list of companies with the most EE projects under their belts. Any chance that could be added to the website somewhere?

<disclaimer>
Les will have the final say in this, I’m just tossing thoughts into the mix here, so this is a non-official answer.
</disclaimer>

A top 20 list may be a difficult one to put together for a bunch of reasons. It might be fun to see, but the criteria for choosing the top 20 could be a bit difficult.

For example, many of the firms that might be considered “top”, have Nondisclosure Agreements with some pretty large fortune 100 and 500 type companies preventing them from telling anyone about some of their coolest projects. They might not even be able to tell us if that have this kind of client or not.

Also there is the matter of licenses vs. launches. You could buy up a bunch of licenses, but did you ever get the sites launched? So if you’re counting licenses, or launches, which might be the “real” test of a “top” company.

Then there’s the whole question of quality and/or complexity. One company launches 20 nearly identical blogs based on the same CSS file, slightly altered for each client, and all the sites have 100% valid code, but lack in true creativity. Compare that with a company that spent 18 months to launch one site with EE, and that site is truly amazing in its complexity and global reach. . . .

Then there are the folks who build and maintain great intranets or extranets, that the public can’t ever see. I worked on a blog for the VP of a fortune 100 company once, and because I didn’t work for the company, I never saw it live, I don’t even know if they ever used it. So I’ve built an EE blog for a fortune 100 company that perhaps thousands of folks read, or maybe they don’t. . . .

Or maybe some company does good solid work for small clients, nothing flashy (phun intended), takes great care of their clients and allows their staff time to contribute to the EE community as part of their job. . . would they get more points?

Maybe top companies would be chosen purely on customer testimonials?

I could go on; it’s sort of a can of worms though.

I guess there would have to be some stiff criteria for choosing the top companies, a committee to do the choosing/ranking, and someone to organize the list each year. . . I’m not sure if EllisLab is ready to go down that path.

I’m the new guy on the block (I don’t even start until next year), so don’t take my word for it though.

I was just thinking by licenses purchased.

In past “lives” I’ve been a United States Marine, a schoolteacher, a professional musician and a nonprofit executive. ...I found some website that looked pretty cool and at the bottom it had a little button; “powered by pMachine”.

Are you sure it said pMachine and not pMarine? Seriously thanks for your years of service on all counts.
It sounds like we at ExpressionEngine are bound to benefit from your experience now.
Keep on!

I was just thinking by licenses purchased.

That might not be totally accurate as I have a couple (I think) licenses purchased that I haven’t used, so there isn’t a project tied to them (yet…).

Indeed, congratulations to the EE team!

I’d be interested in seeing a top 20 list of companies with the most EE projects under their belts. Any chance that could be added to the website somewhere?

When someone purchases from EllisLab that is a private transaction. Listing the top 20 license purchasers would be a violation of our privacy agreement.

That Evangalist job is a much needed job. I would love to see some tutorials on the gallery module. I feel like it takes as much configuration to get it working well as it does to get the rest of the other features put together. That mountain might feel like a mole hill if I had some examples to build and work through the process.

Also, EllisLab needs a PR firm. Online and elsewhere I never hear about EE or CI. In fact, if you search CMS on Google I get a mambo and dot net nuke on the second page of results. I went 5 pages deep an didn’t find EE.

When EE2.0 comes out I want to see every web design website and magazine running cover articles on EE!

When EE2.0 comes out I want to see every web design website and magazine running cover articles on EE!

That might be considered as a sign of very active promotion and a poor product :coolgrin: People who look seriously will find it anyway and I think it is not easy to catch up with a too fast growing community. I prefer the way it is…

In a way, I like it the way it is as well. Took me a little while to find. I’d rather there be this smaller, higher-quality pool of people (like there are on these forums) than a huge, diluted base of EE “developers”. I think the people who “get it” already know about this CMS, and those who “get it” and don’t yet know about EE will find it.

Ditto - I see it as reward for doing your homework. If you don’t do your homework, you don’t deserve EE goodness 😉

But seriously, you/we/the community are EE’s PR - if you know of a magazine or web site that should be talking up EE but isn’t, offer to write them an article, they’ll probably appreciate the content. More good people using EE = more people contributing bits & pieces = more cool stuff for you/us/the community to play with - it’s a good feedback loop 😊