Posted by Derek Jones on September 21, 2011 Comments
The EllisLab family of sites (ExpressionEngine.com, CodeIgniter.com, MojoMotor.com, and EllisLab.com) will be down for scheduled maintenance on Thursday, September 22, 2011 beginning at approximately 10-11pm Eastern and lasting a number of hours. Access to critical resources such as the store, your product downloads, and documentation will be unaffected.
Posted by Leslie Camacho on September 20, 2011 Comments
EECI 2011 is just a few weeks away and everyone at EllisLab is working hard to get stuff done so we can relax, hangout, and have a great time with all of you.
I thought it would be helpful to post the EllisLab todo list so you know what to expect between now and October 19.
1. Post “ExpressionEngine 2.3 Release Date & Schedule Info” to the EE Blog. Note: Its my fault I didn’t get this out last week like I promised on Twitter. It will go up Wednesday, September 21. Here is the short version. EE 2.3’s tentative release date is the second week of October. We moved it back because the feedback we’ve gotten is that the 8-10 week release schedule is too aggressive, so we’re going to try 12-14 weeks instead. “Too aggressive?” What does that mean? The post will explain and we’re counting on you to voice your opinion and provide feedback.
2. Release EE 2.3, second week of October.
3. Major behind the scenes overhaul of all EllisLab websites. This isn’t a redesign or refresh. We’re prepping our sites to take advantage of our forth-coming store overhaul. Which brings us to…
4. Launch the new store. We’ve been working with David and Tony from Brilliant2 to relaunch the ExpressionEngine Store on BrilliantRetail, their excellent ecommerce add-on for ExpressionEngine. They’ve been a joy to work with and we’ve given them permission to release all the custom work we commissioned into future versions of BrilliantRetail. We can’t be more specific about this until the store launches. Honestly we’re not sure if this will happen before or after EECI, but we’re doing our best to make it before.
5. Email out the first issue of PixelBuzz, the EllisLab newsletter. Tentatively slated to go out the first week of October, we’ve got a tutorial lined up from Creat-ee to kick off the first issue.
If you’re not signed up for the newsletter yet, you can do so here.
6. Finish the EECI keynote. If there is something you want me to address in the EECI Keynote you can leave a comment here, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), or yell at me on Twitter. I can’t promise to include everything, but I’ll try. For sure the Keynote will cover:
7. Figure out where to eat in NYC. Apparently the folks at Vector Media Group are putting together a Fine Dining Guide for all us NYC noobs.
As always, speak your mind! We’ll see you at EECI.
Posted by Derek Jones on September 06, 2011 Comments
The Reactor team has written a CodeIgniter contribution guide over at CodeIgniter.com. If you’ve been wondering how to get involved in the community’s accelerated development of CodeIgniter, this is the best place to start. It covers everything from how to set up your GitHub account, to Git-Flow, coding and documentation requirements, and the mechanics of making a pull request to the CodeIgniter repository.
You can read the full contribution guide here: CodeIgniter Contribution Guide
Posted by Derek Jones on August 25, 2011 Comments
On the back of last week’s announcement of EllisLab’s change to Git, a number of people have asked for some assistance in migrating their Mercurial repositories. If you Google for “convert from Mercurial to Git” you will find a number of very good, concise tutorials on converting your repos from Mercurial to Git. So rather than completely rehash those, here are some simple steps applied to an example CodeIgniter repository followed by links to what we think are the most helpful resources for converting your repositories.
It should be stated that if you aren’t maintaining a fork with changes and then all you need to do is the following and you’re ready to go (requires git-flow):
$ git clone git@github.com:EllisLab/CodeIgniter.git
$ cd CodeIgniter
$ git flow init
The instructions below assume that I have a Mercurial CodeIgniter fork in my ~/Sites/repos directory named codeigniter-hg. Your locations will vary, but the process will be the same.
$ cd ~/Sites/repos
$ ls
codeigniter-hg fast-export-fab6d6f
$ git init codeigniter
$ cd codeigniter
$ ../fast-export-fab6d6f/hg-fast-export.sh -r ../codeigniter-hg
master: Exporting simple delta revision 755/2499 with 0/9/0 added/changed/removed files
master: Exporting simple delta revision 756/2499 with 0/9/0 added/changed/removed files
master: Exporting simple delta revision 757/2499 with 0/2/0 added/changed/removed files
...
$ git checkout
$ git flow init
$ git remote add github git@github.com:EllisLab/CodeIgniter.git
$ git pull github develop
That’s all there is to it. For a more in-depth look at migration or of the git-flow branching model, please read the references below.
Converting from Mercurial to Git - Hivelogic
Easy switch from Mercurial to Git - Jérôme Renard
Why aren’t you using git-flow? - Jeff Kreeftmeijer
A short [video] introduction to Git Flow - Mark Derricutt
Set up Git - github:help
Posted by Derek Jones on August 20, 2011 Comments
Today EllisLab completes its distributed source control system transition from Mercurial to Git. We began this transition at the end of June and have been using Git internally for over a month now, including the CodeIgniter Reactor engineers who joined us in July.
Since making the change from Subversion to a distributed version control system in March of 2010, EllisLab has been a proponent of Mercurial. The few divergent features between it and Git played a large role in the team’s choice of Mercurial for our specific needs. But those needs along with our team composition has greatly changed, which brings us full swing, where those few divergent features now clearly point us at Git.
Beanstalk was also instrumental in this switch, as one of the original reasons we settled on Mercurial was its user-friendliness to those shy of the command line. In addition to their fantastic access and management features, their online code editor allows some changes to be made without a staff member even having to learn how to clone a local repository.
Mercurial served us well, as has the social coding web site Bitbucket, where CodeIgniter enjoyed a prominent position as one of the most followed projects of all time. And we do not plan in the short term to be leaving that community entirely.
A source control system is only a tool though and would not typically warrant a public announcement unless it impacted the community. Once the decision was made, our challenge was to execute in a way that benefitted not only our staff but our community as well. So I am pleased to announce as part of this transition that EllisLab today has a significant presence on GitHub, beginning with the following:
We have also latched on to git-flow, a branching model that has already proven itself valuable in improving our ability to get incremental releases to you more quickly and less prone to error. If you are a Git user, we highly recommend it.
Finally, GitHub now joins Twitter, Google+, and Facebook as a place where we exist to serve the Community. We’ll see you there.
Posted by Leslie Camacho on July 29, 2011 Comments
Updated August 17, 2011
Part of embracing “user experience” as a way of life is going beyond the software itself and making sure that everything fits as part of the whole. One area that we feel has been a “sub par” experience (at best) is how paid upgrades and Download Access to our software are handled.
Whenever we discuss new features, improvements, and other things to look forward to in ExpressionEngine’s or MojoMotor’s future there is a unified response from the Community.
“Will it be a paid upgrade?”
The old answer to that question got complex fast and doesn’t fit with the “whole.” Today, we change that with a new upgrade policy for all our Commercial software that is easy, simple, and makes you smile. Here is the new policy.
“When you purchase our software, all updates to that version are free.” That’s the new way starting right now.
When you own ExpressionEngine 2 or MojoMotor 1 you won’t pay for “updates”, only upgrades such as ExpressionEngine 3 or MojoMotor 2. A more developer-centric way of saying this is that all “right of point” updates are free and all “left of point” upgrades are paid.
This also simplifies Download Access for you. “When you purchase our software, you’ll always have access to the latest release to the version purchased.” Your Download Access won’t expire or go away for any reason.
Please note that this new policy applies to both active and expired ExpressionEngine 1.x Download Accounts. If your account was expired, you can download again for free. However, please note that the price to upgrade to ExpressionEngine 2 has not changed. If your Download Account was expired at the time the new policy went into effect, the upgrade cost for that license will be $50 + the old renewal fee. If your EE 1.x Download Account was active when the policy went into effect, the upgrade price is still just $50. We think this is the fairest way to get everybody on the new system.
Your trust in EllisLab and championing of ExpressionEngine, CodeIgniter, and MojoMotor make this possible. We’re here to serve and make your internet life as successful as possible.
Thank you for choosing EllisLab and spreading the word!
Posted by Leslie Camacho on July 25, 2011 Comments
We have a big opportunity open on our dev team and we want it exclusive to our Community before advertising it anywhere else. If you love ExpressionEngine, excel at PHP/MySQL (and related web technologies), and want to play a significant part in EE’s future, this is the job for you. Next week we’ll start posting in all the usual places, but we want to give everyone here a head start.
Please spread the word far and wide in the Community!
Leslie Camacho, CEO
EllisLab, Inc.
—————-
EllisLab is looking for a Senior Software Engineer/ExpressionEngine Specialist. You will work to make ExpressionEngine better everyday, and you will be an active part of the Community. Knowing that the best web professionals use your code motivates you. You get to work from the comfort of your own home (US citizenship/Visa/Work permit required).
In addition to being exceptional at PHP and related web technologies, this position has the following requirements.
You must love ExpressionEngine and have a passion to make it better every day. Real world experience with EE is required.
You must be a customer advocate. You care deeply that people build real businesses and fulfill their personal dreams using your code, every day. You are passionate about making their experience perfect and understand that your code and your ability to work with a team is critical in making that a reality. EllisLab writes the paycheck, but we all work for the Community.
You have shipped software to the public. There is a difference in coding for a single use client and code shipped publicly as software. If you just nodded your head, you should apply.
As an exceptional candidate, you have experience working in a Scrum environment and can optimize EE installations at the server level. You are comfortable with version control systems and setting up development environments.
Since you are the best candidate, you can think of ten things you want in EE without breaking a sweat, making the CX case for each, and knowing exactly where you’d start in the code base.
You can find the job description, requirements, benefits, and instructions on how to apply here.
Posted by Leslie Doherty on July 25, 2011 Comments
It’s been a great time at EllisLab. Yes, that’s past tense. As a part of this team, and of the community, I’ve enjoyed both sides. But, I’m a freelancer at heart. I leave EllisLab better than when I joined and have made them promise to build on the marketing and social media foundation I helped build [CEO Edit: We will!].
I am forever grateful for this opportunity to know and meet so many amazing people. If you need an ExpressionEngine Specialist and/or a front end designer, I’m easy to find! See all you beautiful people on the web and at EECI.
Posted by James Mathias on June 24, 2011 Comments
Feedback is essential to moving forward, correcting the mistakes of the past and improving and streamlining the EllisLab product line and business overall.
At EllisLab, historically all your feedback has been heard (read) and in most cases acted on. However, it’s been mostly behind the scenes and not very open.
When I joined EllisLab, I decided I wanted to be super transparent and open about what I’m doing. My work for the most part is subjective and even though I make my decisions with equal parts experience and judgement, we could debate the merits of color theory and button placement until the sun sets, and most of us will. But, that’s not productive or helpful, and going that route we’ll never have a consensus.
We need to come to a conclusion, we will have to compromise, and we will have to prioritize and iterate and mold small changes into larger ones.
We need a starting point, a place to look and say, OK that is something everybody wants.
I’ve built a small section on this very website, that is purely a way for me to gather customer interest on a defined set of gathered and curated ideas and suggestions from the community.
Eventually this will turn into a more central place to submit ideas, find out what we are working on, what is slated for release, etcetera. Right now it’s a start, something to build on, it’s the beginning of collocating all of our customer feedback. It’s the start of a more open and transparent EllisLab, the start of something wonderful.
Without further ado, I would adore it if you’d click over to http://ellislab.com/feedback and start rating and discussing the initial batch of ideas and suggestions, which will lead to a list of things for me to start building.
And as always, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me with feedback, complaints, suggestions and ideas on twitter (@jmathias) or via electronic mail (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address))
Posted by James Mathias on June 15, 2011 Comments
So it’s been a little over a week since I originally asked for feedback, complaints and ideas from the community.
In that week, the original post received 115 comments, I was sent 18 emails, and assorted tweets and bug reports.
Not a super overwhelming response, but I feel like it’s a extremely good response and start to the conversation. I’ve taken in and read all the feedback, I’ve given it some thought and I’ve complied a list of what I determine to be the general ideas and feedback given during this exercise.
I’ve placed these in rough order of priority based on number of times requested. I have also grouped them into categories of tasks, like UI, UX, Feature, etc…
Of course some of these items overlap categories, for clarity I’ve placed each item in it’s main category only.
Interface changes (these are changes that can generally be made with little overhead and without having to create a new feature or adjust the structure of the documents.)
Experience Changes (these are changes that require a bit more involvement from planning and may need new features or feature enhancements. These changes would require more user experience thought, to make a real difference.)
Feature Requests (these are feature requests, items that don’t already exist in the product, or require heavy revamping of an existing feature.)
Process Suggestions (these are suggestion towards how I should approach these problems.)
So what’s next?
I want to setup a user voting system for this feedback, so I can easily garner if my priority listing is indeed correct. This may just be a survey, or the utilization of a service site like usabila or uservoice. Either way, I plan to have something setup and ready to take your votes early next week.
In the mean time if you see something glaringly wrong in the above lists, please do not hesitate to let me know, so I can fix it.
Thanks for all the help guys and gals, I really appreciate it. We are going to make EE the best CMS going, together.
And as always, you can send me additional and new feedback, complaints and ideas everyday on twitter (@jmathias) or via electronic mail (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address))
UPDATE: June 22 2011 It’s taking me a little longer to set up this feedback collection page, please bear with me. Very close, just want to make sure it’s useful and not buggy. Thanks folks!
Posted by James Mathias on June 07, 2011 Comments
There has been a bit of confusion and some calls for clarification on my Call for Feedback from Monday.
Some members of the community are concerned that I am asking you to repeat yourselves or rehash things that have been said ad nauseam since the launch of EE2. Which has led to the concern that EllisLab has not been listening to you previously.
I am asking you to repeat yourselves. I’m not doing so out of laziness or lack of available information. In fact a lot of what is being said is known internally, and personally. My reasoning for asking you to repeat yourselves is so that I can hear the real idea, feedback or in some cases complaints. This leads directly to me doing a better, more educated job.
Here’s a very simple example.
Somebody internally says to me “You know, everyone hates the CP homepage”. Which communicates to me, that we need to change it right away.
This would be an example of making a decision for one-thousand people based on consolidated and paraphrased feedback of five or ten, second hand. Which would result in a poor solution, that really doesn’t address the actual problem and may even make it worse.
The better approach is upon hearing the above feedback, is to follow up with “Why does everyone hate it?” or “What about it is irritating people?” I might get an answer that the CP homepage doesn’t have any useful information, or that they would like to be able to customize the CP homepage on a per user or per user group basis. This is much better feedback, and it’s a far cry from “everyone hates it”. Which means, I can make an action item, and get to work.
So my reasoning is context based, more so than repetition based. I’m collecting, collating and curating a list of action items, ideas and feedback. I’m doing this in Things (task software for Mac) for now, but I will look into a more public facing way to do this, so that we can all know that I’m not only hearing you, but making plans and acting on this feedback.
Another issue that has arisen is a question as to what is within my power to act on. I will restate what my new position entails.
As Chief Creative Officer, I am the champion of user experience. If the system is hard to use, it’s my fault, if the system doesn’t get out of the way while you’re using it, it’s my fault. If the system is visually ugly, it’s my fault. If you have a poor experience with the software, from installation to publishing new content it’s my fault.
All that said, in a nutshell, it is my responsibility to guide and produce all things design related across EllisLab, from UX to UI to Front End Architecture.
Unfortunately, I’m not able to manage functionality feature requests, in terms of what gets approval or ships. I will however have a large hand in guiding how those shippable features get built, and the experience that goes along with using them.
I chose to follow up with this post, in order to give everyone quick access to this information, without having to ask directly, or wade through the growing comment stream.
I hope everyone knows, I am really excited to be a part of this company and this community, response to my arrival has been positive, supportive and welcoming. And I appreciate that very much.
Now you know. And knowing is half the battle.
Don’t forget to be heard Call for Feedback or on twitter (@jmathias) or via electronic mail (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address))
Posted by James Mathias on June 06, 2011 Comments
Today is my first day with EllisLab as the Chief Creative Officer.
Man Alive! That is a huge title to fill. But, honestly the work itself is going to be the hard part. To do the absolute best possible job, I need your help.
Personally & professionally I’ve used ExpressionEngine for everything. Which means I have ideas, needs, wants and desires for the platform. And I know you do as well.
Tell me everything. Tell me in the comments below or on twitter (@jmathias) or via electronic mail (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)) or in a box with a fox.
I want you to literally make it impossible to respond to everything directly. I want to have so much input from the community, that I have to prioritize my time just to read it all. No joke, everything.
In all sincerity, I need your help and this is a chance to have your voice, ideas, needs and wants heard in the quest to improve the greatest content management system ever made. Let’s make the magic happen together.
So tell me, what can we do in the short term to improve using the system? And further, what should the long term look like?
Posted by Leslie Doherty on June 03, 2011 Comments
Have you always wanted to attend Engine Summit? Are you curious about the behind the scenes at EllisLab? Are you dying to have our CEO or new Creative Director answer your burning question? Do you have control panel feedback to get to the Front-End Dev? Are you unable to attend conferences in other cities but crave learning new and great techniques in ExpressionEngine?
Boy do we have something for you.
Join Les Camacho - CEO, James Mathias - Chief Creative Office, and Leslie “Flinger” Doherty - Front-End Developer for a shake down of info along with five other amazingly brilliant EECMS community members.
Learn Multiple Site Management from Emily Lewis. Get tips on client interactions from John Henry Donovan, Technical Support Specialist at EllisLab. Fred Boyl speaks about going mobile while Chad Crowell debates Structure versus Template Groups and Mark Huot discusses add-on development.
Even better? You can win a ticket. That’s right! As cheesy as I’m sounding right now, like a car commercial or one of those introductory rates to a home loan, I’m genuinely excited to give three people the chance to join us simply by commenting here.
How do you win?
It’s easy. Comment with a question you’d like to see answered. Get people to “like” your question. Our goal is to have three questions that everyone wants to see asked win a ticket to the conference.
Ready? Go for it. Hope to see you there!
*Deadline for winners to be announced is Monday, June 6th.
Posted by Leslie Camacho on May 26, 2011 Comments
Please welcome James Mathias, Chief Creative Officer for EllisLab. James has a formal job description but the short version is that he is EllisLab’s champion of User Experience.
During the course of our search for a Designer/UI/UX specialist it became clear that we had the opportunity to bring someone to EllisLab capable of making all of us better at user experience. We set out looking for someone with the design chops to improve ExpressionEngine’s Control Panel and we ended up with someone capable of modernizing EllisLab’s approach to creative development, built around a commitment to the user experience.
James brings with him 10+ experience in UX, UI, and web development, including working as a Senior UX Developer for Amazon’s Kindle Group. He’s comfortable with HTML/CSS, loves jQuery, and has enough PHP chops to code his own CMS. But what put James over the top was his commitment to the Community and making life on the internet better.
During our first interview I asked James why we wanted to leave a very good job to work for a small upstart company and without hesitation he said, “I want to make the internet better and I know I can do that at EllisLab better than anyplace else. I want to make that difference in people’s lives, help tell their story… I’m meant for this job.” He said it with all sincerity, not a quaver in his voice.
Several weeks later having outlasted 150+ candidates, survived The Impossible Task (to be described in a later post), and been grilled by our staff, it became obvious just how sincere James was in that commitment. After a long in person interview in Seattle, he persuaded me to take the risk and bring him on in such a way that he’d have the authority and leeway to do what needs doing to make EllisLab a user experience focused company, something we started out being but drifted away from.
I want to thank our entire staff for being so passionate and involved throughout this process. We have a commitment from every single person to make you, the person using our software, websites, and support, everyday our focus.
James officially starts on June 6th, but he has informed me that you are welcome to inundate him with CP requests starting right now. You may do so by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or hitting him up on Twitter (jmathias).
Posted by Marcus Neto on May 18, 2011 Comments
It’s been awhile since I have written anything for our blog. And with the recent announcement of Flinger stepping into more of a development role I figured it was high time to let the community know what I’ve been working on and what I will be working on in the near future. Especially since a lot of it is geared towards helping you and promoting you.
Most of the last several months has been spent on putting a plan together for some Service offerings EllisLab will be bringing to market to help you. I am happy to say that it is coming together quite nicely. If you would like specifics feel free to email me as we are not ready to make any formal announcements about the different products we will be offering just yet. But I do feel that the solutions we envision will help just about everyone in our community.
As an extension of this I will be taking a look at our policies and procedures as it applies to Business to Business relationships. So this means everything from the Pro Net, Community Partners, Add-on Developers, Sponsorships etc. It has become very apparent that with the growth of ExpressionEngine and the community that surrounds it that we need to formalize these relationships. This will help everyone understand the relationship a bit more. Additionally, we will be looking at taking a microscope to the Pro Net, Community Partners and Add-on Developer relationships. This will benefit both sides. I hope to write some blog posts over the coming weeks in an effort to bring transparency to these relationships. But the recent discussion on Twitter about add-ons and core functionality has made it apparent that we need to define and document our close relationships so everyone is playing on a level field.
Beyond that I will also be taking a look at the New ExpressionEngine user experience. One of my passions for the last couple of years has been to help people understand the power of ExpressionEngine. Like most of you I LOVE this CMS (which is why I accepted the job here). Those of us that are long time members of this community know that there is a learning curve to EE. Part of what I want to address is helping people get through that learning curve faster. This is a continuation of what Flinger started since her method of marketing ExpressionEngine was through education. Kudos to her for that. I think it is a smart idea. This will also include some fun topics like resurrecting the Bug Tracker tutorial for EE2 and other more advanced ideas. But the first thing that needs to be addressed is the newcomer to our community.
So there you have it. In a nutshell (without all the gory details). If you have anything that you would like to add you can certainly email me and I will consider it. I can’t tell you how excited I am to be a part of this awesome community.
Posted by Leslie Doherty on May 13, 2011 Comments
I’m coming up to my year anniversary with EllisLab. It’s a great time to reflect on the changes of the last year, dive in to all we’ve accomplished, look ahead to the future and tell you a secret. But first: a success story.
My position was announced at EECI San Francisco last year. At the time, EllisLab and the community weren’t communicating as effectively as either side would like. As Les famously said at SXSW in Austin this year, “We had to hire an extrovert.” As it turns out, being extroverted is my star quality.
With EE 2 out of beta, the ExpressionEngine.com site refreshed and blog posts regulated, I worked diligently on behalf of the community. I “caused trouble” on your behalf, explaining how needed the executives are on twitter, facebook, blogs. You craved hearing from our developers. You wanted updates about the company. I was the person in charge of listening and I listened. I read Kenny’s infamous post and agreed with it. It was the catalyst I needed to drive the point home: Things had to change.
Luckily for everyone, EllisLab is a pliable company. The individuals are not stubborn or arrogant. When the world changes, the company can adjust. We adjusted our communication style. The executives had a heart to heart and positioned themselves in more fitting roles: Les became the voice and ear of EllisLab and Derek took on the role of communicating his findings as CTO. Our developers welcomed the chance to blog and share their knowledge. Everyone embraced twitter and facebook and worked toward a more appropriately transparent message. In essence, it was a success and only continued to be more so in January when we added Paramore|Redd to the list of resources.
There was only one area that didn’t seem to click for me: I missed coding. More than that, I missed representing women in Computer Science. As one of only two women in my graduate school program, a passion ignited to write and research on retention rates of women in technology roles. I recently brought back this theme from an unwritten dissertation I proposed to a real-life book with interviews of strong women programmers. In exploring women in computer science, I’ve not only received encouragement from EllisLab and our partners, I’ve been encouraged to join the development team here.
As I was told once, “What you are good at and what you love might be two different things. In which case, get better at what you’re passionate about.” -@knight777. I think I’m good at Marketing. It’s a natural fit, but I’m passionate about coding. It’s not as natural for me but I love it. I don’t walk around thinking I’m amazing at development but I crave it. I strive to be better, I read all of your articles and resources and discoveries and I love them. Without doubt, without reason, I love development.
The first stop for me on the team will be an initial clean up of the Control Panel. In preparation for the incoming Design Delighter, we’ve been rounding up the changes the community is asking for and we’re ready to begin implementation. Although daunting, it’s a great way to jump in feet first.
In addition to my new roll on the dev team, I’ll still be working the social avenues: twitter, facebook, tutorial writing on the blog. Now, though, I can speak from the other side, from the dev team, from the “room of code” if you will. Rest assured, when you speak, our dev team listens.
Marcus Neto, our Director of Services, will be taking over much of the marketing portion of my job. I’m sure you’ll be hearing from him a lot in the coming months as he is “the other” extrovert on the squad now.
So I am here to do what I love, to be part of the community, to work closely with our amazingly supportive dev team and contribute to the world of women in Computer Science in the most basic way I can: By doing.
Posted by Derek Jones on April 29, 2011 Comments
We’ve been using Jira for some months now for project and scrum management, and the other day I wanted to get our email notifications setup through a new email account using SMTP with SSL. This information can be pieced together by Googling as well as following the right series of links in the Jira documentation, but I thought it wouldn’t hurt to share it here in a consolidated form in case it saves someone time searching for a concise how-to.
Jira’s SMTP configuration option only allows for non-SSL SMTP, so if you try to simply change the port number to 465 for SSL, you’ll find that Jira times out as it is unable to authenticate with your SMTP server. You must instead use a JNDI location.
First, add the following to your /path/to/jira/conf/server.xml file, in the <Context> node, replacing the host, user, and password with the credentials for your SMTP server:
<Resource name="mail/SSLSmtpServer"
auth="Container"
type="javax.mail.Session"
mail.smtp.host="secure.example.com"
mail.smtp.port="465"
mail.smtp.auth="true"
mail.smtp.user="jira@example.com"
password="email_password"
mail.smtp.starttls.enable="true"
mail.smtp.socketFactory.class="javax.net.ssl.SSLSocketFactory"
/>
Then in the configuration for the mail server in Jira (Administration > Mail Servers), supply the JNDI location:
java:comp/env/mail/SSLSmtpServer
Next, you will need to move two files from the WEB-INF directory into the Jira server’s lib directory.
$ mv /path/to/jira/atlassian-jira/WEB-INF/lib/activation-1.1.1.jar /path/to/jira/lib
$ mv /path/to/jira/atlassian-jira/WEB-INF/lib/mail-1.4.1.jar /path/to/jira/lib
Depending on which version of Jira you are running, the version numbers with the activation and mail JARS may be different, but they should still be in the /path/to/jira/atlassian-jira/WEB-INF/lib path.
Finally, restart the server:
$ /path/to/jira/bin/shutdown.sh
...
$ /path/to/jira/bin/startup.sh
Whabow. Hope that helps someone; if nothing else, it’s documented here for ourselves to simplify things when upgrading our Jira instance.
Posted by Derek Jones on April 19, 2011 Comments
With the recent resurrection of the EllisLab blog, we chose to implement Disqus for commenting and social media integration. A number of people have asked what factors led to this decision, particularly since ExpressionEngine comes with a Comment module. In short, we didn’t have a lot of time for design and implementation, it gives us an opportunity to play with third party tools that our community uses, and we think it might encourage commenting from people outside of EllisLab’s existing communities.
Our Director of Marketing, Leslie Doherty, has been working with Paramore|Redd to revamp our public face, part of which included relaunching the EllisLab blog. Before she was able to begin working on that, Les wrote his Q1 CEO Report for 2011. Since the content of that post encompasses the entire company, its products, culture, and communities, it felt wrong to post it on the ExpressionEngine blog. So that pushed our timetable to relaunch the EllisLab blog up a bit, like, let’s launch it in a day or two.
This meant very little time to craft the front end, much less consider new back end features. The ExpressionEngine Comment module was written in 2003, and the internet landscape was a very different place back then: Google had just purchased Blogger, Facebook and Twitter didn’t exist, etc. The Comment module’s original purpose served the needs of that landscape, and frankly hasn’t changed much between then and now as it still satisfies those original needs that many sites today still have.
So between the choice of hurriedly modifying the Comment module’s database schema into the Bride of Frankenstein to accommodate the features currently popular for interaction, or having an opportunity to play with one of the more popular commenting solutions that we know our community uses, we happily chose the latter. Disqus already has comments, reactions, integration with Twitter, Facebook, and login solutions that are used by people outside of our community. So it was not only extremely convenient, but it felt like a situation where we could learn more by experiencing first hand what some of our users were choosing to implement instead of the ExpressionEngine Comment module, as opposed to simply soliciting feedback.
Some other advantages of choosing a commenting service are the offloading of bandwidth for content, data storage, and images, as well making it easier and more fun for people who are not actively engaged in our community to participate in discussions on our company blog.
It’s ridiculously simple to add Disqus to your ExpressionEngine or MojoMotor site. After signing up, simply paste in some universal JavaScript embed code supplied by Disqus into your template (or layout in the case of MojoMotor) where you want the comment form and comments to appear. For the disqus_identifier variable, which uniquely identifies the page for associating comments, we chose to just use the entry ID with our Disqus “forum” name, and a URL title path variable for the disqus_url:
var disqus_identifier = 'ellislab_{entry_id}';
var disqus_url = '{url_title_path="blog/comments"}';
For MojoMotor, you could use the URL title alone:
var disqus_identifier = 'ellislab_{mojo:page:url_title}';
var disqus_url = '{mojo:site:link}{mojo:page:url_title}';
Since March, their default theme uses semi-transparent greyscale background images, so it fits with any site design, preventing you from having to worry about the markup and styling.
We’ve already seen some things we like and don’t like, but there’s no arguing that this experiment will be an extremely beneficial step prior to revamping or rewriting ExpressionEngine’s Comment module, as opposed to just hacking on new features because we wanted to try them out for ourselves. And who knows, perhaps this will help us see how changes or new modules we might write could benefit both ExpressionEngine and MojoMotor users who prefer external services like Disqus.
Posted by Leslie Camacho on April 13, 2011 Comments
Good morning!
I thought a short update on how the search for a designer is going. We’ll be accepting applications through Friday April 22nd. However, given the amount and quality of the applications we’ve already received, we’re going to start setting up phone/email interviews this week.
If you applied and haven’t heard from me specifically by Monday, April 18, please follow up by email if you’re still interested in the position.
A big thank you to all who have applied already and to those who are still planning to sneak in before the deadline. I wish each of you the best of luck.
Posted by Leslie Camacho on April 08, 2011 Comments
EllisLab is now hiring a Designer/UI/UX Lead, a Practitioner of Visual Delight.
Your primary job will be to make people smile when they use any EllisLab application, starting with our flagship web publishing platform ExpressionEngine, by owning the UI and user experience. You will make this your baby. Your baby will delight people and they will be impressed that your baby, though only 2, speaks seven languages fluently and can do advanced algebra. But, more importantly, your baby will make their lives easier and happier. Just seeing your baby will make people smarter and quite possibly better looking.
