Southern California ExpressionEngine Training
Are you an agency or freelancer in the Southern California area? There’s one week left to register for Train-ee’s Beginner to Intermediate training class in Pasadena, California (March 5th - 7th).
Train-ee is bringing its time-tested instructor-led live-in-the-flesh classroom training to Southern California. Come out to experience the mild spring weather and rub elbows with fellow developers while learning ExpressionEngine. Bring your projects and get some help and direction!
Train-ee has a tremendous track record teaching ExpressionEngine in-person, including EllisLab certified courses. That combined with the opportunity to brainstorm with fellow students from other agencies and schools of thought is priceless. If you’re in the area (or want to be for a few days), you should definitely sign up and attend.
Content Strategy and ExpressionEngine: It All Starts with a Good Plan
Before you install ExpressionEngine and start tweaking preferences, it’s best to take some time to think about the content you’ll be managing with EE and plan out that content’s structure. It goes a long way in making that content valuable and reusable for years to come. (I’ve found it helps the design process immensely to know the chunks of content you’re designing for as well. Otherwise, you’re just designing your visual wish and cramming in content to fit the look.) In this overview, you’ll
The Cookie Consent Module & EU Cookie Legislation
In November of 2009, the European Parliament issued EU Directive 2009/136/EC, an amendment to several prior directives concerning data protection and electronic privacy rights. Of primary concern to this article were changes regarding the storing and accessing of personal data on a user’s device via cookies [1]. The amendment changed such storage to require opt-in rather than opt-out permission from end users. EU member states were supposed to implement laws in accordance with the directive by May 2011.
Making Sites Fly with Varnish
There comes a time in an ExpressionEngine site’s life when it needs to scale. The demand for it’s dynamically-generated pages becomes too much; you can throw more servers at the problem or tweak the ones you’ve got, but that has its own scaling issues.
Or, there’s Varnish Cache.
ExpressionEngine Site Strategy with Dev Docs
Documentation First! Wait, Documentation First?
You hear it often enough - “Documentation First!”, but for an ExpressionEngine project?
As the Community continues to amaze with the quality, depth and breadth of sites developed in ExpressionEngine, the need for a centralized dev doc repo becomes more important. The nature of projects being built with EE edge ever closer to web apps, with incredible add-ons that are almost apps in their own right!
Documentation may be the least interesting part of any development project, but you and your users will benefit by having high-quality documentation available.
Building an ExpressionEngine Fieldtype
For my turn driving the EE blog, I thought I walk you through the creation of a new fieldtype. Before we get started, I should probably give you a heads up about the approach I’m taking. One of my professors once described an absolutely brilliant lecture he’d attended where a physicist was explaining some uber-high level ‘physicy’ stuff to an audience of laymen. He did it by starting with the simplest of analogies. Of course, the simplest of analogies was totally wrong. But once his audience grasped the logic of the simplest analogy, he would then draw a new, slightly less simple analogy. Which—was also wrong. And he kept building upon all of these simple, but wrong, analogies until the audience could grasp the basics that were NOT wrong.
Or to quote Terry Pratchett, “Actually that sentence is wrong in every particular, but it’s quite a useful lie.” (Night Watch)
So with that in mind, let’s start building our super simple fieldtype.
Building a Plugin: Replacing Magpie
Writing add-ons for ExpressionEngine isn’t terribly difficult once you know what you’re doing. However, before you know what you’re doing it can be a frustrating tangle of guess and check. I vividly remember writing my first plugin, and then my first extension, trying to wrap my head around how hooks work. Then I tried my hand at writing a Multiple Site Manager compatible extension and there was more confusion there.
I want to walk you through writing a plugin, the best first step towards building ExpressionEngine add-ons. This tutorial will be a start-to-finish adventure, starting with the plugin skeleton and working our way to putting it on GitHub for everyone to download. I’ll explain my methods and my approach to building plugins, and by extension, software in general. Additionally, this particular plugin will be replacing the aging MagPie plugin, since MagPie is no longer being maintained.