October 24th, 2007
So tomorrow I’m off to a two day open source conference. Not sure how much I’ll be around for on the net, but probably a lot… but still, I wanted to mention a few things before I holed myself away to revel in geekery. First, there are a few well known CodeIgniter community members who are doing some cool stuff, and deserve our attention. I’m a big fan of this work, and this contribution to the community. Guys, you don’t hear it enough. Thanks!
- Michael Wales released “Erkana” another CodeIgniter authorization library. Looks nice.
- Jim O’Halloran continued his excellent series “Building a Complete CodeIgniter Application” with part 3. I never had an appropriate post for part 2 (so there you go), but I did mention part 1.
- pr0digy wrote a great little peice. CodeIgniter - loading external libraries. Well done. I’ve actually been sitting on this one for a few days, as I debated using the Zend PDF engine for BambooInvoice. This post is meant to remind me to do that. Its been sitting marked as “unread” in my RSS feed for 17 days… time to stop hiding it and share the love ;)
Also, just a quick ExpressionEngine tip (EE doesn’t get enough of my attention on this blog, despite the fact that I spend several hours a day working with it). If you aren’t masking your control panel… you should be. It couldn’t be easier, and it will save you from problems like… oh I don’t know… to pull an example totally out of thin air that absolutely didn’t happen to me… your browser histroy showing it while your laptop is hooked up to a projector in a room of 50 people. OK, I confess… it did happen to me. Fortunately, with a masked CP, I just FTP’ed in and renamed it at break. Easy-peasy. Makes me glad I was masking it!
And finally, just for fun, here are 2 links that made me laugh over the last 2 days. How to survive a zombie attack (pure awesome), and the super-est.
Next up, hoping to write a bit about the conference. I’m hoping for a chance to steal a conversation with a few Mozilla guys, and Bob Young (founder and CEO of Redhat).
Until next time! Signed,
Little Bobby Tables
Continue reading “3 great CodeIgniter links, and masking your CP in ExpressionEngine”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine, Noteworthy with no comments 
October 05th, 2007
This came up in the forums today, and not many people knew about them, so I just wanted to draw attention to them. Some time ago, we (EllisLab) released a series of developer guidelines that might be of interest to anyone reading this. Included are Performance Guidelines, and security guidelines. We also have a set of style and syntax guidelines, which are useful - and I’d be remiss if I didn’t also point out the Zend coding standards, which I tend to follow more in my personal coding.
Oh! And on the topic of developers (developers… developers… developers) I’d like to publicly welcome Jamie Poitra as a new EllisLab Developer. Welcome!
Continue reading “EllisLab Developer Guidelines”. Posted in
ExpressionEngine with 2 comments
September 17th, 2007
Leslie Camacho and Derek Jones deliver what might well be the funniest thing I’ve seen in months. A funeral for Internet Explorer 6.
I personally believe that internet ISP users are unable to do so… um… because some people out there in our internet don’t have browsers… and ah… I believe our education such as Firefox… for the children
Classic!
Go watch it now.
Continue reading “I personally believe, like, such as, and… Internet Explorer 6 is dead!”. Posted in
Browsers, ExpressionEngine with 1 comment
August 19th, 2007
Some interesting items in the past week.
Ed Finkler, the man responsible for the great CodeIgniter podcast PHP Abstract, is at it again. This time, he’s down in Atlanta offering Intro to CodeIgniter for PHP works ‘07. Go Ed! If you’re in Atlanta, find that man and buy him a beer.
I’ve also seen a rise of interest in BambooInvoice recently. Eric Davis wrote Simple and easy to use invoices - Bamboo Invoice and Customizing BambooInvoice. Great work thanks. My favourite quote?
The thing I like most about it is that it provides just what I need to invoice my customers; it does not try to provide accounting, supply chain management, or any other “total business solution”.
And that my friends, is why Bamboo is around. Thanks Eric. Nice writeup. If anyone else has written about Bamboo, please do let me know, I’m always interested in reading those posts.
In ExpressionEngine land, there are a few neat things happening also. Smashing Magazine, in a writable of the RubyOnRails content management system Mephisto, wrote that ExpressionEngine is the first-class engine for professionals; if you’d like to achieve the highest level of flexibility and have the full control over the outer appearance and structure of your weblogs, EE is the first option you should probably consider
.
Also, Les Camacho (our fearless VP, and all around cool guy) started a weekly blog entry called “last week on the forums” where he highlights interesting and notable posts from the ExpressionEngine forums. One of the ones that really stuck out at me was a plugin by silenz called trunchtml. Nice work silenz.
Continue reading “CodeIgniter, Bamboo, ExpresionEngine roundup, August 19”. Posted in
BambooInvoice, CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine with 3 comments
June 21st, 2007
Nine days ago I announced that I was running the beta of 1.6 to test it out. This morning I’m happy to announce that 1.6 is now publicly available. Among the many cool new features that I know people will love is a tidied up Control Panel, hidden templates, and a pages module. Also notice the new theme. Sexy indeed!
Of course, as always, the upgrade is free if you own a license.
Continue reading “ExpressionEngine 1.6 has been released”. Posted in
ExpressionEngine with 9 comments
June 12th, 2007
Exciting things are happening inside EllisLab. We're internally testing ExpressionEngine 1.6 (in fact DerekAllard.com is running off it right now), and judging by how smoothly everything has gone so far, things should be ready for public use very soon!
If you use EE to handle "client sites" there are a couple of new features that you're going to love. Your job just became easier friends! Rick will cut off my use of the corporate jet if I say any more... so you'll need to trust me on that one. That said, these are significant enough that I'm going to delay 2 projects that I have "in the chutes" right now, just so that I can use 1.6 on them. The long term benefits make the small delay worth it.
And let me also say this: Its a tribute to how we handle beta software that the only bug I've found in the whole application so far is a hyperlink that was missing a dot. Way to go Paul and Derek - rockin the kazbar as usual.
Continue reading “Powered by ExpressionEngine 1.6”. Posted in
ExpressionEngine with 4 comments
June 10th, 2007
So the gist of this post boils down to me asking “why”. Presumably you’re using Wordpress to blog. If you are using it as a pseudo-cms, then you already feel the pain. What if there was a blogging platform that was superior to Wordpress in security and functionality, and also would give you expertise in a framework that could double as a full-fledged Content-Management-System that you could use commercially with your clients/customers, and was tightly integrated with CodeIgniter… would you be interested?
Then why aren’t you using ExpressionEngine?
Rick Ellis (The “Ellis” in Ellislab and all around grand pu-ba) recently announced what has been widely speculated in the community for a long time, that ExpressionEngine is getting integrated very tightly with CodeIgniter. This leaves me with the aching question: As a CodeIgniter programmer, what does Wordpress offer you? Many of us (CI programmers I mean) keep a personal blog where we discuss CodeIgniter and related developments. When deciding on a blogging platform, there are several good options, but it seems that there are 2 common choices; (1) roll it yourself (this is how I started) or (2) use Wordpress. I’d like to argue right now for a third, and better, option - use ExpressionEngine.
Continue reading “Are you a CodeIgniter using Wordpress?”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine with 18 comments
May 22nd, 2007
On the ExpressionEngine forums the staff have a secret “staff only” forum that we use to ensure we’re all on the same page, and all giving the proper advice. Sometimes though, things just devolve into nonsense, Simpsons jokes and one liners. Most of this hijinx never sees the light of day, but Les blogged about one particularly amusing thread today, and I had to share.
Go enjoy, and astound yourself at the high level of intellectualism and 80s rap references… how I didn’t find a way to work “2 legit 2 quit” into there I’ll never know…
Oh yeah, and 2 posts in one day (even if this one is a bit… um… off-topic) officially counts as me breaking out of the blogging slump.
Word
Continue reading “Behind the scenes ExpressionEngine Hijinx”. Posted in
ExpressionEngine with 3 comments
May 22nd, 2007
I've been asked how I acheive the alternating comment styles in my blog. When this blog was custom built on CodeIgniter, I used alternator() in the string helper. It looked like this:
<?php foreach ($post_comments->result() as $comment): ?>
<div class="comment<?= alternator(' even', ' odd');?>
<p><?php
if ($comment->comment_author_website) {
echo anchor ($comment->comment_author_website, $comment->comment_author_name);
} else {
echo $comment->comment_author_name;
}
?> wrote on <?= date ('F jS, Y @ G:i', $comment->comment_date);?></p>
<?= $comment->comment_body;?>
</div>
<?php endforeach; ?>
When I switched my blog over to ExpressionEngine a few months ago, I decided to change my strategy a bit, and use the tools EE makes available for me. Specificly, the {switch} tag for comments.
{exp:comment:entries sort="asc"}
<div class="{switch="even|odd"}">
<p>{url_as_author} wrote on {comment_date format="%F
%d<sup>%S</sup>, %Y @ %G:%i"}</p>
{comment}
</div>
{/exp:comment:entries}
I find it ever bit as intuitive as pure PHP, and I love the convenience shortcuts like {url_as_author} (Hyperlink pointing to the URL (if it exists) with the author name as the link title. If the URL does not exist simply the name is returned).
I still have all the legacy code (of course) from the custom written blog app, and while I don't want to release it wholesale, I'd be happy to field any specific questions about any part of it.
Continue reading “alternating comment styles”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine, How-To with 1 comment
April 27th, 2007
Ever been working along and say to yourself “whoa, where’d the time go”? Then you look back and can’t believe how much you’ve got done? Sometimes it just magically happens to be sure, but I think the tools I’m using must play a big role in it (and turning off my email and cell). These are the tools I find myself using in those spontaneous moments.
CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine, Firefox and plugins, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Coda and the interweb.
Notice how the operating system is not there? I haven’t found any noticeable difference between operating systems, as long as my macbook is plugged into a nice big monitor. I do notice a decline as my screenspace goes down. That said, there is something psychological going on there, since I want to use the Mac more then I ever wanted to use a pc. I must be influenced by all those ipod and “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” commercials. I’m such a slave to media…
I’ve always liked Dreamweaver (yes its expensive, but feature for feature as good as any editor I’ve ever seen including Textmate), but I absolutely hate it on my Mac - and truthfully, its only 1 thing… I hate all those dopey floating panels. I’ve been spending a bit of time with Coda. Yeah there’s a lot of hype, but it isn’t undeserved. I like the integrated environment, I have absolutely no need for a CSS editor (its nice that its included, but I don’t use it anyhow), and I find the terminal completely adequate. I might just buy it since the trial runs out in a few days.
CodeIgniter and ExpressionEngine have completely revolutionized the way I build sites in the last year. Fireworks has been my “go to” image editor for a long time now. Its combination of vector and bitmap tools have been ideal for me, although a switch to Illustrator might happen if I find the right project.
What tools do you find yourself using when the magic moment strikes?
Continue reading “Productivity Tools”. Posted in
Browsers, CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine, Mac with 10 comments
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