DerekAllard.com : CodeIgniter, ExpressionEngine, and the World of Web Design

New MojoMotor updater

August 13^th, 2010

Coming in MojoMotor 1.0.4, is a simplified version updater. Here’s a 17 second video preview.

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MojoMotor themes

June 18^th, 2010

One of the things that hasn’t really been made public about MojoMotor is that it has the ability to be themed. This option is available under Settings.

Its my vision that down the line we’ll be able to offer a few official themes, as well as offer community contributed themes. More focus on this will happen after the beta of course. For now though, I’ve been working on a little theme that I think will go over good with everyone. Now I’m not much of a graphic artist, but it’s pretty slick work (if I may be so humble) for a code monkey. It could use a minor bit of polish, but at the end of the day, there’s a little something for everyone.

If you ARE a graphic artist, please don’t be too critical, but I would be very interested to see what everyone thinks! If there’s enough interest, I’ll make it the default theme.

Want to see it? Keep reading!

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MojoMotor, and my EECI2010 review

June 06^th, 2010

Well, finally back and enjoying the afterglow of another amazing experience; EECI 2010. Aside from the great things that happened to me personally (I’ll get to those in a moment), it was 3 days of pure and utter awesomeness for the whole ExpressionEngine/CodeIgniter world. I’ll never get to hang out with a more awesome gang then the folks I meet through this world.

Rick Ellis said something unexpected and uniquely insightful during his keynote that really resonated with me. I don’t have the video in front of me for the exact words, but an accurate paraphrase would be “The community is where its at. In many ways, and all the important ones, the software is irrelevant.” As someone who has worked tirelessly over the last 3 or 4 years to build the software he’s referring to, I completely agree with this. The magic-sauce of EE and CI comes from the community of dedicated, passionate people around it. Its easy to forget that when we’re busy fighting deadlines and trying to fix IE bugs.

Now seems about as appropriate a time as any to extend my sincerest thanks to Robert Eerhart, Janneke van Amsterdam, and the entire Whoooz team. These folks put on one of the most professional, well organized, kick-ass experiences I’ve ever enjoyed. Every little detail was tended to, nothing was second rate - I wish I had Robert and Janneke organizing my day to day life… things would be so much better!

The highlight of the trip for me was finally getting to talk about MojoMotor. Mojo is something that I’ve been working on since around Christmas last year, and its been nearly everything I’ve been up to professionally for 5 months. Anyone who’s watched my keynote at EECI2009 knows that I’m a “social coder”. I crave community; and I consider nerding-out with other people to be foundational to the way I work. Keeping Mojo under wraps for 5 months has been killing me! I want to share, I want to say “hey, check out this cool thing I’ve been doing”, but we decided very early on that we wanted Mojo to come as a total surprise. Now that its out there, I’m glad we did.

Response to the news of Mojo has been overwhelmingly positive. I’m really hopeful that people will end up loving it as much as they love CodeIgniter and ExpressionEngine. I few secret tidbits that not many people know about MojoMotor:

• MojoMotor was a name that Rick grabbed years ago. He just liked the sound of it. As I was developing MojoMotor it started out with a much different name, but it was quickly apparent that “MojoMotor” was the right name for the little CMS.
• “The publishing engine that does less…” and the concept for the logo both came about in less then 3 minutes during a Skype call between me and Rick. Other parts of the software that I expected to come quickly took WEEKS. Funny how that works.
• The graphic artist who helped us along was Ilina Simeonova. She did stellar work, and her dedication to a project that she had little invested in was inspiring.

And of course, the journey is only just beginning for MojoMotor. The final round of beta testing with “real world” (ie: non-staff) testers is just getting underway, and after that we’re releasing. It’ll be in your hands quickly, I promise. The price has been set at $49.95. I’m looking forward to watching it mature and grow before our eyes.

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