DerekAllard.com

An insiders look at ExpressionEngine tech support

Pssst' wanna know a secret? Let me let you in on how tech support works at ExpressionEngine.

Most of you reading this from the Code Igniter community are probably familiar with John Fuller and my posting patterns on those forums (where let me remind myself - we are volunteers). If you aren't - well, we're pretty prolific. Now, imagine John and I, joined by 2 other support staff who are flipping unbelievable in their own right - Robin and Lisa.  Now imagine that we're all paid.  We're paid for the express job of sitting on the forums, waiting for questions and then answering them and improving the ExpressionEngine resources and community.  Getting good?

Now imagine we're also joined by 2 active developers (Paul Burdick and Derek Jones), then by the vice-president Leslie Camacho (who is also highly technical), and then the Grand Poo-Ba and original author, Rick Ellis.  Now imagine that a hosting company with their own team of support techs also has an active interest in participating in support.  You picturing it?

Now imagine all that, and a community of people, who are passionate and engaged and active.

And THAT my friends, is how ExpressionEngine support works, and it is a scary thing to behold!

Comments

Yannick wrote on

oooohh….ahhhh…it’s quite quite the scary thing indeed. So how do the diabolical robots fit into the grand scheme of things? I thought they were the one’s who ran the show?

And as for ‘Grand Poo-Ba’. HAHA I love it. I’ve gotta start using that one.

Derek wrote on

Ha ha.  Ya, Rick might be the grand poo-ba, but let’s be honest, the killer robots call the shots ;)

Richard wrote on

Does this mean that derekallard.com is moving to Expression Engine :) ?

I’ve actually been evaluating EE for an upcoming series of projects at our college.  Lisa has already been extremely helpful, even in the pre-sales stage.

Hopefully, we’ll see closer integration of CI and EE in the future.  Maybe even EE built using CI!

Derek wrote on

Richard!... you let the cat out of the bag! ;)

Yes, derekallard.com will switch over the ExpressionEngine.  It just does so much that I need to keep building in here to accomplish the same thing.  Building this blog on Code Igniter was a fun exercise, but time to go to the big-leagues.

Now for the hard part, exporting all my data…

Richard wrote on

Whoops!  Any plans to release the code for your current blog to CI Community?  It would be interesting to see how it was built.

Derek wrote on

No immediate plans to release the code, but if there’s anything specific that you see that you want me to write about, I’d be more then happy to do so.

Richard wrote on

The code is probably very straight-forward.  I would be more interested in learning how you structured your blog application using CI (Models, Views, Controllers).  I haven’t found any other good CI examples beyond BambooInvoice.

Most of the information available in the CI Manual is related to using specific functions, however, the hardest part of building an application is typically related to the design and structure.

Derek wrote on

Have you seen my video tutorial?  There’s full source code available there.  I still feel a bit uneasy about releasing the blog code since (as I admitted shamefully on the CI forums) I’ve got one really ugly hack in my code that I’d be embarrassed if the rest of the world saw!

Richard wrote on

Yes, the video was very informative.  Thanks for taking the time to put that together.

That’s completely understandable .. no need to perpetuate bad habits :)

Thanks for the quick response and best of luck at your new job.

Gilles wrote on

Hi Derek!

Sounds really cool for EE users/customers! Congrats and good luck for your new job!

I never used EE but it sounds both flexible and powerful. It’s interesting. I’ll try EE pretty soon.

Cheers.