blog | CreateSean Web Design

Structure Screencast

Wednesday November 11 2009

One Module that I’ve been meaning to try out for some time is Structure and today there is both a tutorial at EE Insider and a new Screencast over at Vimeo on this topic. The tutorial/article is by Travis Schmeisser and the screencast by Jack McDade the creators of Structure. Both are quite helpful for me, but I’m still not getting the lightbulb moment. My only comment about the screencast is that I would prefer a voiceover guiding you through the process rather than a musical sound track.

Sean inscribed these words of wisdom on Wednesday Nov 11, 2009 at 01:23 PM

| tags: expressionengine, expressionengine 2.0, screencasts, structure, |

The Ultimate Twitter ExpressionEngine List

Sunday November 08 2009

A week or so ago twitter made lists available to all users and they seem to be gaining in popularity. I made a few lists right away with the largest of them having about 160 people. That was my ExpressionEngine list. However I wanted to find everyone on twitter who tweets about EE so that I could have the Ultimate LIst of ExpressionEngine tweeple.

I did this by looking through all the lists that I appear on, the lists of popular EE developers on twitter that were related to EE and also by going through the wefollow under ExpressionEngine. The final list has 424 people and/or web firms. Go check out the Ultimate LIst of ExpressionEngine tweeple.

For more specific recommendations of who to follow on twitter check out this post.

Hope someone finds this useful.

Sean inscribed these words of wisdom on Sunday Nov 8, 2009 at 03:56 PM

| tags: expressionengine, twitter, |

Galleria - Slideshow

I’m working on a client site which has a gallery with a slideshow. I looked at a number of different jQuery plugins to run this and finally settled on galleria (though I originally rejected it)

At first I was struggling with getting the large image to display when the page is initially loaded. I would get all the thumbnails but the large image would only display on clicking the thumbnail. I resolved this with an ExpressionEngine conditional. I’m using FF matrix to run the gallery along with nGen file field and a checkbox field. The checkbox field selects a cover image for the entire gallery which I pull onto other pages. What I did is add this:


<li class="{if cover}active{/if}">

Now when the page loads it finds the cover thumbnail and applies the class of active which makes Galleria load the full size image. Everything works perfectly.

It took me about 30 minutes to get everything working the way I want it. Currently I’m about 98% happy with just a couple of things to iron out. The first is that I can’t seem to get images to crossfade. The current image just disappears with the next one fading in. Secondly, I would like to have the thumbnails operate as a carousel so that if there are several thumbnails they don’t go to a second row. I’m pretty sure I’ll have to incorporate a seperate plugin to get that running, but it’s a lower priority until I get the rest of the site complete.

here’s what the gallery looks like now:

Sean inscribed these words of wisdom on Sunday Nov 8, 2009 at 09:58 AM

| tags: code, jquery, |

createsean.ca

Monday November 02 2009

Yesterday I finally got off my butt and purchased http://createsean.ca which now parks on top of http://createsean.com—Now when I return back to Canada I will have a .ca domain. Not sure how important this is to get local traffic in Canada, but it can’t hurt.

Was having some trouble purchasing this domain as I live overseas and their are restrictions on ownership of .ca domains. I meet the requirements being a Canadian citizen, but I think my ip was causing some trouble. I contacted live support at namecheap and spent some time chatting and got it all worked out. The support was very professional and helpful and I highly recommend Name Cheap if you need to purchase a domain—I’ll be moving all of my other domains over there from a competitor a little later.

Sean inscribed these words of wisdom on Monday Nov 2, 2009 at 05:11 PM

| tags: this blog, domains, |

Field Frame Matrix - thinking out loud

Sunday November 01 2009

I just sat down to work out the site architecture, in detail, on a site I’m about to start developing. This site has a photo gallery and I am planning on using Field Frame Matrix, ngen file field and imgsizer to make the gallery. I’ve done this several times already and it’s pretty easy to do. However what I want to do this time is make a grid of nine random photos from all available galleries. The last time I looked into this it wasn’t possible using the above method of gallery creation.

However today I took a look at the docs for field frame matrix and I believe this can now be done. What I need to do is start the weblog:entries tab and set it to pull random entries and limit it to nine entries. That’s pretty easy.

{exp:weblog:entries weblog="gallery" limit="9" orderby="random" disable="trackback|member_data|comments"}
{/exp:weblog:entries} 

Now insert the following between the opening and closing tags above.

{photos limit="1" sort="random"}
<div>
    {exp:imgsizer:size src="{picture}" width="130"}
        <a class="lightbox{entry_id}" href="{picture}" title="{caption}"><img src="{sized}" width="{width}" height="{height}" /></a>
    {/exp:imgsizer:size}
</div>
    {/photos} 

Theoretically this will return a random photo from a random row of the last 9 random gallery entries. Once I start coding the EE tags into the site, I’ll try this out and confirm it. If anyone reading has something to add in the meantime, please do comment.