Season’s Greetings

Today is Christmas Eve and I wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

ExpressionEngine 2.0 Public Beta

ExpressionEngine 2.0 Public Beta has finally been released. You can read the announcement here or head over strait to the public beta section for all the details.

I’m excited about the public beta but have no time to play with it until after Christmas. Right after Christmas I’m going to be redesigning this site and will at that time see if I can port it over to EE2.0. Would be nice to be running what I want to use with clients.

Congratulations to the whole team at EllisLab—I know this will be a great product and am really looking forward ... Read More

Breadcrumbs in ExpressionEngine

I’m working on a site and setting up breadcrumbs with ExpressionEngine. Since I’m not using the structure module which as I understand it has a plugin tag I had to figure out a way to do this myself. With a little google help I found a plugin called Crumbee which got me a large part of the way there.

The problem was that I ended up with a lot of extra pieces in the breadcrumb including “site” (my renamed index.php), cat (Category URL Indicator) and a couple of template names. In the comments to the plugin there’s a way to remove them. This ... Read More

PHP for Absolute Beginners

I just ordered PHP for Absolute Beginners which should arrive sometime around Christmas which is right when I start a 10 week vacation from teaching. Clearly I will have lots of time to go through this book and learn. I’m planning on doing every exercise in the book from cover to cover. Hopefully by the time I’ve finished the book I will have the fundamentals of PHP down.

Why a book? Well I learn better from books than reading online. Also because my knowledge of PHP is limited to opening and closing a php statement I am truly an absolute ... Read More

Structure Screencast

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.

The Ultimate Twitter ExpressionEngine List

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. ... Read More