Migrating Matrix & Ngen file fields to EE2 Matrix and native file field

Long time no blog. I’m back and planning on writing more frequently here.

I recently upgraded my personal family site with MSM from ExpressionEngine 1.6.9 to 2.1.3 and as most EE devs know this is a major upgrade with a lot of potential for incompatibilities due to the complete restructuring that went into the 2.x branch of ExpressionEngine. To ensure everything went very smooth I copied my site to a development server and did the upgrade there. I was also very careful to follow the upgrade instructions.

Even so there were a couple of ... Read More

Default Install of ExpressionEngine

Last night I set up a default install of ExpressionEngine 1.6.9 to help me with faster web site deployment. Basically now I’ll be able to move directly into development of the client web site rather than installing and customizing EE each time, which takes a lot of time due to downloading and installing various add-ons over and over. Now All I’ll need to do is unzip a folder and import an .sql file to the database and I’ll be good to go.

What I’ve done with my default install is:

• install a number of add-ons that I use on all my ... Read More

Banner Advertising With ExpressionEngine

I’m currently building a magazine site for a client which will have advertising in the sidebar. To implement this advertising I used the method detailed in the Subvert.ca blog How to build your own banner advertising system with ExpressionEngine and Google Analytics This was really easy to implement. However I wanted to do a little more.

Since campaigns may expire and it’s possible that there may not be a full complement of live ads on the site at one time I decided to add dummy ads to the site that will only appear when there are not enough ... Read More

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

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