The 99%: Hillman Curtis, On Reinvention and Taking the Courageous Path.
“The one thing I’ve gotten good at from doing all these different pursuits is finding a central theme in a project. If you can find that theme or story in your subject, the solution will present itself to you.” Damn straight. Dude, if you need another creative with similar background, call me.
Expression Engine Blog: Twitter Timeline Plugin and (n)Oauth.
ExpressionEngine: ExpressionEngine 2.1 Released!
And, take note ... 1.x series is no longer for sale.
New Shopping Cart alternative for Expression Engine.
paradox1x: Karl’s got a thought-provoker up.
The case for killing ‘WCM’ (Web Content Management)?
Smashing Magazine: If you want to customize Wordpress, you’ll want to see this.
Wordpress Theme Development Frameworks. I rarely troll the WP waters anymore, yet occasionally I get called upon to do so, hence this link. Doesn’t make it as easy as Expression Engine, but it will likely take some of the pain away.
Testing MarsEdit2.
I mean, since the author himself responded in one of my last posts, how could I not? Metaweblog API seemed to work on first go (though not automatically); be sure to trim your ID # off the end of EE’s generated Metaweblog API and enter it manually.
Later: I should mention this is posted with MarsEdit2. And now edited with it, as well.
Even Later: No hitches, no glitches. I have to consider my titling scheme, however. EE only allows a certain set number of identical article titles, which my news-source title style breaks (I manually add extra title/URL info to avoid this). What I like best is, smaller RAM footprint than all the browser windows I usually keep open.
Expression Engine, spam prevention.
Oh, there’s been some very bad behavior overnight. Naughty spammers in my comments.
I installed the Akismet extension last evening, but it is not enough, given the popularity of this site. Some slip through. So, as I had done on my WordPress site, I’ve installed Bad Behavior as an extension, and the No Follow plugin. [Note that extensions and plugins get installed and activated in different places in EE, and use the x.11 or newer of BB, or you’ll be blocked from commenting your own site]. EE already has a preference in the Control Panel to expire comments after a period of time, so that’s taken care of on EE install.
Funny, the captchas were enough on previous sites. Guess I’m a juicier target than I thought. So comment and trackback spammers take note, your efforts are worthless on this weblog.
Oh, I ran into a problem. Got a white screen instead of my weblog. Turns out the instructions for installing Bad Behavior are a little misleading. You don’t slap the whole Bad Behavior folder in EE’s System > Extensions folder. You put the subfolder named (lowercase) “bad-behavior” in there. The overarching “Bad-Behavior” folder contains four or five files for WordPress and other applications. You want the “bad-behavior” folder that contains “admin.inc.php” and a slew of other php files.
I’ve also added a new “Expression Engine” category to this weblog, for those who are interested in tracking my experience.
Later: Scott had an issue with the RSS feed here not formatting the text of the entries. I’ve applied this fix.
dangerousmeta! changes to Expression Engine
All my regulars seem interested in what precipitated my changeover to Expression Engine from WordPress. An explanation is in order, in my long-winded fashion.
As my history in weblogging shows, I am a fickle software user. Folks who’ve been around since ‘99, remember my pushing Userland for rollover capabilities in Manila (which they implemented), and then leaving ETP to use Zope shortly thereafter. I have no allegiances ... when something different or better comes along that seems like it will be of benefit, I switch. I’ve been through Userland Manila, Zope and variants, Movable Type, WordPress, TextPattern, Drupal, Joomla, and some of the online hosted offerings in my CMS travels. I still cannot, with weblog or CMS software, keep up with the posting frequency I commanded through hand-coding. Commenting and other features drove me to software solutions in order to keep dm! at status quo, but I’m not wowed by any CMS or weblog software’s speed of use. All GUIs drive me nuts, for different reasons, bar none.
I want to be extra clear, because I have online friends who work with these other CMS/weblog packages. I’m not out to tar and feather any one CMS, just to explain my reasoning as to why I switched. YMMV.
You also need to understand I come to weblogs as a designer more than a programmer. I use weblog and CMS software as solutions for my clients as well as for myself, and have done so since my first experiments with Userland Manila. The features I most prize are ease of templating, flexible power, and ability to customize workflow for my clients. All of these drove me to Expression Engine. Chris Ruzin brought EE to my attention back during version 1.3, and I owe him thanks.
I cannot ignore or forgive needless complexity in a CMS; from my designer’s standpoint, CMS theming and templating remain ridiculously primitive. Proprietary templating tags are often nightmarish, introducing the added annoyance of typo-errors ... and some CMSs still require straight PHP and MySQL in their templates. I see it in my own templates, in others’ templates, this disconnect between “what I want to do, and what this damned CMS wants me to do.” It’s hard enough for bloggers, eager to opine in the metacosm, to try and parse CSS and XHTML amid browser incompatibilities; pile proprietary templating tags and a smidgen of PHP and MySQL on top, and you’ve got the situation we see today. Most learn just enough to be dangerous, but never enough to create the site that truly satisfies.
So, my friends, why Expression Engine? I’ll take a very simple example. Compare four templating tags of some common weblogging/CMS environments. Placing the title of a post in your page:
In Movable Type, you type: <$MTEntryTitle$>
In Wordpress, you type: <?php the_title(); ?>
In TextPattern, you type: <txp:title />
In Expression Engine, you type: {title}
Expression Engine handles identifying the templating language in the first call of the loop {exp:weblog:entries}. You don’t have to repeatedly identify the CMS code, and you’re not dancing in and out of PHP. This makes EE simple to remember, easy to program, a breeze to debug. This kind of common-sense is just one of the reasons why I’ve switched over. [I should mention you can, by selecting a checkbox, include PHP on any template page in EE, if you would prefer to deal directly with code].
What I love most about EE is that I can design a webpage in whatever HTML editor I wish, get it nice and compliant, FTP my images up to the server, log into the Control Panel and paste my XHTML into a template and start breaking it apart into CSS style sheets, headers, footers, and other logical constructs. I then call them into my templates as {embed}s and start automating and simplifying everything in proper CMS manner. Again, all in the Control Panel. [Lately, I use a little Firefox widget called “It’s All Text” so I can click a textarea and edit in a proper color-coding text editor; a ‘save’ puts that code back into the EE Control Panel and lets me save it in the template.] Note, I am adapting EE and my template/theme to how I work ... not how a CMS programmer thinks I want to work. EE’s the cleanest CMS I’ve used when it comes to shoving information into a database and then presenting it any way I want to by routing it through different templates. It amazes me how I can, now that I know the CMS reasonably well, create a site of astonishing complexity, with such ease of input for my clients, in a very short time.
It takes some climbing to get on the learning curve, as for any CMS. For me, most of the problem was trying to overwrite the habits I’d formed from other CMSs. And yes, EE costs money ... $200 at the commercial end. Some condemn it for not being open-source; you know what I think of that argument. I’ll gladly pay for something that works well, as long as the price isn’t exorbitant and there’s a clear benefit. Not a single client has rued the cost, because I’m able to tailor the input screens to their manner of working, and I believe I’m getting excellent value as a programmer/designer. EE shows off my talents better than other solutions. Response times from Ellis Labs and EngineHosting have been stellar, support has been excellent, the knowledgebase and the fora are always open, and given a few minutes of searching, I’ve found answers to every problem I’ve encountered.
Best place to start, for those of you interested, is to read Expression Engine’s own “Getting Started” documentation.
Then, check out BoyInk’s tutorials. You’ll get a much better idea of what EE can do ... though he takes you in deep, really fast. Be sure to read and understand before trying all of it out.
You can also seek out a book called ”Blog Design Solutions”, which explains how to set up weblogs in MT, Wordpress, EE, TextPattern, as well as explaining a “roll your own.” Get a cup of coffee and scan through to see which style of CMS you prefer for your weblog. If you choose to use any of these systems, this book will help you climb their learning curves (though I think the TextPattern section could be much, much better).
The most embarrassing aspect of recommending EE is those dreadful default templates. Expression Engine needs to run a templating contest to gather up-to-date designs; offer a full-on Commercial version for the winner, nine or so Personal versions for the runners-up, and retire those dated defaults. You learn a great deal from the code, and any default templates should include any and all cool functionality that EE can brag about.
And with that, I’ve got work to do. I hope that answers everyone’s questions.
Mod_rewrite and redirecting Wordpress ?= entries to Expression Engine:
Tobias gave me the fix, but I wanted to officially record it here so that others who troll the search engines looking for a solution can find it. After you “ReWrite Engine On”, try these suggestions.
This will allow you to redirect your rss feed, if you’re using a standard Expression Engine Template install:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} feed=
RewriteRule (.*) http://yourdomain.com/site/rss_2.0? [R=301]
And this will allow you to redirect any individual entries (replace the # with your entry #):
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} p=103
RewriteRule (.*)http://yourdomain.com/yournewpage? [R=301]
Because I couldn’t wildcard my entire list of entries, I used Google Analytics to choose my top entries, and redirected those. I left no duplicates online, so Google will eventually catch up.
Of interest.
Given that Expression Engine (my new CMS here) gives a ‘total’ tally for the site itself, as well as requests on individual templates, I can tell you that this joint gets 13,586 requests in 24 hours on a Friday (historically, a slow day for dm!). The CMS contains nearly 16,000 entries, not including my four years of HTML hand-code files which contain an equal if not higher number of individual entries, outside of the CMS.
The total reflects both people, spiders and whatnot ... but mostly spiders. Obviously, I need to dive into stats and prune away some search engines again, or at least rein in their trolling habits. Google Images has been ignoring my robots.txt over the last month, so I need to give them a swift whack in the head.
Just thought that if this is happening to me, others might want to peek at their stats and start fishing out some of the more egregious bandwidth lampreys for the new year.
