EETemplates.com

Spam sucks. If you are a spammer there is a special HOT place waiting for you after death. No one likes you and your mama thinks you are ugly.

OK now that I have that off my chest there has been an awful lot of registration spam hitting ExpressionEngine websites lately. While I cannot consider myself an expert (although I do think Greg from Purple Dogfish is) I do think I have some to share. I have come across a few things that I do to help fight registration spam that I will hit on after the jump. Just click on the Read More to… well… read more.

ExpressionEngine Camp is coming to Denver Colorado on Oct 22nd. I really wish I could be there. And I hope that this is a sign of things to come with people organizing more EE meetups around the country. There are very few conferences for our community so whenever someone has the guts to put one together I have to give em some credit. If you are anywhere in the area I suggest you go. It should prove to be a fun day of learning and networking. We are a sponsor and everyone that attends will be receiving a FREE LICENSE of the template of their choice. So head on over to the ExpressionEngine Camp website and read up on the specifics

I have been getting hit hard by some comment spam on a client site for the past week. I was really confused as I even turned off comments and it was still posting them. It was not till I searched for the title of the entry on the edit page that I got a clue as to what had happened. The client had posted an event to their calendar with the same title as the title of a blog post. The intelligent spammer somehow figured out that he could post comments to the site by subsituting the entry titles for other channels into the url structure for the blog/comments. So in other words instead of sitename.com/blog/comments/blogentrytitlehere he typed in sitename.com/blog/comments/eventcalendarentrytitlehere and it allowed him to post comments to that channel.

So… when creating the channels for your sites make sure to shut off comments for all channels that don’t require them. It can be found in admin -> Channel (weblog) administration -> Channel (weblog) Management -> Edit Channel (weblog) Preferences. Find Comment Posting Preferences on the left hand navigation. The radio button at the top turns them off.

I am typing this on my iPad from while on the airplane back to Mobile from EECI. It was such a quick trip but pack full of goodness. There were lots of things that I learned on this trip. For instance, the next release of ExpressionEngine is going to be a non-beta-too-legit-to-quit version. That’s right. The next version is 2.1. Between that and the addition of many of the add-ons that the pro network community depends on I think it is high time we started releasing some more EE templates and building our custom sites on ExpressionEngine 2.1. This is something I have been waiting on for quite some time.

One of the other items learned was the addition of MojoMotor to the EllisLab family. It looks really slick. If you want you can check out the video at their site. Some of the highlights are that it will be $49.95. Will be extensible. Will be easy to edit for clients. Will allow for custom themes. This is in no way going to replace ExpressionEngine for us though. EE has a feature that many of the other CMSs do not which is custom fields and from what we learned MM will not have that same functionality. I could see using it for small sites that need a simple brochure-like site. But it is a far cry from what we have gotten used to with EE. And for those that say this is the reason why EllisLab dropped core… I seriously doubt it. There was a ton of functionality in 1.6s core version. There is no way you can compare the two.

This morning I was having a discussion with a fellow EE developer about website speed optimization. I was mentioning various methods for speeding up a website. One tool that I find useful is the Google Chrome Resources Graphing tool. With it you can tell where latency and download speeds are slower than could be. I find that the problem with most sites is not ExpressionEngine but more than likely excessive calls for JavaScript and CSS files and even more so for images.

Just a quick blog post as a public service announcement. Recently I have begun culling all of the bogus users from our member list as I hate being used for link bait. For those of you that have never experienced this it is quit a frustrating experience. It is the act of a human (no bots here) that registers on your website. They wait a few weeks and then they come back and put a bunch of links in their bio. Now I am all for allowing people to promote their legitimate businesses but when I see 5 links in a bio and they are all for something different. Or if there is even 1 that I know is ACAI or WEIGHTLOSS link then they are probably going in the trash as well.

Fortunately I have recently been informed of a Member Utilities which is a module that ties into the ExpressionEngine membership capabilities and notifies you of any changes your members make. So if bobfrodo1967 (names changed to protect the innocent) makes a change to his account it emails the specified people with all of the pertinent information like user number, user name, email address, IP Address (so you can tell if they are coming from a single person and ban repeat offenders) and their bio so you can see what they have added.

Well it appears I have won another contest. This has got to be the luckiest season in my life for winning contests or give-a-ways (as my Bud Adam would say… If I fell into a barrel of thumbs…) So Brandon Kelly is the Owner of Pixel and Tonic. He makes the most famous FF Matrix and WYGWAM as well as other notable add-ons for ExpressionEngine. He used to do business under his name but recently relaunched as Pixel & Tonic. He was giving away a number of prizes and it appears I have won the Grand Prize! w00t!

To be honest I have been putting off this blog entry. A lot transpired over the week of South by Southwest (SxSW). All of it good. But it kind of leaves me waxing poetic like a kid that has just left summer camp and all of his friends are scattered across the world. Actually that is exactly the feeling I had when I got on the plane to come home. Anyway, make the jump to read the skinny on SxSW and why you should be there next year.