EETemplates

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.

Member Utilities has allowed us to remove about 100 users from our site in the last week. Fabulous stuff. Especially for sites with large memberships. For $15 it is a steal. So thank you Greg from Purple Dogfish for an awesome addition to ExpressionEngine!

*Free Tip: disabling your membership list from being viewed will probably dissuade a few of the smarter spammers. To do this go to admin-> members and groups -> member groups. Select the edit group for the group in question (I would do everyone except Super Admins).

On the left hand navigation select Member Account Privileges. From here you will have to make some decisions based on the type of site that you run. But for my purposes I have no need for members to see or contact each other so I set most of these to no. But at least set Can view public profiles and Include Members in Site’s Member List to no. This concludes our public service announcement.

Oh. and I hate to do this but comments are being moderated as well…

This tutorial will show you how to add a calendar to your ExpressionEngine based website. And as an example we will be using our Tudobem template. The HTML/CSS and necessary ExpressionEngine code will all be included. So make the jump to the full page article to read more.

In this video we will start with a blank slate and create a usable but simple layout to replace that which is found at Sean Smith’s Repatriate.me. This was not meant to be a end all be all tutorial but rather just a quick post about some of the features that I like about Fireworks as it applies to web design. You may like Photoshop… that is ok. The video idea came about because Sean and Richard were both asking questions about designing websites and I made the comment that they needed to give Fireworks a whirl. As a way of convincing them to come to the dark side I have armed this video with the very best. It basically recreates the look of Sean’s website in about 10 minutes.

You can download the completed file here *note: I hated the colors after recording the video so I changed them up a bit and feel free to use the file for whatever.

Click through to see the video…

I often see questions on the ExpressionEngine Forums regarding photo galleries. In EE Version 2.0 the Photo Gallery module by EllisLab is going to be discontinued but there are some other reasons for using Weblogs instead of the Photo Gallery Module.

So…

Doing a search for JQuery Image Slideshow on Google nets quite a few solutions for the designer wanting to integrate a rotating image effect on their website. We are kinda partial to Mike Alsup’s Cycle JQuery plugin. If you use his code try and make a donation.

What is a company info weblog and why should I use one? Well, we have tried to make it easy to change the information store on an EE website. We wanted a central location for all contact information. Frankly I just got tired of changing company names and email addresses on 6 different locations on some of the sites we manage for our custom clients. So what we did was create a Company Info Weblog which allows us to input the contact information once and pull it into the website in the various locations. See below for more information.

**Note: We are now utilizing the path.php Global Variables for Version 1.6.8

*** Another Note: In our version 2.0 templates we will be using the Global Variables found in the Template Manager

I am making a couple of assumptions with this tutorial. First there are so many different hosts and they each have their own way of creating databases so we are assumming that you already have a database created and that you know the location, database name, database username, and the database password. From there let’s get started on installing EE!

I have wanted to know how to do this for about 6 months now so I finally sat down and figured it out. I also have some handy tips that will help you format the look and feel of SSP. So click on the link to read how you can Integrate SlideShowPro into ExpressionEngine.

Before we get started make sure to head on over to the SlideShowPro website and purchase the Flash Package for use with this tutorial