Photostudio will be next on the conversion list. But I think it will be the only other template we had for 1.6 that will make the transition to 2.1. We have a replacement in store for HandsRaised called Ecclesia. From this point forward though we will only be developing templates for 2.x.

Ecclesia will have some of the same features as HandsRaised in that it will have a rotator on the home page and a JQuery sermon audio player. We will also have a Calendar and some other things that we have found make managing a church website easier. Here is a screenshot…

Published in: News by Marcus Neto

Published in: News by Marcus Neto

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.

Published in: EE Best Practices by Marcus Neto

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.

There is a new team member on the EllisLab team. Leslie Doherty, or Mrs. Flinger as we have come to know her, joins EllisLab as their community architect. As the co-founder of the EllisLab community partner Show-EE.com i welcome her as she is a good friend and knows her stuff.

The talks were good. I think Adii did a good job of discussing community. I know he must get a lot of crap straddling the various fences that he and the WooThemes team work in. I would second his statement of not knowing if templates for EE were the going to fly. But i still think it is early. I think we have provided benefit to the community in helping newcomers get their feet wet by looking at some real working code. And I know he shares my sentiment that I am just not ready to give it up yet.

I think the two highlight talks for me were Simon Collison’s talk on Subconcious Design and Jamie Pittock’s talk on Making EE your own. I did not study design or art in college (found out at EECI over drinks that Kenny Meyer’s and I have an English Lit degree in common) so Simon’s talk made me re-evaluate my eye for design. Not sure what that means but I think I have some more meditating to do on that one. Jamie’s talk on making EE your own showed me the benefit of having a default install that is highly customized. It saves time and ensures a smooth process. So we are going to be trying to work some of his ideas into 2.x versions of our sites moving forward.

Wrapping up I would like to thank Brandon Kelly of Pixel and Tonic for allowing me to go. It is always a blast to get together with other folks in the community. And this time was no exception. ExpressionEngine has a great community! I am thankful for the friends that i have made.

Published in: News by Marcus Neto

For JavaScript and CSS files we have used GZip compression. It really helps and is pretty straightforward to use. For an example try this blog entry

A big area that can benefit from some boosts in speed is in the area of images. Many of us use Sprites and other tricks to speed up download times. But one tool that I have found that is just awesome at cutting the size of image files is ImageOptim. I just downloaded the images folder for this site (cause like an idiot I never do these sorts of things to my own websites) and the original size was 19MB. After running all of the images through ImageOptim the total folder size was 12MB which is something like a 35-40% decrease in file size. Looking through the report that ImageOptim gives I see there are a number of files (some on the Home Page) that saved 70-80%! That is crazy. Using Chrome again I saw a 30% decrease in pageload times. Very nice!

These are things that can be done to all sites. It is only after this type of stuff is done that you should look into things like caching templates in EE and possible server side caching. And by all means if you know of some other tricks please leave a comment to let me know. Would love to hear some of the mechanisms that you are using to speed up page load times.

Published in: Tutorials by Marcus Neto

I am hoping to finish all of my current custom work by EECI. I have a new Church Template that I want to release in June for EE 2.0 now that Freeform 3.0 has been released. Stay Tuned!

Published in: News by Marcus Neto

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…

Published in: Add-on ReviewsTutorials by Marcus Neto

The Grand Prize includes:

• EECI2010 SF Full Conference Ticket ($525 value)
• ExpressionEngine 2 Commercial license ($299.95 value)
• 12-month EngineHosting S-2 package ($240 value)
• Playa license ($75 value)
• Wygwam license ($35 value)
• FF Matrix license ($35 value)

So this means I will be at EECI 2010. Make sure to drop me a note if you are coming to EECI. I would love to meet you.

If you are not familiar with EECI it is one of the largest conferences of the year specifically for ExpressionEngine and CodeIgnitor (hence EECI… get it?).

Many thanks to Brandon for having the give-a-way. I love his products and am glad for the licenses as well.

Published in: News by Marcus Neto

So let’s just start off by saying I had never been to SxSW before. It was a new experience. And while I had some expectations they were few. I knew I wanted to go see Philip Bloom’s session (more on that later) and I knew I wanted to meet some like minded folk but that was pretty much it.

I left Mobile, Alabama on Thursday and arrived in Austin late. Immediately I got to the hotel and dropped off my junk as I knew there was a group of cool kids (other ExpressionEngine Devs) waiting on me at the Iron Cactus. So I arrived and was warmly greeted by Mike Boyink, Adam Wiggall, Kevin Shoesmith and a few other EE folk that at the time were engrossed in conversation (Brandon and Nevin . So that night we all ended up playing pool and getting to know each other… oh and there was the beer… like an ever flowing fountain it just kept flowing. Adam and Kevin kick butt at pool whilst Brandon and I were the bottom feeders with Brandon beating me soundly after playing a single game that seemed to last an hour!

Sessions started on Friday. I think we went to 2-3 of them. That is the thing… outside of the Philip Bloom session on Monday I really cant remember too much of the sessions. I have to say that they were a bit disappointing. Doesn’t matter though. I would do it all over again. And here is why….

Adam Wiggall (@turnandface) was my roommate. Absolutely a great chap (Englishman living in Orlando). I spent almost every hour of SxSW with this guy and I don’t think there were any of those awkward moments where you are unsure of what to say next. He is big into photography too so we spent a few days exploring downtown Austin. He made the parties more fun. I have to say I am Chuffed to Bits to know this dude (I hope I got that right…).

EllisLab sprung for a duck tour for anyone that wanted to come. It was fun to get on this thing and go riding through downtown Austin with out little duck calls quacking at people. Kind of ridiculous really but it was fun. I got to talk to a few people (seeing a theme here?) like Greg Aker and Lisa Wess from EllisLab. Derek Jones and Greg Salt as well. Robert was there from Whooz Media… Loads of fun… Did I mention Robert is hosting EECI in May?

Sorry for doing this but while we were on our Duck Adventure tour we met Leslie. Leslie is a transvestite from Austin Texas. Google her. She is rockstar famous. Nevermind that she is a 60 year old dude walking around in public in a thong… sorry I think I just puked a bit in my mouth ... did I mention Austin’s catchphrase? Keep Austin Weird… ‘nuff said.

I’m not much for Canadians (kidding) but if I had to be friends with one I guess this guy would do. Kevin Shoesmith from Factory Interactive. I can’t believe this is the best picture I have of him. Sorry for the quality. He is a mean pool shooter and doesn’t like to lose so if you see him in a pool hall be on notice. Kevin and I walked back from the Happy Cog’aoke party together talking of ExpressionEngine, business and where the damn pizza place was. To our surprise we arrived on 6th street to find it absolutely packed at… 3:30a.m.!(if I could capitalize that I would cause it is certainly caps worthy)... He pretty alright for a Canuck…

Fish meet Toad… Some of you may know that my parent company is Blue Fish Design Studio. Well this is Paul Burton from Atlanta and his business is 16toads. Apparently we both have a thing for liquid cause it showed over the week. Paul is a stand-up guy. He took his jibs like a champ when he took home first place in the SxSW awards for best blog for his pet project the Vile Plutocrat. We gave him all kinds of grief.

And then there are the twins…. These guys hail from Tulsa, OK. Who knew they even had interwebs in OK (I can kid as my wife is from OKC)? Nick Switzer is the wirey shaved head one and Justin Shattuck is the pomade friendly one. These guys are trouble but damn good at that. Actually they are really intelligent 20 somethings with a hell of a business. Between Mr Wiggles and these guys there was a lot of name dropping (legitimate). Good guys and the life of the party.

So as you can see there is a theme here. The people are what make SxSW worthwhile. So often we work alone (or distributed as in our case) and never get a chance to actually meet face to face with some of our peers in the industry. It’s important to do this every once in awhile. The ExpressionEngine group is a close knit one. We help each other out. We talk openly about our businesses (after all there is plenty of business for everyone) and when we get a chance to get together we buy each other a couple of rounds and catch up like old friends.

So yeah… writing this article is sappy… so sue me. Better yet… next year come to SxSW so you can wax poetic with me.

P.S. I attended the DSLR filmmaking sessions on Monday. Philip Bloom was amazing. And at the end of the 3rd session there was a give-a-way. I never win anything so I was not too excited… till they called my name. I won a Zacuto Rapid Fire rig for video shooting with a DSLR. So awesome! So I want to thank Philip and the Zacuto folks for such an awesome prize. My Z-Finder should be here tomorrow. You have a fan!

Published in: News by Marcus Neto

I was reminded of this yesterday as I was about to board a plane and got a @ message from a fellow EE developer that someone had taken my article from WebDesignerDepot.com and put it on their own site and were promoting it there instead of at WDD. Unfortunately I had the immediate reaction that I am sure that Brent had upon someone stealing their work no matter the intentions. I flew off the handle on Twitter without contacting the individual responsible and figuring out their motives.

The fact remains that I do not want my work showing up just anywhere. My name is my brand. My work is contracted out to individuals that are either going to pay me or are major players in the industry that can help promote my work (in other words… pay me indirectly). When the individual saw my tweets his immediate reaction was not to run into the shadows but rather he thought I would be pleased with the free publicity. This is where my attitude began to change and has now lead to this blog post.

I do not know Elio Assuncao the CEO of YODspica so I cannot make a judgment call on his intentions. Perhaps he is a no good flea ridden Social Media god that had every intention of scraping my article (which he has now deleted 50% of) and benefiting through the traffic and ads on his site. Perhaps he was just trying to share some good information with his readers and did not think of the implications. I dunno. So for that I need to apologize to Elio for wishing fleas on him. No one should wish fleas on someone without knowing what the intentions of the individual are.

But this brings up a bigger issue. In this non-utopian world we all need to survive. The way that we do that is through the trading of life hours. Currency is just a representation of that. We do something with our skills and someone gives us something in trade for it. Online we sometimes forget this as everything is available and so easily gotten. You can just do a view source and in a few minutes steal something that took someone else months of work and thousands of dollars to develop. We need to wake up as a community and realize that free is not free. Yeah you may have access to, and be able to download something without pulling out a credit card, cash or your paypal password. But the reality is that the item that you are downloading cost someone something. Some people recoup that cost through the use of ads (take the recent article by Ars Technica for example). Some use the traffic or notoriety to gain additional contracts and work (like my desire to write for sites like Web Designer Depot). And others sell products (like us, RocketTheme, WooThemes and so many others). But there has to be a trade off for our time otherwise we end up digging ditches for a living instead of being able to stay in business. I would even go as far as to say that the OS systems are an example of this but that is another blog post…

All this to say that the next time you write an article or build a widget and a large portion of what you are doing is based off of something someone else did take a minute and consider our ecosystem. Contact them first. Make sure you get the OK before starting/taking their work. I think you may find it a lot easier and less stressful than finding out they are pissed after you have already started.

That is all. I am putting this all behind me now…

Published in: Rants by Marcus Neto