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A new version of my l’il old Weighted Categories Plugin is out. I went up two version points because I never released the last update I made. Oops.

ExpressionEngine 1.6 has been released today. Woohoo, something new to play with! A month ago I was under the impression that 1.5.x was going to be the last version before 2.0.

All of the new features are mentioned in the changelog, but here are some of the bigger things I am excited about this release.

(Note: readers who don’t know EE will not understand much of what I’m saying.)

Custom Category Fields. I was so so excited to learn that this was coming in 1.6. With Custom Category Fields you can create custom fields specific to each category group.

And, there is also a new setting for Category URL Title! YAY! Something I have been waiting for since 2004!

Pages module. The new Pages module makes it easier for you to add pages to your site. Pages are mainly used for more static content. When you want to create a page, you still have to create a new entry in a weblog, but now you can specify a specific URL for the page. And it doesn’t seem to clash with the way I currently organize my static content, which is good.

Note that there already is a Pages module out there by Mark Huot – and since they have the same name, there will be a conflict. Mark Huot’s module has been renamed to Tome. I haven’t used Mark Huot’s module, but based on the activity in the forums it seems to be quite popular.

Hidden templates. With hidden templates you can prevent people from accessing certain templates. Many people, including me, use the {embed} variable to include certain templates into other templates, so that you can use one snippet of code in one template in many different templates. I don’t want others to access the snippets of code directly, so the hidden template feature will definitely come in handy.

Relaxed categories parameter. I will quote the changelog for this one:

Added new parameter relaxed_categories= to the Weblog Entries tag to allow use of category indicator in weblog entries tag pulling entries from multiple weblogs that do NOT share category groups

My first thought when I read this was, “huh?? What does that mean?” Then I realized it fixes something I ran into a long time ago. So, yay! It means shorter URLs and less templates to worry about.

Link to next/previous entry in the restricted by category. Two parameters category=”“ and category_group=”“ were added to the Weblog Module’s Next/Previous Entry Linking tag, which means we can finally restrict next/previous links for an entry to another entry in the same category, or any other specific category.

New Multi Site Manager Add-on. I’m not sure whether I like this. This is a new paid add-on (not a module/plugin/extension, but an add-on). With it, you can easily manage multiple sites under one installation of ExpressionEngine. This add-on was previewed earlier this month. When I first read about it, I was confused because I thought that you could already run multiple sites in ExpressionEngine – why did was there a new add-on to do it? Then I watched the video and saw how much more powerful this add-on is. Each site has its own separate settings, template groups, weblogs, and so on, but the member groups can be shared between all of them. The Multi Site Manager supports 3 sites, and if you want to add more you have to pay for each additional site.

The thing is that with the release of this Multi Site Manager, the old way of running multiple sites with ExpressionEngine will not be officially supported. I’m using this old method to run this website, my journal on a subdomain, and another weblog on another subdomain, all using the same version of EE. I’m worried that since this old method is not supported any more, one day as EE gets updated the old method will stop working. I don’t want to rely on an old method just in case something happens.

I could just purchase the MSM and forget about the old method. :p But I’m still trying to decide whether it’s worth it. (I am tempted to purchase just to try it out – that’s how I got the paid Forum module!!)

Other.

• There’s a new default theme, which matches the look of the new ExpressionEngine website.
• The Template Management page now shows different icon images next to each different template type. This will replace the lovely Template management with images extension that I had installed.
• “Modified default control panel styling of <h3> tags to no longer align text to the right.” Heh, this one bothered me although I never did bother to fix it in my custom CP themes.
• If you’re updating from there are some update notices to go through first.
• All the entries in the Multiple Rick Birthday Contest are quite funny!

I’m planning on playing with this new release even more over the weekend.

Yesterday I went to the pMachine site and got a huge shock – not only a fantastic new design, but a new name, as well! pMachine has now become EllisLab.

I just stared at the screen in awe for a good minute or so before reading the news.

The pMachine EllisLab, ExpressionEngine, CodeIgniter and EngineHosting (formerly pMachineHosting) sites have all been redesigned by Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain of 31Three, and they are all running on the same installation of ExpressionEngine. It looks like the members list for CodeIgniter and ExpressionEngine have been merged, and the forums for each of them too. There’s going to be an article from Jesse at the Digital Web Magazine about how he designed these sites.

Congrats to everyone at EllisLab for the wonderful job. I’m so excited to see the new stuff that they’re going to be coming up with next!

I’ve updated my LiveJournal Crosspost Module/Extension to 1.3. There is one new feature added to it – any posts you make to LiveJournal will be formatted first. So you can use Markdown, Textile, or any other text formatting plugin available.

I just made an update to my Comment Text Formatting extension.

This new version allows you to specify the text formatting for your comments via a parameter in the comment display/comment preview tag.

What does this mean? The previous version of this extension allowed you to choose only one text format to be applied to all comments. This was done through the settings in the Control Panel. But say for some reason you want to apply the Textile formatting to the comments of one weblog, but Markdown on the comments of another. Well now you can do that by using the new “format” parameter!

To use, change your {exp:comment:entries} and {exp:comment:preview} tags and add the parameter wherever you want the formatting to be displayed:

If you don’t use the format parameter, then the extension will just use the settings from the Control Panel.

I didn’t even realize that I could use extensons to add new parameters like this, until, well, now.

Download Version 1.2.0 here.

I’ve made a minor update to my Show Entry View extension for ExpressionEngine. The newest version adds a new option to display the total of all entry views.

Download Version 1.1.0 here.

I’m using the brilliant ExpressionEngine Wiki Module to jot down some links and notes as I’m trying to learn about my new iMac and exploring its features. I just noticed this – the wiki titles are case insensitive! Coming from MediaWiki, where the titles are case sensitive, I’ve been following this rule of making only the first letter in the title of a page Upper case, and then any other letter in the title all lower case, so as not to confuse myself. Now I don’t have to do that any more!

I feel tempted to go and rename all of my existing wiki titles. In keeping with my naming convention I have titles like Pmachine and Itunes and Htaccess and they all look weird.

I might just put all my notes in a new wiki and make it public. (My main wiki is private – sorry.) It may or may not be of any use to anyone else. Anyway, there are already wikis devoted to this topic already – for example, this Mac Beginner’s Guide from Mac Rumors.

Now. I’ve finished writing up yet another reason I love EE. Back to playing.

Edit: By the way, I’d better clarify something. You can’t really make the wiki itself private. What you can do is create a new template, put the wiki display tag in that template, and then restrict access to that template.

If you’re tracking your entries in EE using the entry views tracking feature, this extension I’ve written may be useful for you. It shows the entry view counters for each entry on the Edit page in the Control Panel.

Here’s a small screenshot:

There are four views to track and you can choose which ones you want to have displayed on the Edit page. In the screenshot I’ve chosen to show only the first two.

Download Version 1.1.0 here.

( Read More... )

I’ve made another update to the Link Entry from Control Panel to Your Site extension. It wasn’t playing nice with other extensions.

Download Version 1.1.1

The Link Entry from Control Panel to Your Site extension has been updated again. This new version uses less code. In previous versions I had to duplicate a chunk of code from the expressionengine core code, but thanks to a new extension hook I don’t have to do that anymore.

Oh, and said extension hook is not mentioned in the Extensions Library, I found it by accident today when going through the code.

This plugin for ExpressionEngine will reset the entry view counters. You can specify which view and which weblog to clear. It works in the same way as the clear template hits plugin.

Download Version 1.0 here. Documentation and examples are inside the plugin file, and I’ve copied them below.

( Documentation )

It’s the Victoria Day Long Weekend. I didn’t have anything specific planned, until just now when I saw that ExpressionEngine 1.4.2 was released! It comes with a brand new wiki module and some updates to the forum module. So now I’m going to spend some time this weekend playing with it. It’s going to be fun!

I tried to go see The DaVinci Code earlier this evening. The showtimes were 7:00, 7:30, 8:00, 8:30 and 11:30pm. I got there at around 7:00 hoping to catch either the 7:30, the 8:00, or the 8:30 but all of the shows for the evening were sold out already. Looks like the lukewarm reviews aren’t stopping people from wanting to see it!

Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Rick Ellis mentioned in his blog about some of the upcoming features in ExpressionEngine. There’s the long-awaited e-commerce module and updates to the forum module. The surprise though (and what I’m most looking forward to now that I know about it!) is the announcement of a wiki module. No more having to deal with MediaWiki – ohhhh I’m so excited!

My LiveJournal Crosspost Module/Extension is now at version 1.2. Since it’s such a long name, I’ve officially dubbed it :LJCME: and added this acronym into the Acronym Module so I won’t have to link to it all the time.

The main new thing in this version is support for the new Current Location field. Those LJ people haven’t updated the documentation yet but I was able to figure out what to do. The documentation for tags isn’t there either, and tag support has been around for months!

Edit: So many strange things going on over here lately. I’m having problems with the standalone-edit form and the daylight savings time settings, the comment previews are messed up, and the acronym modules works on the comments page but not on the index page. Blearghhhh…

Made some updates to my LiveJournal Crosspost Module/Extension, making it version 1.1. I fixed a couple of bugs. And then I changed one of the module’s tags ({exp:lj_crosspost:id}) so that they’d be more consistent. It will mess up your templates, so check the docs to see how to change your code.

Also, I added another option where you can specify whether you want to enable/disable comments for any particular entry. In the last version, if you enabled comments on your ExpressionEngine entry, it would enable comments on the LiveJournal entry, and same if you disabled comments. I realized this isn’t ideal, because you might want to, say, enable comments on your EE entry, but disable comments on your LJ entry, and force users to comment only on the EE entry so that the conversation won’t be broken up into two places.

Next up: I would like to put the documentation in a separate readme file, instead of having it in the control panel – that way, you can read the documentation before installing the module.