Thursday, May 15, 2008
Site Spotlight: CampKettlebell.com
Life has been crazy busy lately, but thats a good thing. For this spotlight, I want to highlight CampKettlebell.com. This is a little self-serving because this is a site that my company did. 
If you aren’t familiar with kettlebells, they are a terrific exercise tool. Basically, they are weights with a handle. You can do tons of really challenging exercises with them. Camp Kettlebell is a class put on by a local trainer that has several certifications in kettlebell training.
For the site, the main needs were to be able to update it, have a news section, an exercise section and let people pay online. To accomplish this, we setup a fresh ExpressionEngine install with a main weblog, and a weblog for each of the other categories. We used freeform to handle the form and some cool little PHP bits. For example, when he uploads a news item, if he uploads an image with the same name as the article title, it will insert the image automatically. If not, there is a default image that will be inserted. Same thing for the exercises. We also created a weblog to update the form with the dates of the camps. He can create a new article in that weblog, give it a name (Say Summer 1) and then select the start and finish dates on the calendar, save, and it updates the form. Pretty cool, huh?
When you have a few minutes, check out the site. If you are in the Dallas/Fort Worth area and are looking for a kettlebell training program, sign up and prepare to be sore.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Job Posting: Convert my psd to EE
I’m a little swamped this week and I have a psd that needs to be converted to ExpressionEngine. The design is completely done (home page and interior page), I just don’t have time to finish it out.
If you are interested, shoot me an email at admin at eedesign.org. I can give you more specifics then. Be sure to include your charge. This is coding only, no design involved, so bid accordingly. Ideally, I would be able to get this back from you tomorrow evening, but I can be flexible. I will pay 50% up front and 50% upon completion if you have references, if you do not, then its 100% upon completion and I’ll be happy to be your first reference.
Again, email me at admin at eedesign.org. Be sure to reference “coding job” in the subject so that it doesn’t get confused with my “increase male aggregate” messages.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Is ExpressionEngine Worth Paying For?
If you follow Internet ramblings, you may have stumbled across this little war of words between some of the guys from Wordpress and Movable Type. All of this started with an announcement from Movable Type (here) that MT would be getting some upgrades. A shot was then fired back by Matt Mullenweg from Wordpress, and so the volley begins. The two products do the same things (basically) but one is free, the other offers paid licenses. Both sides have their fans, but usually in the end, the conversation/argument goes to, “why should I pay for MT when I can get the same things from Wordpress for free?”
Anytime there are “free” options, some people have trouble paying for an alternative. I’m not here to debate the differences between Wordpress and Movable Type, but I believe that this directly applies to ExpressionEngine.
There are a lot of free content managers. A lot. Does that mean its a good choice though? Maybe, maybe not. Here are some of the things that I’ve found with free content managers and how its different when you use a paid system such as ExpressionEngine.
1. Support. I have built many sites using free software only to hear the very loud chirping of crickets when I needed help most. The “sorry dude, I don’t know” responses are just as painful. If you are a coding god, then this may not be that big of an issue, but for everyone else, this is important. With a paid solution such as ExpressionEngine, I found a great support team and a killer forum that is quick to help. The forum is free, so one could argue that the ExpressionEngine user base is just more helpful, but, is that such a bad thing? Paying for software is what makes the official support happen. If you want to use Wordpress and you back yourself into a corner that you don’t know how to get out of, don’t think that just because they have such a huge user base that someone will have had your problem, know how to fix your problem, be willing to help you and do it.
2. Upgrades. While upgrading shouldn’t be a requirement, it also should not screw up your site when you do it. With free software, I don’t think a developer goes into it with the idea that he wants to screw up everyone’s sites. Silly developer, that would be foolish. He/they do their best to make it work for everyone. But what happens when it doesn’t? Maybe this leans back on the support issue, but you may be completely on your own for figuring it out. Didn’t do a backup before the simple 3 click upgrade? Now you are sunk. A paid solution is typically a much more controlled environment giving you better results. Have trouble with your upgrade? Contact support and get some help and avoid the, “RTF Readme n00b!!1!” replies that plague some of the free programs.
3. Features. With free software, you get features that may or may or not be good and may or may not be useful. With a paid solution, whether or not the developer’s children get to eat is determined by people buying their software. So, they obviously have a strong reason to include the best, most usable features that they can so that people will want to buy their product.
There are probably other some other great ones that I am leaving out, but these are some that I have dealt with personally. Obviously everyone has a budget so you need to do what works for your budget, but before you rule out a paid solution because there is a “free” alternative, you need to make sure that you consider the real cost of free.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Site Spotlight: BestNetworkSecurity.com - Part 1
Lately, it seems that there are a lot of new sites coming to ExpressionEngine. When moving to ExpressionEngine from another content management system, eventually you will most likely be doing some type of conversion. Recently, Adam Khan converted BestNetworkSecurity.com from Joomla, another popular CMS, to ExpressionEngine. The following is the first part of an interview with Adam where he talks about the site and converting from another content manager to ExpressionEngine.
Tell us about yourself and how you got involved in web development.
I wanted to be a journalist in order to become a novelist. I did
eventually get to work at a newspaper but by then I’d been doing freelance
web development for enough years that I was more interested in reforming
the paper’s website than doing the legwork to write stories. Web
development is fun because it brings together programming, manuscript
design, thinking about organizations, and writing itself. But it does
involve spending far too much time alone in front of a computer.
Recently you ported BestNetworkSecurity.com from Joomla to
ExpressionEngine. In your opinion, why would someone want to leave Joomla
(or any other CMS) for ExpressionEngine?
Three reasons:
1) sculptable weblogs, IE, different fields for each one and the
open-ended thinking that this fosters
2) powerful templating
3) intangibles, such as support from Lisa and Robin, direction from Rick,
and taste from Paul, which together form the nexus of an ecology one can
trust.
It sounds like you may have done quite a bit of customization on the
back-end - different field sets for different weblogs etc. From an
organizational/mapping perspective, how do you personally like to go about
sorting out changes like this?
As someone once said, things should be as simple as they can be but no
simpler. Not every object to be published on a site is the same type of
thing. Rather, they can be abstracted through discussion into various
types, each of which type should be definable. That’s what I meant before
by sculptable weblogs. Without them, objects to be published are squeezed
into a standard shape of title/summary/body. When your structure is too
simple for what you’re trying to do with it, you end up complicating
things hopelessly. And people must get pretty hopeless indeed because it
appears to be no small thing to switch systems – you really must have
reached the end of your patience.
So the client and I discuss all the different types of things on the site
and how they relate and what needs to be done to each of them. To express
it another way, we’re creating a series of related database tables where
previously they were all being squeezed into one table. This review and
exploration needs to be exhaustive because it’s what determines the
architecture of the site. Revelations arriving later can throw little
spanners in the works. It’s easy and I think actually fun to discuss this,
and in my experience it’s when the client starts to get excited as well,
thinking, yes, this is how it should have been all along!
In Getting Things Done, David Allen says don’t be afraid to add another folder to your system even if it only contains one item, and to therefore always keep a
stock of empty folders - around a hundred. A hundred! Similarly, I don’t
flinch from opening up another weblog and field group. In fact, it’s only
much later, when it’s been demonstrated that two weblogs actually do have
the same shape, that I go back and eliminate one of the field groups,
allowing both weblogs to share the same field group.
One of the real power features of ExpressionEngine is the ability to shape and mold the manager to your site. That is very refreshing when you are coming from a more rigid management system. This freedom can also be intimidating but once you get your head around ExpressionEngine, the possibilities are nothing short of exciting. If you are new to ExpressionEngine, or maybe just checking it out because you are tired of other content management systems, take a few moments and check out the ExpressionEngine Video Tutorials which walk you through some of the basics. Be sure to check back for the continuation of our interview with Adam.
Friday, March 07, 2008
Animated Graphics = Sophisticated Website
According to Adobe, “Animated graphics add an exciting, sophisticated look to your website.” Really? Animated graphics will make my site look sophisticated? They follow that genius statement up with, “For example, you can make your company mascot dance across a page while the logo fades in and out.” Now THAT, is sophisticated. Adobe link.
Animated graphics, don’t by default, make your site better or more sophisticated or whatever. They may just be bloat. That isn’t to say they can’t, but saying they do just seems so 1998. It doesn’t help that Adobe gives such a poor example.
When making animation/graphic decisions, here are some good rules to follow:
1. Does it matter? Does the graphic add meaning to the message? If not, then its just filler and you should move on.
2. Will it be good in five years? Ten? Sure, five or ten years in Internet years is forever, but when you make yourself think of how something will look down the road, you may realize that your dancing baby graphic holding a banjo is really just lame.
3. Is it cute or funny? If it is, it probably isn’t. Lame web graphics have been around for a while and no matter how great that hot dog doing the macarena may seem, it isn’t that great.
4. Is the animation/graphic good? I realize this is subjective (like most things in design) but pick a site that you think is really great and see if you think that graphic would ever show up on their site. If you don’t think it would, then it isn’t good.
5. Don’t use an animated graphic when a static one will do the job just fine. Repetitive animation is annoying. We knew it ten years ago, we just didn’t know that we knew it. Dump the fast looping GIF for subtle or static. Your audience’s eyes will thank you.
Feel free to add your own rules to the list. Like most rules, these are [probably] made to be broken. The trick is to know when and how to break them. Thats where you win the cash and prizes.
