More on EE 1.3

I still haven’t gotten to play around much with the newest version of Expression Engine (I plan to add avatars to comments soon) but I did want to comment on a few little things.

This upgrade has been the most painless upgrade I’ve experienced so far with EE!  They did beta testing a little differently this time around and either that method worked much, much better or they simply had fewer bugs.  Normally I have to struggle with fixing something after an upgrade, but this time - not a single problem!

I’ve tried out the spell checker fairly extensively with journal entries and it rocks my socks off!  I don’t know how they worked their magic voodoo so well, but it’s the best spell checking system I’ve seen since Google.  In fact, it’s very much like Google.  I’d like if the questionable words were a little more apparent (they’re simply underlined with a dotted red line) but I suspect there’s some CSS I can tweak somewhere to get it to appear bold and red if I want.  Is this the first blogging CMS with spell checking built in?

There have been reports that my Amazon API plugin is borked with some changes they’ve made.  Paul wrote to me and said he thinks he fixed the problem and uploaded a new zip file to the plugin site, so if you’re having problems with that, go to download the version on the plugin site and see if that fixes it. 

Personally, I’ve abandoned the plugin since it made it take WAY too long to load my pages and I didn’t have the time or patience (or knowledge) to figure out how to fix that.  The only thing I really care about getting from Amazon is the image and referral link which I can easily do using just the ASIN/ISBN.  It’s highly unlikely I’ll ever be updating the Amazon API again.  Luckily, there’s a version for PHP 5 so maybe everyone can eventually switch to that. 

I’m thinking of writing a few EE tutorials for the site, if only to keep track of a few things I’ve done here.  Is there anything you see I’ve done that you’re interested in knowing how to do?  Let me know and I’ll write a tutorial for it!

EE 1.31 Coming Soon!

Go look at the new pMachine site recently designed using the latest version of ExpressionEngine which will be avilable soon.  The community forums are still down at this moment, but I can’t wait to see the changes that have been made.  I have high expectations!

Google Sitemaps and EE

If anyone using [[ExpressionEngine]] is interested in making super easy Google sitemaps (I really haven’t figured out the benefit to them yet), Yvonne has written a tutorial for setting up sitemaps.

Old ExpressionEngine Posts

Since I started my blog over again from scratch, any old entries I’ve written aren’t easily found.  I now have them available at their old URL (blog/entries) with google robots off.  This is so any old links still point to the entry and so I can link to old entries if I feel a need to do so.  There’s no navigation in these old entries however and really no way to get there unless you know the URL. 

I did want to make an easy reference list to my posts about ExpressionEngine which other people might find helpful.  Please note that any plugins are still available for download, but no longer supported.  In fact, anything in this list here is no longer supported - I’m just providing a link on the off chance you find something helpful in it.  Any posts I make about [[ExpressionEngine|EE]] in this blog under the EE Category will be supported, so feel free to bug me about it. 

I’ve rambled long enough, so here’s the list.

• Expression Engine Recent Comments Plugin
• EE Plugin: Comment Leaders
• EE RSS 2.0 or Index Comments
• EE: Calendar with Overlib
• EE: Amazon API Plugin
• Most Recent Searches
• Extra Info in Online Users -AND- EE Query Module Tutorial
• Ads Between Entries

Blog Binders and ExpressionEngine

Blog Binders looks like an interesting tool which will let you import your blog entries using a variety of formats to create a bound, printed version of your weblog.  Of course they don’t have a specific way to tap into ExpressionEngine, but there’s an easy enough round-about way to get there.

1. Create a template using the following code.  Note you might need to change the weblog and limit parameter in the weblog:entries tag and the body and extended variables if you use something else.

2. Go to the URL of your newly created template, view the source and save it on your hard drive as an XML file.

3. On the Blog Binders site, go into Make a Book and choose “Blogbinders Interchange Format" from the dropdown menu.  Hit the Browse button and navigate to the XML file you just created.

4. Follow the rest of the Blog Binder instructions.

I’ve been thinking about printing a hard copy of my journal entries and it would be neat to have yearly volumes.  The downside is that it doesn’t seem to transfer pictures over to the PDFs generated to create your book.  CafePress might be a little more difficult, but better all around option.  [[ExpressionEngine|]]

My Tag Cloud