Archive for October, 2010

Oct 29

Sandra

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Another step forward in Expression Engine

I am currently working on a site that uses Expression Engine, and as we all know, there is no thing as a perfect CMS.

I needed to be able to assign a member group id to a user according to the registration form that was completed. This is not something that is native to Expression Engine – all new registrations get assigned the standard member group id.

I therefore had to come up with another extension in order to get the job done.
Now, as the information on writing extensions is extremely thin on the ground, I had to scour the internet for an explanation on how the hooks within Expression Engine work.

Finally I found an explanation, and was able to write what turned into two relatively simple extensions using the native Expression Engine hooks. The first one adds the member group id to a temporary field in the member’s table upon registration.
The second extension updates the group id field with the value from the temporary database field when the user confirms their registration.

All in all, it is working well so far. I may even package this one up for distribution!

Oct 6

Sandra

1 Comment

My first expression engine extension!

In my day job as Senior Web Developer for a large publishing company, I use the Expression Engine CMS.
Until I started in this position, Expression Engine was not a piece of software I had come across as I tend to go for open source software as I find the support and range of addons to be so much better.

I was not a fan of Expression Engine on the 1.6 version…but then I  have to be fair and explain I had a steep learning curve in order to produce complex websites with unfamiliar software.

However, I now have 2 sites under my belt that were constructed within Expression, and I am now on my third. For this site I am using the newly released version 2.1 – and I much prefer it.
Some of this can be attributed to the fact that I have learnt a lot about the software in the last 7 months and I generally feel more comfortable in what I am doing,  but I think the overhaul that the developers have given the software in the latest release have made it  a much nicer CMS to use. And although it’s not important, it looks a lot nicer.

Well after searching for an extension to make my life easier today, I discovered that the rating extension I needed hasn’t yet been upgraded to work with version 2 so out of necessity I looked into writing my own.
Looking over the documentation, this was quite a daunting thing. Whereas with opensource software there are usually hundreds of tutorials on how to make different types of addons, there are none readily available for Expression Engine.

With a lot of trial and error I finally got the extension working – and I am so very proud! Unfortunately, as it was created whilst at work, it’s not my extension to package up and sell…but hopefully it’s just the first of many!

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