For seven or eight months, we have been slogging our guts out on two or three vast projects, perhaps the biggest being a major rebuild and redesign for frieze Magazine - Europe’s #1 art magazine.
Things are so, so busy that I’ve had zero time to continue blogging of late, for which I apologise. New staff, new office, new projects, plus a major new site we just soft-launched (but more about that later, once I’ve ironed out a few things).
Over at Erskine Design, we’ve just cut the ribbon on Beatportal - a massive new site for another of our US clients. Beatportal is the latest project from the top-class chaps at Beatport.com, the recognized leader in electronic music downloads.
It is a very big day for my friends over at what was, until today, called pMachine. Originally named after their initial product (long since put to bed with the growth of ExpressionEngine) they have today been reborn as EllisLab inc, named after the founder Rick, who is modestly not responsible for the decision. Well, he blames the team…
The already hugely popular ExpressionEngine fansite/resource Jambor-ee pulls down your britches and smacks your arse with Issue 2, featuring some hot content for a cold day, including my first contribution Sortable, Colour Coded Search Results. It’s a piping hot geek soup full of chunks ‘o love.
I’ll end this week with what I think is an utter gem. I’ve been banging on about how Expression Engine isn’t just a blogging tool, it’s a full-on content management / web publishing / whatever we’re supposed to call these things this week system. Problem is, it’s missing one key, critical feature - hierarchical pages. It’s certainly something you can fudge around, using nested categories for the structure, and one weblog entry per category for the pages. But this tends to get kind of awkward to explain to the people who are going to be using the system.
After a quick check of my days-of-the-week pants, I can tell it’s Thursday, so time for today’s episode. We’re going to be building a simple what’s on guide, so hang on to your hats.
Where is this week going? Anyway, no time for such philosophical questions, it’s time to get dynamic with Expression Engine.
Sometimes I need one of Expression Engine’s features to work for me in a slightly different way, and that’s when I reach for the Query Module. In a nutshell, this module lets you get data from EE’s databases using standard SQL, then make that data available.
During my tenure as guest author, I’ve not got around to talking about anything other then Expression Engine. So, to continue the trend, here’s a quick snippet of hopefully-useful code for Monday. There’ll be another snippet each day this week.
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Engineered in Nottingham, scaffolded by ExpressionEngine, steam-pumped by United & kept alive with tea and roll-ups.