Shift in client requests

From clients I am noticing that pretty much every project requires a content management system, e-commerce store and usually some custom functionality. Back in the day we had to work to get our clients to get a CMS with their project and know it is a staple. But the issue has now become budgets. Yes mostly every site needs one but they still take time to set up. Even when using open source technologies like WordPress or ModX, almost 99% of sites need custom work. Maybe if we grab a WooTheme and install if and hand it off we are good but that is not the case. We need to do the graphic design, front end development then develop the templates for the CMS then work on customizing it to our clients needs. Open source has made our lives easier but providing easy to use solutions by they are not ’1 size fits all’ solutions.

I do not mind this shift as it shows that clients are starting to catch up and have a better idea of what is out there. This allows me to never have two projects a like. Each project presents a new challenge and this allows me to continue to learn.

Shift in technology and companies hiring

I have noticed a tremendous shift in what technology companies and agencies are looking for in individuals. As a browse through international businesses and search for gigs I am seeing a increase in different technologies used for the web.

I am primarily a PHP and MySQL developer with strong background with AJAX, SEO, HTML, CSS, etc. But I continually see cutting edge companies wanting Ruby on Rails (written in Ruby) developers. I am also starting to see companies developing products with Django (written in Python). There is also a lot going on with Perl and C. This is a big change from the basic ASP and PHP for anything web related which it used to be.

I know from working with some highly experience developers that using Perl and C is really vital in large applications as they are super powerful and must faster then things like PHP and ASP. Also 37 Signals partner David Heinemeier Hansson created Ruby on Rails while developing Basecamp. He suggested building it with Ruby rather then PHP as he saw tremendous advantages and along the way started Ruby on Rails which is becoming extremely popular, especially for web apps.

Now maybe I have just been extremely naive but I am finding emerging technologies being used more and more every day and it is becoming a little tougher for find gigs if you are a specialist in 1 area unless you are an absolute wizard.

So in my quest to stay in the game and keep up (as much as we can) with technology I plan on picking up Ruby on Rails. I will have to start with learning some Ruby and then start working with Rails. I am really excited about this after hearing David speak about it on BigThink. It sounds very powerful. I am hoping picking it up is not to difficult, once you know 1 programming language picking up another is not to difficult as most of the Logic remains the same but the code that accomplishes it is different.

If anyone has any useful resources I would appreciate it. I hope every else is doing their best to stay ahead of the game as well. Possibly I will take my own advice of Forceful learning and take a job as a Rails programmer and force myself into learning it!

I find there is a lot of stuff I want to learn but it always gets put off because I am too busy or once put off for so long I forget about it. I have a few recent experiences where I have been forced to learn something and learnt much quicker then if I would not have been in that situation.

I am working with a particular client and we may be using the ExpressionEngine content management system. I began doing some research and discovery on the product and it was purchased so I started testing it out. I was later instructed that I will be using this CMS and had a detailed functionality list for the project. This forced me to start to research the core functionality to see what can be done out of the box as well as look at all of the plugins and evaluate what to use for non core features.

To take it a step further, I was notified I will be providing a client demonstrating to the client to showcase the product. I had 4 business days to become an expert in the product. I was literally forced to learn it, there was no other option, there was no turning back. I can say that after 3 days I could now put ExpressionEngine on my resume as something I work with. I may not be fluent in it but I feel comfortable enough to build a complex website using it now. I know for a fact that if I was not forced into this, I would still be wanting to learn ExpressionEngine and most likely never would.

I had a very similar experience with the content management system ModX. Now I can say it is one of my favourite products and have built several sites using it since I was forced to learn it.

How to use this in the real world
You can benefit right now from this. Say that you really want to learn a new programming language or a specific product. Try putting it or your resume or offering to build something you next project using it. Once you have the gig where you will use it, you have no choice but to become an expert in it.

Now my examples may all be web development related but this can be applied to all areas of life. Say you always wanted to learn salsa dancing (like me) try actually going and entering yourself and your significant other in dance classes or on your next trip to Mexico sign up for the dance night or enter a dance competition.

Put yourself in a position that forces you to be your absolute best.

My goal of this version was to outline the primary functionality like user registration, user login, managing account settings, building a basic dashboard and some of the basic features of the application that I will touch more on in the coming weeks. This provides a solid foundation to build off of. The next version will start off by building a HTML5 interface utilizing HTML5 Boilerplate which will allow some better visualization of how things will work. This will be followed by some simple templating and code re-factoring and implementation of AJAX for enhanced user experience.

I will be starting on v0.2 today and am looking forward to this application taking shape. I have a full road-map outlined and the future looks exciting. I am dedicating 5 – 10 hours per week to this project as it is not a rush project at all, just a fun side project with the hopes of one day being so much more.

I have always been interested in working with CodeIgniter but have never taken the plunge. To date I have been primarily a procedural programmer and use OO techniques where suited. But now that I am looking to start developing some large scale web apps that need to be able to scale I am looking into using a framework once again.

I have spoke with some leads on a few web apps such as CarbonMade and they have their app built using C#, and .NET (an ASP based framework). I know that if I want to build a highly scalable project capable of being used by thousands of users that I will need to use a stable framework or build a custom framework myself.

I have done a lot of research over the years into this stuff but just know am I beginning to act on these ambitions. O, the power of procrastination. That is a whole other topic in itself.

I have researched CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Symfony, Zend and a few others. I did a little discovery with CakePHP and CodeIgniter and read a plethora of forums and blogs surrounding them, how they work, likes, dislikes, the whole works. I have made my decision to work with CodeIgniter based on a few things.

First off, it has a really small footprint. This means that the file size of the package is very small and contains just what you need to get on your way building your application. Some of the other frameworks come with everything under sun pre-packaged in the native install. This causes it to become extremely bloated which is not good as it brings down performance. They try and please each and every persons needs right off the bat. Whereas CI comes with the core essentials and if you may need some additional functionality you can add a library yourself—when you need it.

Secondly, it is very fast on 2 notes, firstly being performance (because of its small footprint see last point) and secondly fast to configure. Once you download the CI package you can be up in running with a “Hello World” in a few minutes.

Thirdly, it does not require me to use the command line. I am learning more and more about the command line but there are certain things I like to use it for. My framework config is not one of them. Many frameworks out there require the use of the command line to be installed and configured. I feel this limits the people that can use it as using the command line requires some extensive knowledge to grow beyond the basics.

Last but not least it is not bound to a certain templating engine. Most frameworks out of the box use a particular templating engine to generate all the the views. Whereas CI has the ability to use a templating engine if you so desire but if you opt to simply write your own HTML as you go and not worry about learning a templating engine along with your framework CI is there for you.

I look forward to making CodeIgniter a staple asset in my skill set.

Stay tuned for my upcoming beta release of my organizational web app and please contact me if you would like to join the beta-tester list.

Until next time.

Start your ExpressionEngines!
ExpressionEngine Day 1
ExpressionEngine Day 2
ExpressionEngine Day 3 – Add-ons

After 4 solid days of working with ExpressionEngine I have switched back to ol’ faithful—ModX. Note this is for the particular project at hand and that I will definitely dive back into EE in the future.

There were a few drawbacks I came across while developing with EE, primarily how pages (entries) are created. Now all of this has the ability to be made better with add-ons but under the time constraints of having to have a full functioning demo in 4 days I was not able to evaluate the add-ons with enough time to have a backup plan. The outcome was switching gears entirely to run with ModX for the project.

The way pages and templates are created and rendered is a little different in EE compared to other systems. With the default install to browse to a page you go to: www.domain.com/template_group/template/. So if you want a page to be  www.domain.com/about-us/biography/ you need to create a template group called “About Us” and a template in it called “biography”. In the biography template you then call the data from the biography channel.

This confused me because if I were to hand this off to the client and say “When you want to create a new page on the site you will need to create a new template and template group then insert the template code and call the Channel that contains that data.” They would fire me. There should not be that much work involved in creating a new page.

This can be fixed with the “Pages” module that comes with EE which gives you the ability to create multiple pages based off of one template which is more along the lines of other systems and is much more usable. There is also an add-on called “Structure” that aids in this fix as well.

One of the other concerns I had was there was no way to generate the navigation dynamically (without use of an add-on). So in development as pages were added, I had to update the nav embedded template.

Now there are add-ons to get around all of the issues I experienced but under the time constraints at hand, there was not time to purchase these and evaluate them to see if they could fix my problems. So I switched to ModX which I new could handle my requirements and is an extremely powerful system.

I am sure they may be ways to get around all of my issues even without add-ons but there is always a learning curve with a new system. I still give props to the ExpressionEngine team as I find what they have done great and believe their community is just going to continue to flourish.

I will revisit ExpressionEngine in the future and I am sure once I build a few sites with it I will see its true full potential.

WordPress

I love some of the newly released features in WordPress. I have found that the Custom Post Types have made a world of difference in developing a powerful CMS. What they allow us to do is pretty much repurpose any content that we want. For example in the past you would have static text pages and a blog. For the blog you would add post after post as the blog is frequently updated. But if you wanted to build a portfolio, you would have static text pages for contact, about us, services, etc. Then you would have a blog that is constantly updated but also a portfolio section where you will be constantly adding new pages. In the past you would have to hack your way around this by made “Portfolio” a blog category then hide that category in your blog feed and create numerous conditional statements and custom templates, etc. Needless to say it was a pain. But now Custom Post Types has changed this all.

WordPress Custom Post Types

With Custom Post Types you can create a new section in the admin area that functions much the same as the blog where you continually add content and there is a page on the front end that displays this new data.

So in the previous example you would create a custom post type for “Portfolio” so you can go in and enter the text and images you need for this portfolio item seamlessly then you can create a page on the front end that pulls this information and displays it similarly to a blog. This is a very generic overview of the functionality without getting into the technically nitty gritty but it truly is super simple to set up.

I have recently launched a site using this functionality in many places. The website has a blog and utilizes the WordPress Blog functionality (WordPress is king of blogs). But they also have a Portfolio, Careers, Press Releases and Bios section that will be continually updated. I have created a custom post type for each. So now when someone needs to add a press release then can login to to the press release section and add a press release. Then the templates on the front end pull this information and display it to the end user.

Custom post type input fields

There are some awesome things you can do such as adding custom input fields for these custom post types. So when I enter in a Portfolio item I have it set up so I enter the title, the body copy, the featured image as well as a custom input field for a thumbnail.

Now I have a template that queries this post type and displays all the thumbnails. When you click on a thumbnail it takes you to a new page which displays the title, copy and feature image of the work. This works so awesome and it is so easy to set up and get going I absolutely love it.

Custom taxonomies

Now there is also a feature that has been in WordPress for a while that is custom taxonomies. This allows you to categorize items. This really tops off the custom post types feature. So if you create a portfolio section, you can create custom taxonomy to organize your work adding things like “Web Design”, “Logo Design” so when you create your portfolio piece you check what it is for example Web Design then on the site you can allow people to select that category then display all the results from your Portfolio that are tagged as Web Design. It is awesome!

Conclusion

WordPress also has a huge following and a plethora of plugins to help you do everything under the sun.

One thing off the top of my head that I dislike is when you select text to link to-say on the homepage you want to link to the contact page. You have to enter in the URL whereas in ModX it displays a list of all the pages on the site for you to select from (then uses a page id – so if URLs change, the link still works) which is super handy for clients with little web experience.

ModX

Now almost at the same time I got into ModX I discovered the new WordPress and this is when my dilemma began.

ModX Templating

My most notable draw to ModX is templating. I can literally take my HTML and have it powered by ModX in a matter of 5 – 10 minutes. That is how simple it is to work with ModX. I cannot say this about any other competitor (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc). ModX was built in a way that you work with your HTML rather then making you work around its templating engine. It uses tags that you place in your HTML for specifying where content goes, where page title goes, etc. It is extremely simple and fun to work with.

ModX content editing

The second note I like is the on page editing feature in ModX. If I am logged into the admin panel and browse to the site there is a grey bar on every page that I can click to edit that page. I find this highly valuable for clients as they usually read the website and see something they want to change so if they can make it without leaving the page, it makes me look good!

ModX Security

The new version of ModX Revolution is awesome for security. You have complete control over everything, literally everything. I dove into this knee deep on a recent project when the client has offices all over the world (Canada, US, UK, Australia, etc) and people in each office will be editing different content and they don’t want those people to be able to access anything but that specific content. This is kind of tricky, you do not have this control in WordPress. But in ModX you certainly do.

You have the ability to create groups of users that have specific roles and access. So I can make it so John from the UK can only edit the UK page. When he logs in he will ONLY see the UK page. But when the owner of the company logs in, he can manage everything. Then when Sally from the down under logs in, she is only able to edit the content of the AUS page and not any of the meta data (Page title, description, etc.) I can create a specific set of roles and access so she only sees the AUS page and the only editable box there is the content, she sees nothing else.

So when you are working with large companies with multiple editors this security is extremely important. Also the ability to see who edited what, when, etc is also very important.

Conlusion

ModX is great, I love it. It is super easy to use super quick to set up. One downside is that it is newer and there is not as many plugins/addons for it yet. This will change as more people discover its power.

Please share your thoughts on these two wonderful systems.

Another day with ExpressionEngine and things seem much like they did yesterday—positive. I think that EE is very powerful and I am starting to like there interface. They have some nice eye candy that grabs peoples attention like the Google Analytics addon I spoke about yesterday. I previewed that you a few people that they loved it!

Now as I begin to thoroughly test it out and think about how I would implement it with client projects I ran into one issue.

The way that EE seems to be set up is that when you would like create a section of page you create your template for that page, followed by creating the Channel then publishing content.

But the way that I work with a lot of my websites is I will have a “Default” or “Page” template that many of the pages on the website are based off of. Yes there will always be custom templates for specific pages but I think it is fare to say that when a site is built the majority of pages can use the same template. This seems to be a sticky point for ExpressionEngine.

But fear not, Structure is here to save the day. To quote viget.com Structure allows the following “Entries [to be] linked to templates, and not vice versa.” EE’s issue is that templates are linked to pages. So when you want to create a new page, you need to create a new template. When you use Structure, pages become linked to templates. So you can create 1 template and build make Pages or “Entries” as you wish. Structure is a plugin I will most definitely be using.

Easy Content Management with Structure

It also allows for easy content management, presenting your website content in a tree view allow you to see all the pages and parent – child relations and allowing you to easily re-order/re-organize it.

Navigation

It also provides us a few navigational benefits. In EE we cannot simply spit out a list of navigation. You can only do this with a particular Channel or Categories. Structure allows you to use a tag to dynamically generate a navigation menu. It will also provide you with handy breadcrumbs with different parameters like “Include Home link”. It also will handle submenus making it ideal for dropdown and flyout menu systems.

Conclusion

I only touched on a few benefits of Structure today but I urge you to check it out—it will save you time for sure. Structure also has other features which I am sure you can utilize.

I am still enjoying ExpressionEngine, here are a few other handy Addons I found today:

SEO Lite – a SEO addon.
Sitemap Generator – a handy sitemap generating that pings search engines.
Contact Manager – allows you to drop a contact form anywhere you want.
CKEditor – use the CKEditor WYSIWYG instead of the default plain text editor.
CP Analytics – integrate your Google Analytics stats right into your dashboard.

Note all of these add ons are compatible for ExpressionEngine 2.0.

Day 2 working with ExpressionEngine is coming to a close. My thoughts have done a 180 from Day 1. On my first day working with it I was feeling like I would way rather be working with ModX or WordPress but I am starting to see how ExpressionEngine could be very powerful.

Building your template

I started off by taking an actual HTML layout for a client site and building out templates. I started by splitting the page into sections similar to how I would use server side includes like header, footer, navigation for information that is included on multiple pages. Like ModX, ExpressionEngine stores all of the template data in the database. So I worked from local files building the templates and implementing the various template tags. I found these easier to work with then ModX and WordPress.

In a matter of minutes you will have your HTML page sliced and diced having a number of blocks of code being replaced by items like:

{embed=embeds/header}
 {embed=embeds/main_nav}
 {embed=embeds/footer}

Adding content with Channels and Content fields

Once you have completed your templates you will begin working creating pages. Now the concept is quite simple. You create a form then create a page to build content off of it. Then Channels are like a group of similar content. So say we have a news section. We will have a Title, body, and excerpt. We proceed and create a Content Field Group for “news” and add the fields we just named. We can then add a “News” channel that uses the “news” Content Field Group and when you go to publish a page you will see those fields! (this is kind of handy so clients only see the fields they need to fill out). You can publish unlimited number of items in a Channel. So you can go and add a tonne of news posts. Then this is how you add it to your template file:

{exp:channel:entries channel="news" limit="10" orderby="date" sort="desc"}
 {title}
 {body}
 {/exp:channel:entries}

This is a very rough example just for the record! But you open a block and specify the Channel to pull data from. Then the items within the curly braces {body} are the names of the content fields that we added.

It was a little difficult for me to wrap my head around the:

{exp:channel ….. }

I won’t lie, I am still taking it all in but I see the power of the system and am still learning.

Sweet Google Analytics Integration

One awesome feature I found was a third-party Google Analytics Addon. It integrates write in the user interface so would be an awesome feature for clients and developers alike.

But that is enough for now, writing this post is drawing from my R&D.

I have spent a day with ExpressionEngine and that first day had me not so found of it. I found a lack of documentation and articles surrounding the latest release (version 2). Outside of the official documentation from EllisLabs good articles are few and far between. There is a lot of blogs, articles and tutorials on the previous version (1.X) but they completely rebuilt the CMS and is now completely driven by CodeIgniter. This could be due to the fact there is only around 100,000 sites running it which is a far cry from WordPress which powers something like 15,000,000+ sites.

The initial difficulties may be due to different terminology and an interface I am not accustomed to but I will press through and try and find a happy medium as I want to learn this system as I hear incredible things.

* Please note that these posts will not be landing on the actual days of testing but providing insight on that days events.