Tag Archives: expression engine

Agency Primer Notes: CMS Smackdown, all over but the plug-ins

Agency Primer: CMS Shootout – WordPress and Expression Engine from The Nerdery on Vimeo.

Promotors of last week’s WordPress vs. Expression Engine webinar hinted that there could be blood. Two Nerdery programmers trained hard for this CMS bout. They drank raw eggs and ran stairs, and then a nationwide audience of agencies tuned in for what turned out to be a rather amicable exchange. Or was it? Watch Thursday’s rematch above.

Here is a list of recommended plug-ins for  both content management systems, with WordPress plug-ins submitted by (in this corner) Anthony Lukes, and Expression Engine plug-in faves from (challenger) Brian Litzinger.

WordPress  plug-ins:

Dagon Form Mailer - This is my (Anthony’s) personal favorite because it’s easy to customize and it supports file attachments. Another favorite of mine is Contact Form 7.

Flutter CMS - This plugin allows for easy assigning of different data types and for easy custom page templating.

NavT Navigation Management Plug-in - This plug-in allows you to manage and customize your site’s navigation system.

Inline PHP - This allows you to insert php code into the text editor.

All in One SEO Pack - Pump up your SEO. Customize page titles, meta keywords, and descriptions. This works out of the box and can be fine-tuned for super-users.

Google XML Sitemaps - Generates an XML sitemap of your site to better your search rankings with Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask.

Akismet (comes with WordPress) - This helps keep spammers from posting comments on your blog.

NextGEN Gallery - Great photo gallery plug-in. Not an essential for every site, but this is a really well built plug-in that’s too good not to mention.

And in this corner, recommended Expression Engine plug-ins:

Structure - It forgoes the current template_group/template setup and creates “static” and “listing” pages that can be edited through a tree sitemap view. Traditional page style content and multiple entry pages can live within the same area.

Image Sizer - Resizes images as specified in EE tag and caches the resized image in the cache folder. If you update the original image, a new resized version is created. If the image is not on the server the tag will not return anything. The architecture is setup to only process images when needed.

FieldFrame - A framework for rapid development of fieldtype extension, FieldFrame will be included as part of EE 2 core when 2.1 is released.

nGen File Field - nGen File Field is a field type for the FieldFrame framework that adds a custom field type allowing you to upload files from the Publish/Edit interface, and also functions as part of the FF Matrix. This extension is useful for creating galleries and downloading libraries.

“No mas … no mas.” – Roberto Duran

Express Yourself: Come to The Nerdery & learn all about Expression Engine

Who: You
What: A tech talk about Expression Engine (kind of like the iPhone one).
When: 5 -6 p.m., Thursday, August 27th
Where: The Nerdery, 9555 James Ave. S Suite 245, Bloomington, MN
Why: To hear The Nerdery’s Brian Litzinger, whose Expression Engine wizardry helped catapult Team Praxis and the site they created for District 202 into the winner’s circle for 2009′s Overnight Website Challenge, teach you all about this popular content management system.
How: Just RSVP by leaving a comment (so we know how much pizza to order).

Any questions?

District 202, renewed

Heading into the Overnight Website Challenge, District 202 needed a game-changer. After 17 years, the GLBT youth-serving nonprofit org was boldly leaving its long-leased but costly and under-utilized physical space for the more-portable, much-roomier and free Internet – a strategic online move of necessity.

“Without the Overnight Web Challenge and intensely hard work of Team Praxis, we would have been looking at shutting this organization by the end of the year,” said Curt Prins, board chair of District 202. “The web site overhaul has allowed us to start overhauling our organization. It helped us become smaller in order for us to become bigger.” (Old site, above; new site, below.)

When asked what was so wrong with District 202’s old website, Prins said: “Basically everything. It was hard to update. Hard on the eyes…”

Team Praxis, comprised of volunteer interactive pros from Colle+McVoy and The Nerdery, came ready with some pre-baked homework. “Although we did not know which nonprofit we were going to get beforehand, we were allowed to plan and build whatever we wanted and bring it with us. So what I did was prepare a base ExpressionEngine install,” said The Nerdery’s Brian Litzinger in an interview posted on ExpressionEngine.com (see Brian’s entire interview here).

“In 24 hours we designed and architected the site, built a chat application from scratch, integrated with a third party CRM/donation tool, and created a Ning community,” said Litzinger. “I knew that the way ExpressionEngine handles different content types – through the usage of Weblogs and custom fields – it would handle whatever we threw at it. It handled static pages, news feed, and generated all the XML for the Flash modules. Pretty much every word on the site is editable through ExpressionEngine, which will make it easy for the client to update.”

“With this transformation, we wish to reemerge as a youth inspired, tech savvy, streamlined and more powerful organization which keeps creating new ways for youth to bring their unique voice and leadership to our ever-changing world,” wrote Prins in an open letter to District 202 constituents. And while his District 202 colleagues Jason and Solomon made it through the all-nighter, Prins described his shuteye as one of the most enjoyable 90-minute naps on concrete ever taken.

While all volunteers at the Overnight Website Challenge deserve credit for their nerdy deeds, it’s worth repeating here that the panel of judges gave the work of Praxis top honors. “We come away from this year’s event with a trophy, yes, but also humbled at the awesomeness of Minneapolis’ web development and nonprofit communities,” said Praxis team captain/Colle+McVoy Technology Lead Jason Striegel. “We’re honored to work with District 202 in launching their new site, and appreciate Sierra Bravo’s leadership in making this event happen.”

“District 202 headed into this crazy all-nighter hoping to get a better looking website that our youth could easily update,” said Prins. “What we got instead was a visually impressive, easy-to-manage tool allowing us to evolve from a bricks-and mortar nonprofit into an Internet-driven organization empowering GLBT youth.  It’s the greatest donation we’ve received in our 17 years.”

See for yourself at http://www.dist202.org/.

Pretty pumped about Phizzpop

Phizzpop is a web design and development competition put on by Microsoft that travels to seven cities throughout the country pitting the best and brightest designers against each other to create some amazing websites and apps using Microsoft’s Expression Studio and Silverlight. This week Phizzpop has landed in Minnesota and the teams are already at work coming up with creative solutions to their challenge.

But that’s not what’s got us so pumped. What we’re really digging is that a couple of our nerds are helping out two of the agencies in town. Afterall, it’s kind of what we do, help out ad agencies when they need it. First, we’re teaming up with Zeus Jones, our longtime friends who we’ve worked with in the past.

Second, Microsoft asked us if we’d be willing to help out a team from Gestalt by providing them with a little programming muscle. We were, of course, more than happy to oblige. Plus, we effectively doubled our chances of being on the winning team. Go nerds!

All the teams are busy working away on their projects, and winners will be announced Thursday. If you are so inclined you can get tickets to the final event which is going to be held at Solara in Minneapolis.