ExpressionEngine Patterns & Best Practices: The Genesis
Posted on 23. Feb, 2009 by Jack in ExpressionEngine
ExpressionEngine gives you flexibility. Nearly unlimited flexibility. This is an awesome thing, except when it bites you in oversight. Sometimes there is something to be said for a more rigid CMS/Blogging engine, such as WordPress, as it takes care of a lot of little details without you having to think about them. Archiving by month, full entry-view details, pagination, thumbnails, galleries and so on. Drop a template in WP, mod out some graphics and you’ve gotten somewhere pretty quickly.
This shortcoming could be alleviated/improved upon with some development patterns and best practices. This is a pretty large undertaking and as such could be approached a number of ways. Maybe I’ll let you all decide. Here are the options as I see it:
- Community involvement. I could put up a site where contributions could be made to the pattern list. We could also incorporate an addon directory if there was enough interest. Or, if someone is already working on such a project, i could lend a hand.
- A long-lasting series by yours-truly, each post focusing on a specific area, i.e. News, Searches, Categories, Members, etc…
- A big ass bundle i could slave over and release all in one shot for a very small fee. Like a dunkin’ donuts coffee style fee. Or maybe i’ll just be a super nice guy and hope for a donation here or there.
What do you all think? I’m open to however demand dictates! One thing is for sure, StinHambo thinks it’s giving away too much of our knowledge… Your input will help me decide. Leave some comments!
I’m Jack
ExpressionEngine is my best friend as a developer. I no longer have to worry about how to fit my design into the CMS, leaving me to be as creative as I want to be, and not lose site of my strategy.
Shoot me an email: jack {at} jackmcdade.com!
7 Comments
Zac
23. Feb, 2009
It may be a big collaboration effort, but it would be a cool series to get a couple EE developers to talk about how they would all approach a similar project, say a simple business site.
Then you could do a wrap up of the comparisons of things like weblogs vs. categories, pages vs. template groups etc.
I would sure love to read it
Just a thought though.
Jack
23. Feb, 2009
Agreed! I would be open to that.
Steven Hambleton
23. Feb, 2009
Hey didn’t I suggest this sometime ago on Twitter?
“How do you EE?”
Justin Long
23. Feb, 2009
I vote for community involvement or a series. I prefer the community involvement just because as you said there are so many ways to do something and I know that with myself I often over look simple ways and go the route of way to complicated. A great series with comments would be great it would give some direction but that again would go back to community involvement.
Jack
23. Feb, 2009
Well let’s revive that bad larry!
Denzyl
24. Feb, 2009
I vote for doing community involvement, but in a way that involves new ExpressionEngine developers. Have 3 or 4 new developers each propose a site that eventually evolves into 3 or 4 different series. Along the way, EE veterans can answer/guide the new developer along to the finish and it’s done by a comment system, or the new developer could leave a question, then it’s answered via a recorded screencast. A back and forth Q&A but with many developers helping all 3 or 4 newbies. Once all series have wrapped, you could put it in e-book form and sell it then.
Tristan Bailey
24. Feb, 2009
I like the idea. would help with some of the ways of using tags not listed in the documentation.
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