It has been requested by JD that I post the code I used to accomplish this parent / child relationship in ExpressionEngine templates. So… without further adieu… here’s the tutorial file. This is this first time I’ve shared code of sorts, so if I didn’t explain it well, please feel free to comment. I’ll do my best to help you out.
Enjoy!
Aug 2, 2008
The best way to accomplish goals is to review them several times - and monitor your progress - before its too late to make any changes. By taking a step back every once in a while, you’ll be able to see what you need to be spending more of your time on. Also, it’s just good practice to review what you’ve completed so you know what’s left on your list. Lets get into it.
The first quarter of the year is over - so lets take a look at what I’ve accomplished so far.
Doesn’t seem like much right now, but hopefully I’ll get a bunch more done in the months to come. Here’s what I plan to accomplish by next quarter:
Apr 11, 2008
A few months ago, we decided it was time for a redesign for Gadgetell. Ever since the redesign, I’ve been craving a good solution to show the child categories (second-level categories), but hadn’t found a good way to do so in ExpressionEngine - and haven’t really had time either. Well, over the past two nights, I’ve finally implemented child categories on Gadgetell, and am absolutely loving how they look and work. Take a look below - and on the site - and let me know if you have any suggestions.
I love being able to go from concept to production testing to production within a few hours. If you are trying to do a similar thing and need some help, let me know and I’ll send you the code.
Feb 21, 2008
It amazes me that Twitter is having so many server issues lately. I know the company has had to scale to an insane amount of users in a short period of time, but all of this downtime is really turning me off to the service.
I joined Twitter way back when, and only started using it within the past month or so. All of the downtime is just painful. I’m talking the kind of pain that you get when your cell phone dies… you don’t know what to do with yourself! I’d say I’ve checked the service twice today, and both times it’s been down. Not only that, but think of the amount of third party applications out there that are bricks right now because the grand daddy is down! I would imagine services like Twitter Vision that rely solely on the feed from Twitter are caching information just in case the service goes down.
At the beginning of February, Twitter decided to ditch its old web host and go with an Enterprise Hosting Solution at Verio, a wholly-owned subsidiary of NTT America. Apparently that’s not helping the situation as much as we had hoped.
- Continue reading this entry -
Feb 12, 2008
Back when I started Gadgetell, I made the relatively simple decision to use WordPress as the site’s Content Management System. At that point, I only cared about two things: 1) it’s free, and 2) it has a huge development community. I needed all the support I could get since this was my first hosted blog.
Once Adam came on board and we grew Gadgetell to a decent size (about a year later - October 2006), we decided to branch out and create sites for Apple news, and gaming news; meet Appletell and Gamertell (which both finally launched in May 2007). We figured it would be best for the growth stage of our business if we moved to a CMS that was made to handle multiple blogs in the same control panel. The ideal solution would allow us to have multiple member groups, multiple blogs, and a whole slew of other options. We did our research, and it appeared that ExpressionEngine was the way to go. They had a fair-sized loyal development community, and had pretty much all the settings / options you would ever need. Also at this time, we thought it would be a simple export / import moving the Gadgetell data from WordPress to ExpressionEngine. Boy were we wrong.
We were already working with a design firm at this time, and they said they would move the Gadgetell data into ExpressionEngine. When they realized they didn’t have the means to do the work (after months of fumbling around), they hired outside help. Little did we know, the outside help was going to run into problems as well. It seemed that none of the WordPress export tools were able to handle our data for some reason. The bizarre thing was that we didn’t make any crazy customizations - it was pretty much out-of-the-box. The only feature we counted on that was not included in WordPress itself was Ultimate Tag Warrior - a fantastic plugin by Christine Davis. We also had one custom field in WP that we relied on to auto-generate the thumbnails. All of that beside - we knew what needed to be done: export the WordPress data in MovableType format (pretty much a standard for blog migrations), and import the MovableType data into ExpressionEngine. Sounds easy, right? Apparently not.
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Feb 11, 2008