devot:eeDevoted to ExpressionEngine

This Week in devot:ee #47 - December 13, 2012

December 13, 2012
by Ryan Masuga

Some Notes on the 2012 AcademEE Awards

We have received a lot of feedback about the 2012 AcademEE Awards, and I think that's for a couple reasons: people care about them and the current format isn't doing them justice any longer.

We arrived at the current batch add-ons by running queries for items released in the last year, and then we looked at ratings, number of sales or downloads (depending on free or commercial status), page views, favorites and so on. Then we took add-ons that span multiple categories and whittled those down to their most essential category. If something is a module and a fieldtype, it could go either way depending on how critical the type is to the add-on. Without ever having used it, I would have thought Low Events was a module, but even its own docs point to the fact that the functional part of it is a fieldtype, though it contains a module as well.

Are our queries perfect? Apparently not. We missed Causing Effect's CE Cache last year, and we missed it (at first) this year as well. It has since been added to the Modules category.

Another example: Solspace. The way we currently query to see what gets into the awards more or less excludes them from any categories. Their commercial items aren't sold through us, and they don't have any free downloads through us, either, so both of those metrics are out the window. When Freeform Pro came out, the existing entry for Freeform was updated to mention this, but no new entry was made for the Pro version, so this add-on was missed.

We've spent some time talking over the awards and we think that if we do them in 2013, that we'll have some sort of nominations before the actual voting takes place. We also think the categories need to change in some way. The current awards might be renamed to best NEW this or that, but we'd also like to have awards that recognize perennial favorites - or those top notch add-ons that might have taken a year or two before people realized just how incredible that are. A perfect example of that is Stash by Mark Croxton (@croxton) which was released in 2010, but took a year or two before it became a part of everyday ExpressionEngine conversation. As of this writing, it's been downloaded 1,030 times in the last 90 days - pretty impressive.

Voting is Open! Go Vote!

Award voting is open until 11:59 p.m. Eastern, December 16, 2012. If you haven't done so already, please take a couple minutes and vote! You don't have to vote in each category. If you only vote in one category, make it the Developer of the Year. We're sure that you're familiar with at least one developer in the list, and we know that they would appreciate your vote. Not only that, that category is a very tight race and every vote will count!

We updated the voting form this week so that you can go back and change your vote up until voting is closed. We did this because of the late addition of a few add-ons in the Modules category.

Note that the add-ons are listed in alphabetical order, but (based on a user suggestion) we randomized the order of the developer names on page load to be as fair as possible there.

New Add-ons This Week

• Hokoku (Export from Zenbu) ($) by Nicolas Bottari
  Export the data from your entry search result directly from Zenbu. Hokoku adds an "Export this search" button within Zenbu to allow you to export your data in multiple formats, using your own filename and export settings.
• Rosie ($) by The Outfit
  Rosie is a machine translation module for ExpressionEngine. Easily translate your ExpressionEngine templates into any language supported by either Google Translate or Bing Translator.
• Post Block by Isaac Raway (Airways)
  Post Block allows you to block POST or GET requests to your pages which do not match the conditions you specify. This can be an extra help in preventing spam and working around limitations of older add-ons.
• Img-Resize by Joseph Wensley
  Img-Resize lets you resize images on the fly in your EE templates.