devot:ee's 2012 AcademEE Awards

2012 Accessory of the Year: devot:ee Monitor

devot:ee Monitor

Masuga Design

The devot:ee add-on keeps you up-to-date on what add-ons are out-of-date on your ExpressionEngine sites.

Winning Summary:

The devot:ee Monitor is one of the most downloaded free add-ons on the site. This award belongs as much to EECoder and Antistatic Design as it does to us, due to the programming and design work done by EE Coder's lead coder Aaron Kuzemchak (@akuzemchak) and design and layout done by Mark Wells of Antistatic Design (@antistaticdsgn).

Runners Up
Honorable Mention
  • Environment (Trevor Davis) – Display which environment you are on at all times in the control panel.
  • True Preview (Laisvunas) – Preview the entry being edited inside a Preview tab on Edit/Publish form or by clicking a Preview link above the Edit/Publish form.

2012 Extension of the Year: Snaptcha

Snaptcha

Brian Litzinger

Snaptcha is an invisible captcha and will be the last time you will ever have to think about protecting your forms from spam bots.

Winning Summary:

Snaptcha is an invisible captcha and will be the last time you will ever have to think about protecting your forms from spam bots. This easy-to-implement add-on all but completely eliminates spam posts on your site. This review sums it up: "This brought one of my sites from 500 spam comments a week to 0. Thanks, Ben." We use Snaptcha right here on devot:ee, so we agree: "Thanks, Ben!"

Runners Up
  • 2nd Place: EE Debug Toolbar (mithra62) – Add an unobtrusive interface for debugging output, and replaces the default Profiler and Template Debugger.
  • 3rd Place: Single Entry (Viget Labs) – With a few simple settings, your control panel can be set up to create and edit single entry posts without the risk of adding new and unnecessary entries to these channels.
Honorable Mention

2012 Fieldtype of the Year: Low Events

Low Events

Tom Jaeger (EE Harbor)

Do you need to display events on your site? And do you like to keep things simple? Then Low Events is the add-on you want.

Winning Summary:

This sort of fieldtype was apparently in demand, because this has been a popular add-on ever since it was introduced earlier this year. From the description: "An event is an entry, the date and time entered is the date and time displayed. Always. Simple as that." Simple is good, and it looks like Low Events has simple in spades. Well done, Low.

Runners Up
  • 2nd Place: Content Elements (KREA) – Gives your clients and editors freedom to create content structure directly on the publish page.
  • 3rd Place: Editor (DevDemon) – Editor works as a WYSIWYG for default fields, matrix fields, Low Variables and category descriptions, using Redactor for a clean, light text field experience.
Honorable Mention
  • MX Select Plus (Max Lazar) – Make long, unwieldy select boxes more user-friendly with Chosen plugin, and allows the user to add new items into the list on the fly.
  • Flag Master (mithra62) – Create unlimited Profiles with custom options to allow site users the ability to mark, or "Flag", certain content based on your specific needs and custom criteria

2012 Module of the Year: Updater

Updater

DevDemon

Updater makes updating ExpressionEngine and compatibile Add-Ons easier then ever. Sick of uploading all your files, backing things up, moving files around and wasting hours of your life away? Updater is here to give you hours of your life back. Simply install Updater into ExpressionEngine modules and with a few simple clicks you will have ExpressionEngine up to date.

Winning Summary:

Talk about buzz; this add-on literally exploded on to the scene this year, and won this category handily. Updating ExpressionEngine is frequently a painful topic of conversation. DevDemon's Updater arrived on the scene with a demo video showing an EE site being updated in a matter of seconds, making just about everyone go crazy with nerd glee. Updater is very popular and itself has been updated frequently. A very cool and much needed add-on for so many EE users.

Runners Up
  • 2nd Place: CE Cache (Causing Effect) – CE Cache allows you to store and retrieve parts of your templates (fragment caching via file-based caching, database, APC, Redis, Memcache or Memcached) or full-page static caching.
  • 3rd Place: Field Editor (Chris Newton) – Adds powerful features to EE's standard field editor interface to add, delete, re-order and manipulate your custom fields all in one simple interface.
Honorable Mention
  • Postmaster (Objective HTML) – The definitive solution for emailing channel entry data within EE. Create email templates using the live preview, and impose extremely fine levels of control to send emails exactly when you want.
  • Publisher (Brian Litzinger) – The only multilingual and workflow module for EE, letting you create drafts and translations of your entries, categories, and content phrases

2012 Plugin of the Year: CE Tweet

CE Tweet

Causing Effect (Aaron Waldon)

CE Tweet enables you to display and consume Twitter in your ExpressionEngine templates

Winning Summary:

Causing Effect offers us another very solid plugin with CE Tweet (after winning this category last year with the incredible CE Image plugin). Another Twitter plugin? Yes, and probably the last one you'll ever need. Based on Aaron's track record, if there is a missing feature in CE Tweet, just make a feature request and it won't be missing for long. If you need data from Twitter on your EE website, this look like the go-to solution.

Runners Up
  • 2nd Place: Forms JS Validation (Rein de Vries) – Add JS validation to exisiting forms, and is compatible with all kind of forms such as DevDemon's form module.
  • 3rd Place: Placeholder (Natetronn) – Allows you to easily add placeholder images to your site.
Honorable Mention

2012 Developer of the Year

Lodewijk Schutte (Low)

Lodewijk Schutte, aka "Low" is an ExpressionEngine developer working from his houseboat in the Netherlands. He's been active in the EE community for over seven years. He's had useful add-ons out there for years, and he finally hit the tipping point where the EE community had to vote and say "this guy is the real deal." I can't imagine building a site without at least one Low add-on (how did we our clients survive without Low Variables?) Note that his latest add-on, Low Events, won the Fieldtype of the Year award this year. Congrats, Low! Time for wine and cheese!

Runners Up
  • 2nd Place: mithra62 (Eric Lamb) (mithra62.com) – Eric has a solid stable of add-ons and loves to talk ExpressionEngine. His EE Debug Toolbar won 2nd Place in Extension of the Year this year, and Flag Master was a Fieldtype honorable mention. This is an EE development career that is going places.
  • 3rd Place: Causing Effect (causingeffect.com) – What can you say about Causing Effect? He shows up in more than one category almost every year, and is definitely highly decorated in the awards. He claims 2011 2nd runner-up in Dev of the Year; 2011 Plugin of the Year for CE Image, 2012 Extension honorable mention for CE Lossless, 2012 2nd place Module for CE Cache and 2012 Plugin of the Year for CE Tweet.
Honorable Mention