devot:eeDevoted to ExpressionEngine

This Week in devot:ee #14 - April 20, 2012

April 20, 2012
by Ryan Masuga

This past week has been a pretty busy one, and we're working on some cool things as well.

Simplifying Add-on Support Forums

One thing we'd like to ask our developers and the devot:ee community at large is whether the removal of empty add-on support forums that are not developer supported (or the archiving of unsupported forums that already have content) would affect you in any way. We're asking first to get a feel for what you're thinking - we don't want to remove content that could potentially be useful.

We've found that the "Peer support" forum idea simply doesn't work like we thought it would when we initially set up add-on support. Even though devs are not officially supporting a forum (and in some cases have even provided a link to where the official support exists), users still post feature requests and bug reports in the devot:ee forums and then often wonder why they don't get a response. At that point a developer has any number of posts sitting there that appear to be unanswered or unresolved, which could potentially make them look bad, or make the add-on look bad. Our new thinking is that a support forum shouldn't exist for an add-on on devot:ee at all unless a developer has specifically enabled official support. Any feedback you have for us is most welcome.

Recently Rolled Out

Devot:ee Monitor

View all your installed add-ons on one screen.

This week we released Devot:ee Monitor which keeps you up-to-date on what add-ons are out-of-date on your ExpressionEngine sites. It's a great free developer tool for use on any size ExpressionEngine site. View what is installed on your site at a glance, and see what add-ons need updating. You can view release notes, and click right over to devot-ee.com to download updated versions.

The release of this add-on is one reason we previouly asked developers to go in and update the package_name field in their add-on entries (see the "Help Us" section in April 5th's article), as this is how we can most easily know what is installed on your site. We're trying to find time to populate these ourselves. Until the majority of add-ons on devot:ee have the package name filled out, you will see a lot of "Not found" add-ons, but this will improve over time. If you install and use this add-on on your sites, let developers know!

Suggested Add-ons in Your Cart

We added a suggested add-ons feature to the cart that may help save you some time. When your cart is empty, we simply list the most popular commercial add-ons for the past 30 days. Odds are, you might need one of these, and you can just add it to your cart on the spot. As you add items, the list may change, because we start figuring out "those who bought this also bought that" based on what is in your cart. This might help you discover some items that other ExpressionEngine users frequently purchase together.

In Progress

Upload API

We're working on an upload API, based on a suggestion by Rob Sanchez (@_rsan).

@devot_ee i want an api for updating addon DLs, so i can include it in my auto-deployments and not do it manually (see tweet)

This would make updating your add-on files on devot:ee much easier, because you would not have to login to devot:ee at all just to upload a new file and/or bump a version number. This is in active development right now.

This Week in Add-ons

• Link Vault ($, for EE2) by Masuga Design
  Link Vault allows you to protect your local and remote download links, track all downloads, track and block leech attempts and disguise any other link URLs you'd like to protect. There are also hooks available so you can extend Link Vault's functionality.
• Nolan (for EE2) by iain
  Nolan enables a very simple matrix style field within a Pixel & Tonic Matrix field
• Evo Google Weather ($, for EE2) by EEvolution
  Display weather updates on your ExpressionEngine templates from the Google weather API.
• Sight (for EE2) by Electric Putty
  Sight is a plugin for enabling/switching between certain accessibility CSS file options.
• String Injector ($, for EE2) by KMD
  Ever wanted to add a <br> only after the first word in a text string ? Or ever wanted to split a text by 2 <p> with different classes ?