devot:eeDevoted to ExpressionEngine

This Week in devot:ee #58 - February 28, 2013

February 28, 2013
by Ryan Masuga

Making the Quick Store Quicker

If you weren't aware of it before, you are now. We have a 1-page "quick store" where you can quickly add items to your cart. Quite often you know exactly what you need for a project and you just want to get them as fast as you can, and with minimal hassle. The Quick Store was made for this purpose.

Unfortunately, the way it was originally coded up made it woefully slow. This week we optimized that and the Quick Store is now…quick. We took the template from a whopping 721 queries and ~22 second load time to 50 queries and approximately 2 second load time. We also included a blazing filter to help you find what you're looking for even faster.

Redesigned Header Bar for Users

If you logged into devot:ee this week you probably noticed the new bar in the header. There are a few new things we wanted to start adding up there, so it made sense to redesign it. Here are some notes about what is up there currently:

User Menu

This menu contains a link to you profile, to edit your profile, and to log out. You can get to this menu with a Opt(Alt)-M key command.

Your Cart

Same as before: shows you the current number of items in your cart.

Favorites

There was never a good, quick way to get to your favorites and bookmarks. Now all of them are loaded for you at the top, and there is a very quick filter. You can get to this menu with a Opt(Alt)-F key command and start typing. Then you can use arrow keys to move through selections. This is a very fast way to navigate to items that you want to view frequently.

Developers

Developers have an extra menu to access developer-specific links such as their settings and sales reports. You can access this menu with a Opt(Alt)-D key command.

Notifications

At the far right there is a new notification center. Here we can put system-wide notifications, such as notes about when the site will be down for maintenance, as well as updates about add-on or new articles or news posts. Article and news post notificationa are on by default, but you need to enable the add-on notifications (just like you have to enable being notified about add-on updated via email) in your member account area. Notifications should stay lit until you view them, and then will be removed after 24 hours. System messages stay there until an admin manually removes them. You can view this menu with a Opt(Alt)-N key command.

We are working on some other things to go in the bar right now. We hope you enjoy this little update. 

New Add-ons This Week

• Random Between by Gents Agency (Diederik Van Hoorebeke)
  This plugin returns a random number between two optional values.
• Extract Image by Yuri Salimovskiy (IntoEEtive)
  This plugin parses anything that's between its opening and closing tags and returns URLs for images in <img> html tags that are found in the text.
• NSM Live Look ($) by Leevi Graham (Newism)
  Preview channel entries and pages in context before publishing. NSM Live Look is a Multi-Site Manager compatible ExpressionEngine addon that expands on the built-in Live Look functionality and allows you to see saved entries in template context directly in the CP. View the page as it will appear on the website and be confident that when you set the entry's status to 'open' it will look just you expected. Please note: This add-on does not enable live WYSIWYG editing of templates or live updates.
• NSM Channels ($) by Leevi Graham (Newism)
  Group channel entries on any attribute or any custom field.
• Explode by Isaac Raway (Airways)
  Explode splits a given string by a given separator and provides two modes for using the resulting values.
• Escort ($) by Derek Hogue (Amphibian Design)
  Let your site's email get sent by the pros! Escort seamlessly routes all emails generated by your site through any of five third-party transactional email services, all using their HTTP APIs.
• Smart Cache ($) by Dave Freidel
  Smart Cache will allow you to modify any .js or .css files while in development or production, and force the browser to fetch the file anew. No more will you have clients saying the site is not working, only to find out they needed to delete their cache.