This Week in devot:ee #121 - May 29, 2014
May 29, 2014
by Ryan Masuga
Two new add-ons this week, including “In” (no pun intended) which looks like a subtle game changer.
New Add-on: "In" from Causing Effect
Aaron Waldon released an add-on this week that looks like something I've wanted for a loooong time, and even fantasized about making a few years ago: an alternative to embeds (and snippets) that is lightweight and only called when needed–not loaded with every request to the template engine.
From Causing Effect's site:
Let's be honest. It's no fun to log into the control panel to create a snippet. Even worse, the snippet isn't version controlled, and you'll probably forget to copy that snippet to the production environment the next time you push your template changes up. And then there's the issue of every snippet and every global variable being loaded from the database into memory every time EE fires up and runs its template engine. You could use an embed, but that would probably be overkill, because they are slow and they are handled late in the parse order (you want to use this code inside of other {exp:…} tags after all).
I think this add-on looks like a subtle game changer. We have a site right now that could potentially benefit from converting a few embeds that aren't even passing any variables into..."in's"? We've also commonly used various snippet-syncing add-ons to try and version control snippets, but if In proves any more useful, we'll show those snippet-synicing add-ons and the snippet they clumsily sync right out the door. I'm looking forward to giving this a try.
New Add-ons This Week
-
In by Causing Effect (Aaron Waldon)
Include or Insert template files. A light alternative to snippets and embeds. -
Link Vault Logger by Ron Hickson
A simple plugin to extend the great Link Vault module. The plugin merely logs a download without generating a link which can be useful in some situations (like dynamic PDF creation).
