When ExpressionEngine users have issues upgrading from EE 1.x to EE 2.x they frequently manage to find us; Hop Studios has done more than a few of these upgrades now, big and small. Recently, Engine Hosting graciously sent us another EE1.x upgrade client, Rainmaker Lawyer Consulting. 

RainmakerLawyer.com is a resource center developed specifically to help lawyers make a great living and live a great life.  Their mission is to deliver innovative ideas and common sense advice that will help their clients unlock the limitless opportunity hidden within themselves and their law firm.  The process to upgrade from EE1 to EE2 can go smoothly or can be quite difficult.  This upgrade went very well with a minor detour for the transition of LG Better Meta, which is an EE1 only add-on, to the new EE2 version, NSM Better Meta—that required some database wrangling and careful backups.

In addition, the URL structure changes slightly from EE1 to EE2; the trailing slash gets removed from most URLs, so we did some fancy work to deal with that. Another satisfied and modernized client, hooray!

I’ll be taking on a new role at this year’s Northern Voice conference—a speaking role! I’ll be talking on Saturday morning about ways to improve commenting on your blog. I’ve got a lot to say about this topic; there are more options for discussion than ever before, and navigating them can be tricky.

Northern Voice is an amazing, long-running conference about blogging, social media and self-expression that for many years Hop Studios was involved with organizing .

This year, it’s happening June 14-15, and for the first time it’s at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre and the Museum of Vancouver. Tickets are still available, but it’s sold out seven years in a row, so don’t wait, get your remarkably affordable ticket now.

SSIR came to us about two years ago with great content but an out-of-date design and a CMS administrative interface that was clearly overdue for an overhaul.  This redesign was particularly enjoyable for us, not just because of the results but because of the folks at Stanford we got to work with.

SSIR was up against stiff competition, and was selected from more than 400 submissions from publications of all sizes. And this is an extremely meaningful award for Hop Studios, given that we focus on media properties, and Min’s is 60-year-old industry news source covering the media and magazine community.

All the best, SSIR!

This continued recognition for Truthdig’s journalism is heartwarming for us. We think this shows that, with the right set of tools, writers can focus on the content and stay focused on producing insightful, provocative journalism.

It would be wonderful if you would help us out by voting for Truthdig as well—we’d love for them to win the People’s Choice awards. Thanks!

All the best, Truthdig!

Update April 30, 2013: Truthdig wins best site in Politics! View Webby Award page

And of course, how do we express our gratitude? With a web page!

Click Here for Holiday Cheer

Hop Studios will be on limited hours until the end of the holidays, but reachable in any emergency. We wish you a wonderful Christmas Season and all the best in the new year.

1) Switching all the products to be under the EllisLab domain is a good move and a strong signal. It’s now ellislab.com/expressionengine, not expressionengine.com, and this makes sense—especially if the company plans to promote itself and its brand more aggresively—though that would require additional outreach and communication, which isn’t exactly the trend. But we’ll see.

2) Imagine, for a minute, you are a person who hasn’t heard about ExpressionEngine. (There are many of these people in the world.) So you come to the site and you want to know, say, what are the requirements are? Or what features it has (commenting, templating, spam handling, search, caching, performance…) There’s nothing like that here any more.  EllisLab doesn’t actually describe the product any more, they just assume you want it, or will want it, after knowing it will “help you succeed.”  Sorry, that’s not good enough. (Bonus item: The testimonial on the bottom of this page from “Wes Baker, VP of Technology”—what company does he work for? EllisLab. See #6…)

3) Offering paid support is great, and I’m excited about it. But offering only paid support is crazy. The forums were a great place to find solutions to problems quickly without requiring direct assistance from an EE staff person. Now, that’s all locked away and even if EllisLab gets rich answering paid support, I won’t benefit from it; I’ll have slowness, delays and frustration. They say they want to help us, but this isn’t putting their actions in line with their talk. Offering three months free with first purchase is a band-aid that recognizes this problem, but I think the real consequences will show up in about 4 months, when everyone has used up their free support trials and the wave of frustration at this program really hits home.

4) That said, the pricing structure of the new paid support is insane. $50 / month for a responses only from 7:00am to 3:00pm Pacific Time with a 2-day wait for a first reply? How is that acceptable for ANY product, especially a business product?  Or how about $2000 / month for 4-hour response, and that by email only, no phone support? For $24,000 / year, I better have a number I can reach you at, and it should be 24-hours, or at least go past 3 p.m.—basically, if I have the best possible plan offered, and I file a support request at noon, they still don’t have to answer until the next morning, 17 hours later.

5) MojoMotor now has equal billing with ExpressionEngine. Truly shows that what makes money runs the show now, not what does the job. (Since MojoMotor is the most profitable product of EllisLab, requiring almost no development or support.)

6) What’s with the staff list and the company history at the bottom of the home page? (“Spark Japan Launch Evolving Chatty Ignited EllisLab Onward”) What does that even mean? And besides, name one other company that puts the company’s history on the home page. Nothing personal, Ellislab, but we don’t care about you! We care about your products and what they can do. Showcase your add-ons, your best sites, your successes, not your history. And the periodic table / staff listing… it’s cute. But it doesn’t mean anything real, and it shouldn’t take up more space on the home page than ExpressionEngine does.

7) Not having any links to Devot:ee, EE Insider, Director-ee, Train-ee, Show-EE... it just shows how insular EllisLab is today. These sites and the people there are what has built your community, EllisLab. Their success helps me, and you. Why shun and ignore them? Speaking of which…

8) Pro Network: gone. Reason given: “Many of you have expressed to us that you feel that the Pro Network has become a bit crowded, with many members who did not keep their profiles updated.” This is horse-crap. “Many of you” is a lame way to pretend that there’s community support for a non-supported decision, and getting people to keep their profiles updated is EASY, especially when those members get business directly from their listing. No, you basically ditched the Pro Network in favor of Enterprise Partners—and the fact that you forwarded the link for every Pro Network member to the new Enterprise Partners page, even if you later modified on this, speaks directly to the fact that this was clearly your goal. Disclosure: Hop Studios is/was in the Pro Network.

9) Minor(?) peeves: The EE version 1 legacy docs are now gone. You can download them, but that’s it, they’re not online. This is stupid: I still use them regularly. You also took down the wiki, which was stagant and I’m glad it’s gone if it’s not used—but it was also the only place anyone could find EE’s Parse order documented. Rescue that, please!

10) New CEO: Good luck, Derek! I hope you don’t get “the wrong advices” (Check out the site’s new 404 page. It’s very apropos.)

The answer is: Yes, EE can handle your traffic, if you know how to set it up properly and if your hosting provider is reliable and robust.  Here at Hop Studios, we have been building large ExpressionEngine-powered sites for years.  Nevertheless, until we first researched this list, it was hard to find concrete examples of enormous sites to back up our assertion that EE could handle large traffic.

So we made this list. And because we like to share, below is the current definitive list of the 20 largest ExpressionEngine Web sites. Why 20? Because 21 seems gratuitous.

But wait… What exactly defines “largest”?

That’s a tough question, because some sites that have a huge amount of visitors might still be just one page in scope. Or a site that serves a niche audience and has a low global Alexa ranking might have crazy active forums. We consulted with many other EE professionals to come up with the following important factors, which seemed to be the consensus about what determines “largeness.”

• number of unique visitors and pages / month
• number of entries and comments
• number of members and forum posts
• awards and buzz

Combining all these data points from an initial list of more than 150 candidate sites, we came up with the ranking you see here, which was based on all the data we gathered plus a little bit of what we like to call “magic ordering sauce.” You might argue with the specifics of the order, however, we guarantee that you’ll be impressed, and surprised, by this list.

The 20 Largest ExpressionEngine Web sites, as of November 2012

1. Barack Obama: You’ve heard of him, yes? This is his campaign site*
2. BroBible: a site for men
3. Periodicos Zocalo: newspaper in Mexico
4. iLounge: everything about the iPod and iPhone
5. Trend Hunter: trends and gossip


6. Totally NSFW: adult content (porn)
7. Penny Arcade: comic strip
8. SpeedTV: NASCAR news
9. Paula Deen: famous chef
10. Kukla’s Korner: hockey fans


11. Red Flag Deals: shopping deals
12. Gear Live: gadget news
13. DipNote: : U.S. Dept. of State’s blog
14. VKMag.com: online magazine
15. A List Apart: resource for CSS and design


16. Alternative Press Magazine: that’s what it is
17. DJ Booth: songs and news
18. MacObserver: Apple news
19. Pep Boys: car parts
20. Campaign Monitor: email campaign tool

(Items in green are new since last year; other sites may be new to the top 20, but were on the list last year.)

* Change.gov used to be the top site on this list; I’ve retired it because it hasn’t been active since 2009, though it would still easily rank in the top 5.

The largest confirmed traffic we know of is BroBible at 30,000,000 pages per month. The largest number of entries we know of is Periodicos Zocalo: 737,000. ZOMG.

If you’re looking for the names of big companies that use EE, the list includes Stanford, U of Miami, MIT, Mailchimp, Cisco, Boobieathon, Sony, Apple, Disney, Nokia, WB, Ford, BBC, Nike, Adobe, Toys R Us, Garmin, Vodafone, GOP.com and Democrats.org. However, the sites (or sub-sites) of these big companies do not deal with the large amounts of traffic that the ones listed above do, and this isn’t about name dropping, this is about BIG SITES.

Much of the raw data we gathered is available for you to use, so long as you credit us. Take a look:

Click here to view the spreadsheet directly

Also note, the spreadsheet is a living document, so it may in the future show a different ranking than the list in this article does. That’s because we’ve learned more and updated it.  The list is still the list.

Special thanks to the folks on Twitter who chipped in with suggestions, and to some folks who couldn’t help us on the record.

Please let us know of any missing sites, either in the comments or by contacting us directly. Thanks!

We at Hop Studios would love to share our incredibly awesome space with you. We have a few extra desk spaces, and would like to have a more lively vibe in the office.

We are located at 55 Water Street; a beautifully renovated, historic building in the heart of Gastown which is home to many tech-related businesses and it’s only a 10-minute walk from Waterfront Station. There’s a full kitchen, fast, reliable wifi, and a conference space for meetings.

Check out our incredible view!  You just can’t beat the ambiance and value for a downtown Vancouver location.  If interested, please contact me, Nancy Waldock, at 604.408.5722 or by emailing nancy@hopstudios.com.  I’ll fill you in on all the details.

And if you just want to give us a hint or a URL in the comments, that’s fine, too.

The info we are gathering is:
SITE NAME:  
SITE URL:  
Traffic (uniques / month):  
Traffic (visits / month):  
Traffic (pages / month):  
Number of entries:  
Number of comments:  
Number of members:  
Number of forum posts:  

Thanks for your help and Happy Halloween!!

Revisiting History — Drawing inspiration from the past

Although I did not design the previous iterations of the Hop Studios website, I wanted to ensure that the new design represented the company’s origin and growth properly. I poured through previous designs and analysed the placement of elements and content; what changed, and what stayed the same? I wanted to make wise design decisions that wouldn’t repeat past mistakes or make new ones. If you’re curious, many of the site’s older designs can be accessed through the Internet Wayback Machine.

This idea made it to final stage. Its results can be seen on our homepage.

Through this process I took elements not only from the official Hop Studios website, but also our founders’ websites. For a good chunk of Hop Studios’s history, they made up 100% of the company.

Notable Inspirations

• The “Who We Are” page took inspiration from Susie’s gadgets page with photos.
• For the “What We Do” page, centering the content is based off of the old “Who We Are” page circa 2007 (see: Archived version of /whoweare.html)
• The image assets and page elements mostly remain the same, in order to minimize the effort of converting to the new site; more on that below.

Have you noticed any other influences from the old design in the new one? Let us know in the comments section below.

Starting from scratch — Reuse and Recycle

With elements obtained from previous site redesigns in a basket of ideas, I set out to design (not redesign) each major part of the site. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of this was to find an elegant way to reuse the existing assets. (That, and maybe the duck).

Reusing assets means less work on the production side, but more limits for designers! However, keep in mind that with the right creativity, and a good developer, you can get really funky. In our case, the recycling of the design overview assets was a huge success. The layout and organization for the thumbnails of the non-featured clients was just as easily reusable.

The Hop Studios duck—what is her name, anyway?—is gorgeous. Her perky pose generates interest and the duck’s eyes have a cute angle. But the question was: where should we place our beloved duck? Originally, she was going to be a part of the navigation area, but within our inner pages it was so small (see above) and.. too big (see below).

The answer, if not the solution,  was to fit the duck where her presence is not going to compete with any other element. Personally, I really wanted to have the duck in the header — she is so important to our identity. But as the design evolved, it became clear the best new placement was not on top of every page, but instead at the end of every page and displayed prominently on the homepage, tying the site together from start to finish.

Inner-page dilemma — Must all inner pages look the same?

Typical design projects include a single inner-page design, with variations, that do not have much flexibility in layout. In this design, our inner pages follow several quite diverse layouts custom tailored to the content they serve. In some top restaurants, each dish may have its own shaped plate to hold the food, plated in a certain perfect way. A shallow bowl for soup, a plate with a lip (not to be confused with a lip-plate) for a steak.

The Software and Client pages have their secondary navigation element on the left hand side of the page, while our blog page has these navigational elements on the right side of the page. The purpose of these changes was not to be disharmonious but rather to ensure that each section gets the best treatment for the way visitors will digest the content. The software and client pages, for example, often have a visual element to them, such as the design overviews or thumbnails. Meanwhile, our blog will be mostly a wall of text content. Furthermore, the client and software pages change to a layout using the right column navigation on each of their detail pages, which are designed with text-heavy content in mind.

Unifying each page into a cohesive look is not achieved here by the repetition of layout, but rather by specific styles and elements used consistently.

The original design idea for the Hop Studios website was a two column layout, with a thinner left column for navigation and a wider right column where the content would be placed. This design didn’t work for this particular project because the “our work” pages needed to reuse assets that looked misplaced on this design.

Conclusion

History, recycling, variation — the big three touchstones for the Hop Studios site redesign. Looking back—farther than just the current thing you’re redesigning—allows for a designer to get (re)inspired by elements that maintain the identity of the brand, whether it be a subtle image roll-over effect or choice of colour palette. Reusing elements from a previous design can be challenging—even limiting—but ultimately can result in a design which not only saves a lot of time or money but can help maintain the integrity of the brand. Finally, designing significant layout variations for different types of content presents the content more effectively, and gives the site a much “bigger” feel than it would have if it were all of one variety.

What do you think of our redesign? Which layout is your favourite? Let us know in the comments below.

The who we are page was going to initially have the same rounded rectangle shape as the old who we are page, with a space for a quotation and a look that is more hand crafted by using various kinds of paper textures.

Here’s a sneak peek of the new look for Hop Studios, which will be rolling out soon.

We hope you’ll appreciate the results of the hard work as well as the fun and whimsy we had redesigning our own website, as we lovingly crafted our future presence on the Internet.

We’re excited to show you what we’ve been working on!

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Well, why dawdle? Let’s jump in.

REPOST-US

Repost.us is a service that makes it easy for people to come to an article on your site, copy a little bit of code, and put that article on their own site.

When they re-use your article, you’ll be able to get information about how many times the article is read there, and you’ll be able to put ads into the articles, too. You can also update the article on your own site and have that update reflected on the outside sites. No more out-of-date information!

If you’ve been looking for a way to let your content be shared without losing control of it, this seems like a great, easy-to-implement system.

RESPONSIVE DESIGN and MOBILE SITES

“Don’t build an app based on your website. Build the app that acts as if websites never existed in the first place. Build the app for the person who has never used a desktop computer.” - MG SIEGLER

The buzz of the convention was defeinitely about mobile versions of sites, app development, and responsive design. It’s 2012, and you now need a strategy to deal with the people who visit your Web site from a mobile device.

There are three methods, each with its own pros and cons:

• build one web site that adjusts its display depending on the size of the screen of the user (this is called responsive design)
• build two versions of your site: one that displays specifically to people visiting with mobile devices
• create an app specifically for the iPhone and/or for Android phones

Which one is right for you? Give us a ring, we’ll figure it out.

BOUNCE RATES

You may be worried that people come to your site, look at a single page, and then leave. This is called “bouncing” and if your bounce rate is really high, you’re getting some low-value traffic, but you’re not giving these visitors a reason to stick around, and you’re not conbverting them to return visitors.

Some things you can try to do for these visitors:

• get them to sign up for an email newsletter
• show them more content that’s directly related to the page they arrived on
• encourage them to share the page they just visited in a more blatant way than you do for your regular site readers

If you’re interested in lowering your bounce rate, contact us for some specific ideas and an estimate of much work this would be for your site.

NEWS-KEYWORDS

Google has introduced a new set of keywords for people listed in Google News: the news-keywords tag. You can read about it here.

If you are listed in Google News, you should definitely be including this tag in all your articles.

CHARTBEAT

This was another great demo at ONA. If you want to know on a moment-to-moment basis what parts of your site are popular, which pages are trending upwards, and which are fading fast, there’s a cool tool called ChartBeat that might be for you. It really helps you respond instantly to the things that are capturing attention at that instant.

You can sign up for a free demo and decide if it helps you make instant decisions to improve your content’s positioning.

EXPRESSIONENGINE

This isn’t news from the conference, but it’s a good service announcement for you nevertheless.

There are two new versions of ExpressionEngine out: 1.7.3 and 2.5.3. If you are on EE version 1.7.1 or 2.5.2, you can probably skip this upgrade, but if you have any earlier version, there are several important reasons to upgrade, including minor security issues.

Look in your control panel’s footer, and let us know if you want to upgrade.

Here’s a fun little project we did recently: creating an interactive needle, dial and slider, to display some important and dense data in an novel way for the Global Footprint Network, a nonprofit organization established to enable a sustainable future.

We were given, on the one hand, a really nice vector design for how this gauge (dial) should work, and on the other hand, an Excel sheet with environmental factors broken down in various numerical ways by year, and we were told: “Make it work!”

Beyond the general need to get it animating properly and smoothly, the biggest hurdle we had on this project was to develop this tool without using Flash, so that readers coming to this site on their mobile devices (specifically ones that do not have Flash support) would still be able to view the gauge and interact with it. We chose jQuery, jQuery UI and jGauge to form the base of the meter and its core functionality. In addition, the “digital LCD” typeface uses Cufon, a tool which lets you use fancier, non-Web standard fonts without needing to make them into rasterized graphics . To wrap it all up in a nice package, some advanced CSS was used to design and customize each element to match the static design collateral.

The lovely little touches (changing colors, smooth rotation) make this one of our favorite small projects lately. Try it out!

If you would like us to eat any clam chowder in a sourdough bowl on your behalf, please let us know immediately.

We hope to come back with renewed energy and understanding of the issues facing the news industry, and the solutions being worked on by the best and brightest. Social media, privacy, comment moderation, improvements to search, to video, how to cover elections, food carts, how to integrate user generated content, better metrics, better security, and how to get people to click on ads or maybe just hand you a fistful of dollars… Who knows what all we’ll learn!

We also hope to run into some of the old stalwarts who started up this whole Online News thing… because we were part of that, too, and it’s such fun to talk about 14.4kb modems and the best way to compress animated gifs.

My time at Hop Studios was short: I was only there for about three weeks. Since my first day I started to learn how the company was structured, and even though my skills at first were not that great, everybody was kind and respectful. During my first week I started to work in Expression Engine 2.5, I read a lot to get to know more about this software and how it worked. After hours hitting my head against the wall , I finally got it . In my instance at Hopstudios I worked on a couple of projects of the company. I created some add-ons and plugins that will make working with EE easier for our clients and others who use EE. And it was fantastic because it helped me to understand how everything works inside a company. As a student right now , I would like to say , “Hey, come to HopStudios they will definitely finish the job”.

Even though it was a really short amount of time for an internship, it was definitely good!! And the best part is that I worked a lot and also enjoyed it.

We’re especially interested in any ExpressionEngine events that might be happening next week (Aug. 27-31).

I’ll reserve judgement on the wisdom of the switch; I just know that it’s something you might need to do some day, and here’s what we found useful as we did this export.  I was switching from EE 2.5 to Wordpress 3.4, so keep in mind things may have changed by the time you read this.

First of all, these resources were amazing, and I recommend them:

How to Import an ExpressionEngine Blog into Wordpress (most recent, and best)
Moving from ExpressionEngine to WordPress in 64 easy steps

These two pages were interesting, but not as relevant or as up-to-date:

Export data from Expressionengine to wordpress
and EE’s own, minimalist, Export Entries wiki post

Secondly, set up a template group called “admin” and a template called “export”. Set the template to be XML.  Then use this file: wordpress_export__EXAMPLE.xml as the template.  If you have comments, you will also need to create a template called admin/comment_export. The code for that is in the same file, near the bottom.

Thirdly, if you can keep your images and any other referenced files in the same file structure after the migration, you’ll be much happier.  If you can’t, you’ll have to do a quick search and replace for any image paths and change them to match your new location for those files. You can also do this with PHP in your template, but it’s very memory intensive, because you’re

Lastly, if you get confused, a good solution is to take one post that you’ve created in Wordpress, or imported successfully from ExpressionEngine, export it to XML, and compare that file to the file you’re generating from ExpressionEngine. This will highlight anything new to your installation that you can add to your export, or anything that doesn’t match what WP is expecting.

One way to solve that problem is to limit the number of times people can login to ExpressionEngine, and this add-on does exactly that.  It’s an extension.

1. Zero-Byte Transfer Ghost

I have run into this problem several times when transferring the latest Expression Engine upgrade files to the server.  I usually use Transmit on a Mac to FTP files to our server.  Every once in a while, a file will randomly transfer “correctly” but empty—with 0 bytes in the file.  The upgrade works, but later, I’ll receive an error message somewhere inside EE and I’ll have to dig deep to find out that it is just a file transfer gone badly, wasting much time that could be spent doing anything else and having much more fun.

Solution: I now transfer the files in a compressed archive and uncompress them on the server side.  I know that if the archive uncompressed properly, then all the files are there in full. 

2. Active Database Deletion

I manage 50+ different ExpressionEngine sites on many different hosting platforms and servers, and I always set up (at least) two databases: eedb, and eedb_bak. When it’s time to upgrade, I copy the eedb to eedb_bak, then run the upgrade, so rolling back (when necessary) is a snap.  Once, though, a new client had an existing EE install that was set up just like that… except the current database was the one called eedb_bak. Hilariousness ensued… not really.

Solution: Now I *always* double check the config.php file to make sure that I’m backing up the current database to the right place.  Rush calls to get a database backup restored are not fun.

3.  So Many Details

The most time consuming and tedious part of the upgrade is making sure that all of your third-party add-ons (Modules, Plugins, Extensions, Fieldtypes, Accessories and themes) are transferred and functioning properly.  It is a little easier in EE 2.x since it you’ve got a single third_party folder in system and in themes, and most add-ons are now updated to use these; plus, you can move these folders now.  But it’s still a significant part of the process, with lots of room for mistakes.

Solution: For now, just keep good track of add-ons. In the future, perhaps EllisLab will integrate more functionality into EE and make some common add-ons unnecessary.

4.  Database Too Large

In upgrading from EE 1.x to EE 2.x, you may run into an edge case where your database changes are too large to be handled via the browser.  If this happens, you may have to use ssh and run the upgrade on the server with command-line scripts.  This leads to possible issues with file permissions, and is a detour that, while it works, takes you off-roading and slows you down considerably.

Solution: This *is* the official (and functional) EllisLab solution to a timing-out problem, it’s just a tricky, that’s all.

5.  Upgrade Blindness

This happens when you go through an upgrade process for a client, run into errors along the way and then have to rollback, troubleshoot and repeat the upgrade again.  This might happen a few times, depending on when the upgrade fails and how far you make it each time.  Eventually, you stumble because you forget to reset something that needs to be done, or you skip a step because you think you’ve done it already (and you have, just no this time.) This might include forgetting to reset the database, the config.php file, resetting the file permissions, re-syncing the file manager directories…

Solution: Document carefully each step, and tick them off as you go backwards and forwards. Sometimes it’s the simple solutions that work best.

6.  Turning the Site Back On

Last, and perhaps even least, is a tiny little oversight that I must sadly admit has happened more than once over the years—specifically on very small, simple sites.  You turn off the site in the control panel early in the upgrade process, and then you run through your upgrade.  Perhaps the upgrade runs into problems and takes longer than expected but you figure everything out and it goes overall quite effortlessly. At last, it’s all working perfectly on your end. You wipe your hands and tell the client it’s done.  The client replies that the site is still down.  Horrors! Suddenly, you remember that as a superadmin, you see the site regardless of whether it’s turned off or on, and you did all your testing while logged in.

Solution: Turn the site back on, dummy!

I hope this helps save you a spot of trouble, and I’d be interested in hearing what “gotchas” you’ve encountered!

See you all on Monday!

I came up with a partial solution that seems to have helped quite a bit, and might be appropriate for your situation, especially if you have a LOT of entries.

All “entries” on an EE site (articles, sale items, blog entries, etc.), use the channel module when they display data. The channel modules fetches data from the database with a very big MySQL request that also fetches categories, author data, related stories, and more.  Even with careful use of the “disable” parameter, this query is often big.

If the database server could cache that query, it could be much more efficient at handing out that data. And it does try to cache those queries, and MySQL is pretty good at figuring out what to cache and how to cache it. But part of every channel query (unless you turn off dynamic queries, which is rarely possible) is a portion that checks the entry dates, so that future entries AREN’T published, and expired entries AREN’T published. And this time stamp is changed every second, so the query changes every second, and so MySQL can’t cache it.

So what I did, is I modified the timestamp code to be rounded to the nearest 100 seconds. In other words, the channel query for any given page (or portion of a page) will look the same to the database server for a full 100 seconds, instead of changing each second, so it’ll be able to respond with the pre-fetched data much more quickly.  The code looks like this:

Now, there’s already caching IN expressionengine, and this won’t affect that. So that’s good.

How MySQL deals with it when the exp_channel (or any related) table changes, is that it dumps the in-database cache, so you won’t end up with any sort of delay when editing existing entries; they’ll change immediately and that’ll display immediately (because otherwise, editing would be much more difficult because you wouldn’t be able to look at the results of your edit very well).

Also, if you do this, you probably won’t have any sort of delay when posting new entries, because it takes at least a minute to write and publish an entry, and the entry date of an entry is set from when you load the New Entry form, so the query, even if rounded, will likely always return any newly published entry.

And this rounding doesn’t happen at all in the control panel, because entry dates and expiration dates aren’t used to modify what appears in the edit list.

Lastly, I just wanted to say that this solution came about because of feedback and expertise from the folks at Nexcess.net, our preferred Web host, and it makes me feel even more confident recommending them for ExpressionEngine sites.

This is a core code modification, so you’ll have to reapply it when you upgrade.  If you try it, please let me know if you notice any improvement in site performance.  My next step is to make it into an extension that you can add to your site; if you would you be interested in that, let me know.

If you have been running an ExpressionEngine site for a long time, then you already know the upgrade process for an EE site can be a challenge at the best of times.  Though it seems straightforward, when your site includes third party modules, plug-ins and extensions that don’t always integrate smoothly, or a large database that doesn’t always upgrade without “bonking”, the upgrade process is not always a quick and easy job.

A “normal” EE upgrade say, 2.2 to 2.3, takes from one to two hours when all goes well, but in our experience, the upgrade from EE1 to EE2 (depending on the complexity of your site) could take 5 to 10 times as long. If your basic site doesn’t use any add-ons, then your upgrade should go fairly smoothly but if you do and there isn’t an EE 2.x version of that addon then the challenge begins.  Do you rewrite the code yourself, find an alternate functioning EE2 addon, wait until the EE2 version is written or modify your site not to use that addon?  Not all of these options are acceptable to your client.

Does your site have customized forums? Does it use any PHP code in its templates? Does it have left-over code from EE 1.3 or earlier? Are you using Solspace’s Tracker? Or the original Snippets plugin? Or the photo gallery module? Do you know how to deal with the URLs on your site changing slightly (they will no longer end with a slash…) Did you use Mark Huot’s File extension, or nGen’s File extension? Will you miss having Gypsy? Do you use Pixel and Tonic’s Matrix? Are you upgrading to the latest version of Playa? Did you remember to re-sync the File Manager directories? Are you running MSM? What about any stand-alone entry forms? For goodness sake, you didn’t try to do a UTF-8 site in EE 1.x did you? Have spammers been dancing all over your member registration form?

In some instances, we have postponed upgrades until the Expression Engine addon is released because the modules offer such excellent functionality, but then we are working with beta or X.0 versions, and that is its own set of exciting challenges.

With each upgrade the process is getting refined and with each separate client there is a different gotcha.  But the clients that we have moved to EE2 find that it’s worth the effort—in order to harness the newest developments in the add-on community, in order to have easier site development, and a control panel that makes more sense.  The new entry form functionality is especially appreciated, and when EE 1.x support ends soon, there will be even more reason to take the plunge.

So far, we’ve done Filmradar, The Greater Good, ourselves (no small job!),  Sam Harris, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and the University of British Columbia School of Journalism. Add in the sites we’ve built directly in 2.x, and we think we’re getting pretty good at this. If you’re thinking of updating a site and have questions, we’d be happy to help even just with friendly advice!

Here’s the interview where Rose mentions her eBook, around 7 minutes and 52 seconds in (or Click here to skip directly to the part of the clip about the book):

This interactive version of the book, I think, is the ultimate version of the book, especially for a hands-on resource like this one. It is always lovely to see our clients on the cutting edge of technology.

The most visitors ever was 1154, on August 26, 2009 03:45 PM
Total Logged-in Users: 1
Total Anonymous Users: 0
Total Guests: 55

So, what does that information really mean and how is it calculated? There is only basic documentation on it from EllisLab, so here’s the inside scoop in full technicolor detail, taken directly from the code for EE 2.3.1:

Every time EE builds a page, whether that page is cached or not, ExpressionEngine updates its stats. But wait… it’s already a little tricky: this assumes you have “enable_online_user_tracking” set to yes.  You probably do.

When ExpressionEngine updates its statistics (the magic happens in /libraries/Stats.php), EE takes a look only at activity from the past 15 minutes. (There is no way to change this time period except by hacking the core—so your site’s stats are going to be compared on the same scale as anyone else’s EE site, unless they are sooper-l33t.)  Information about current online visitors is kept in a table called “exp_online_users”. Old entries get cleaned out approximately every 20 page views, but regardless off the table’s state, visitors will never be over-counted even if the table hasn’t been cleaned, because the 15-minute span of time is enforced by each database query for online users.

Interesting side note and possible bug: You might have “dynamic_tracking_disabling” enabled to help with large traffic spikes. This setting says, if there’s too much traffic, you want EE to disable tracking to speed up your site. But ironically, once you hit that certain amount of traffic, this setting means you will stop updating the “exp_online_users” table.  In other words, you won’t keep tracking that you have large amounts of users, which means EE will soon think there are fewer users, and then you’ll start tracking them again.

In any case, assuming you ARE tracking stats (and therefore users) at this point, EE looks at the current entries in the “exp_online_users” table, and sorts them into: “logged-in” people (public and “anonymous”) and “guests”.  A guest is considered a new person if they are visiting from a particular unique IP address. So, multiple people from one office sharing one IP address, count as one guest—until they log in. And people who don’t specify an IP address or who spoof one—it’s possible—count as one unique visitor.

Meanwhile, a single search engine crawler that connects from 10 different IP addresses or a person behind a proxy with 10 rotating IP addresses, look like 10 guests, assuming all visits happen within 15 minutes.

Important to note: if you log in to a site, you were probably counted as a guest, and you now count as a logged-in user. When you log in via the control panel, nothing removes the guest version of you until 15 minutes expires (but if you log out, you are removed as a logged-in version of you). If you log in or log out via the forums or the member section of your site, this cleanup does happen, so it’s likely it’s a very small issue in your site stats.

So, that’s members and guests. What’s an anonymous user? That’s someone who has logged in, but who has selected to be “hidden” from the list of people online—this is only the case if you have made that checkbox available on the login screen and they have checked it. Anonymous users are not counted as guests. (Anonymous users are visible to superadmins who see all and know all.)

If the number of guests and the number of logged in users (public and anonymous) all together is the largest amount it’s ever been, the “exp_stats” table is updated with your new “high score” and the current time. But if it’s not, “exp_stats” is still updated, with only the “last_visitor_date”. This happens on every page load.

Side note 2: If you’re logged_in, your own profile will update the “last_visit” information for your own account, whether or not stats are turned on, from somewhere else in the code. So it’s possible to have members with more recent last visits than your site’s last visit, if you’ve disabled tracking. Be aware.

Last facts: There’s no way to reset your site’s stats without directly accessing the database. And statistics are tracked on a site-by-site basis, so if you’re running Multi-Site Manager, visitors to one site are not counted with visitors to another (but the table is cleaned for all sites at once).

And that’s how total guests and most visitors work in ExpressionEngine.

* Large, spectacular images of the parks accent the header of the site.

* The homepage illustration changes dynamically to represent the park currently selected in the reservations area.

* On the reservations page, a floating ‘booking’ digest summarizes the trip details for easy visualization of your reservation.

* You can’t see it, but we’ve provided easy access to the site’s editors to add and edit new content for each venue; we generate the map automatically on the sidebar as well as the thumbnails for the image gallery.

* Custom promotional spots throughout the site make adding internal promotions or external ads easy.

* The overall design, visual identity and logo were all done by Hop Studios new designer, TJ Garcia.

* We went to extra step to completely secure the control panel and the reservations form.

So, if you’re looking to get away from it all, we know where you should start.

But its site was built in 2006 with an early version of ExpressionEngine, and while it was really well-built for its time, the code was limited in flexibility and overcomplicated by the limitations of the old EE tool.  The site’s design also had stagnated.

SSIR wanted to have a site matching what their content deserved: something that showed advanced thinking, leadership, and the depth of the site’s information stores—a site that was a pleasure to browse and a snap to search.

So, we built that for them.

This project involved:

• Navigation a very tricky upgrade from EE 1.x to EE 2.x, including rewriting several critical add-ons in 2.x
• Creating some great animations, like the home page slide show, the relate stories box and my personal favorite, the login link—you must click the login link
• Replacing the popup subscribe ad with an in-page, fully functionality expanding subscription promotion
• Completely overhauling the way the articles and images are entered so that production can happen far more quickly, more error-free, and with better tools to re-use the content in multiple formats
• Creating cool new content types, like book reviews, point/counterpoint blog pages, and more—in addition to removing content types that didn’t make sense any more
• Overhauling site search to be more powerful and better integrated with the site design
• Integrating with social tools like Facebook and Twitter—and Google Plus, if that matters
• Oh, and migrating from one server to a faster two-server setup for only a slight hosting cost increase, can’t forget that

The design had to satisfy a lot of different audiences (internal and external, and the final result is striking without being flashy. Images that were constrained by the previous design—built at a time when monitors were smaller—really get the chance to shine in the new site.

The project took six months from start to finish, and already the benefits are apparent.  Traffic is up; user feedback is terrific; and the time it takes to build additional new features is way, way down, given all the new EE 2.x functionality and the new streamlined data model.

This isn’t just a good project, it’s a fantastic example of the kind of project we love to do at Hop Studios. We’ll be showing off this site for years to come.

Hop Studios’ first-ever PDF ebook “Lying by Sam Harris” is finally completed. The book had been available in another format, but Hop Studios’ new version of the book has:

• A brand new layout & design that keeps tablets (like the iPad) in mind
• Interactive endnotes that enable you to quickly navigate to and from citations
• DRM Free, so you use it on any of your devices that support PDF
• a Digital Honour Code that allows you to share the book with family, friends, and colleagues

We’re quite proud of the finished product and I personally enjoyed reading the book myself. Let us know what you think!

The book is available for download at Sam Harris’ website here: http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/lying/.

Come on out this Wednesday, Nov. 30, at The Network Hub downtown, and join us for a talk about all sorts of EE wonderfulness.  There will be two free licenses to EE given away at the event, one specifically to someone who’s never used EE before, and one to someone who RSVPed to the event.  We’ll also have some EE folks from Seattle coming up; don’t miss this!

http://www.meetup.com/expressionengine/events/40429492/ to RSVP!

The answer is: Yes, EE can handle your traffic, if you know how to set it up properly and if your hosting provider is reliable and robust.  Here at Hop Studios, we have been building large ExpressionEngine-powered sites for years.  Nevertheless, until we first researched this list, it was hard to find concrete examples of enormous sites to back up our assertion that EE could handle large traffic.

So we made this list. And because we like to share, below is the current definitive list of the 20 largest ExpressionEngine Web sites. (Why 20? Because the last list was 32 sites and that was too darn long, that’s why.)

But wait… What exactly defines “largest”?

That’s a tough question, because some sites that have a huge amount of visitors might still be just one page in scope. Or a site that serves a niche audience and has a low global Alexa ranking might have crazy active forums. We consulted with many other EE professionals to come up with the following important factors, which seemed to be the consensus about what determines “largeness.”

• number of unique visitors and pages / month
• number of entries and comments
• number of members and forum posts
• awards and buzz

Combining all these data points from an initial list of more than 150 candidate sites, we came up with the ranking you see here, which was based on all the data we gathered plus a little bit of what we like to call “magic ordering sauce.” You might argue with the specifics of the order, however, we guarantee that you’ll be impressed, and surprised, by this list.

The 20 Largest ExpressionEngine Web sites, October 2011

1. Barack Obama: You’ve heard of him, yes? This is his campaign site*
2. Totally NSFW: adult content (porn)
3. iLounge: everything about the iPod and iPhone
4. BroBible: a site for men
5. Penny Arcade: comic strip


6. Periodicos Zocalo: newspaper in Mexico
7. Gear Live: gadget news
8. SpeedTV: NASCAR news
9. Kukla’s Korner: hockey fans
10. Paula Deen: famous chef


11. Red Flag Deals: shopping deals
12. DipNote: : U.S. Dept. of State’s blog
13. A List Apart: resource for CSS and design
14. BMI Music: music licensing and artist
15. Trend Hunter: trends and gossip


16. DJ Booth: songs and news
17. Pep Boys: car parts
18. Campaign Monitor: email campaign tool
19. It Gets Better: support for gay youth
20. Truthdig: independent political news

(Items in green are new since last year; other sites may be new to the top 20, but were on the list last year.)

* Change.gov used to be the top site on this list; I’ve retired it because it hasn’t been active since 2009, though it would still easily rank in the top 5.

The largest confirmed traffic we know of is a tie between iLounge and totallyNSFW; they both have 20,000,000 pages per month. The largest number of entries we know of is Periodicos Zocalo: 453,000. Yes, that’s 453,000 ENTRIES! Woah.

If you’re looking for the names of big companies that use EE, the list includes Stanford, U of Miami, MIT, Mailchimp, Cisco, Boobieathon, Sony, Apple, Disney, Nokia, WB, Ford, BBC, Nike, Adobe, Toys R Us, Garmin, Vodafone, GOP.com and Democrats.org. The sites (or sub-sites) of these big companies do not deal with the large amounts of traffic that the ones listed above do.

Several of the biggest sites from the last list have switched completely away from EE in the past year, but I don’t think that this is an abnormal occurrence. However, I’d have liked to see more brand new sites pushing existing sites out of the top ranks. Here are the ones that left EE completely this year:

1. Top Gear: BBC car show
2. allkpop: Korean celebrity news
3. The Frisky: celebrity news

Much of the raw data we gathered is available for you to use, so long as you credit us. Take a look:

Click here to view the spreadsheet directly

Also note, the spreadsheet is a living document, so it may in the future show a different ranking than the list in this article does.

Special thanks to the folks on Twitter who chipped in with suggestions, and to some folks who couldn’t help us on the record.

Please let us know of any missing sites, either in the comments or by contacting us directly. Thanks!

Update 10/16: iLounge uses EE for its site, but not for its forums, we’ve been informed.

You can ask multiple choice, weighted, true/false, likert scale, essay and fill-in-the-blank questions, and limit the number of times people can take the quiz or any part of it.  It also does some pretty great Javascript stuff, too.

The first quiz we’ve done with it is all about forgiveness, so try it out and if there are any bugs… please forgive us.

The most interesting applicant will have many of the following skills at the “Very Fine”, “Near Mint” or “Mint” level:

• HTML
• CSS
• AJAX
• JSON
• Javascript (including JQuery)
• ExpressionEngine
• CodeIgniter
• PHP
• MySQL
• Common Web service APIs
• Apache
• Version control
• Web hosting and DNS management
• Mobile Web development

Yes, that’s a long list and you don’t need to be expert in everything on it; we’re primarily looking for someone with experience focused on ExpressionEngine and Javascript and PHP—the rest will make you stand out and get noticed.

What are the other requirements?

• Self-starter with healthy curiosity
• Tenacious attitude towards problem solving
• At least a few years of experience working in Web development
• Good at hitting deadlines with a thump
• Excellent written communication skills

Who can apply?

• you live in Vancouver, BC
• you can work in Canada
• you are able to start immediately i.e. you can give notice now
• you want a permanent position

Who are we?

• We’re a 9-year-old company with a focus on media, non-profits and educational Web sites but a broad range of clients overall.
• We’re fun to work with (if we’re allowed to say that about ourselves [we are -ed.]), and our clients are excellent as well; there are no waterfall death marches here.
• We are located in downtown Vancouver, and we offer an open, collaborative work environment.
• We pay a competitive wage based on experience
• We work hard, but also have lives outside of work.

To apply, send a cover letter, your resume, and links to Web sites you’ve built. Send them to jobs@hopstudios.com.

And don’t send your resume as a Word document. We mean it.

The most interesting applicant will have many of the following skills at the “Very Fine”, “Near Mint” or “Mint” level:

• The ability to solicit design guidance from clients with little to no design background
• Wireframe and content organization experience
• Solid Web user interface knowledge
• Web graphic production software; Photoshop and/or Illustrator
• Experience (or at least familiarity) with CSS, HTML, JQuery, and Javascript
• Experience with branding, identity and logo development
• Skills in adapting print or other media marketing materials for a Web presence
• Design ability with Web-associated design media, such as email newsletters and mobile sites
• Familiarity with the ExpressionEngine and/or other database-driven backend content management systems
• Experience with Flash a plus, but not crucial

Don’t have absolutely everything on that list? That’s OK. We provide on-the-job experience acquisition if you’ve got a strong majority.

What are the other requirements?

• Self-starter with a creative streak
• Ability to take design direction and interpret novel solutions
• Several years of experience working in Web design
• Good at hitting deadlines with aplomb
• Excellent written communication skills
• A desire to experiment with new ideas and break paradigms, combined with a realistic approach to a client’s actual needs

Who can apply?

• you live in Vancouver, BC
• you can work in Canada
• you are able to start immediately i.e. you can give notice now
• you want a permanent position

Who are we?

• We’re a 9-year-old company with a focus on media, non-profits and educational Web sites but a broad range of clients overall.
• We’re fun to work with (if we’re allowed to say that about ourselves [we are -ed.]), and our clients are excellent as well; there are no waterfall death marches here.
• We are located in downtown Vancouver, and we offer an open, collaborative work environment.
• We pay a competitive wage based on experience
• We work hard, but also have lives outside of work.

To apply, send a cover letter, your resume, and links to Web sites you’ve built. Send them to jobs@hopstudios.com.

And don’t send your resume as a Word document. Seriously.

We’re still getting organized, but we’re excited to show off our new space, and we’d like to see you here. We’re at 55 Water Street, Suite 514.

There’ll be refreshments, and if you let us know that you’re coming, either via Twitter or to sales@hopstudios.com, we would be ever so appreciative.

I would post more, but I’m busy packing.  Expect to see some wonderful, detailed posts soon, though—including a picture from the rooftop BBQ pad.

The expectation of a carousel or slide show on the home page, promoting multiple top “stories”—that’s changed.  The average size of a computer monitor. The rise of social media. The popularity of podcasts and the growth of iTunes University.

Most importantly, the journalism school itself has grown and changed.  There’s a more talented, more diverse pool of applicants, who have more sophisticated questions about what the school offers.  Oh, and I should add that UBC’s own overall branding requirements for individual Web sites changed in a pretty significant way.

Oh wait, yes, the content management system changed, too.  There was a big shift from ExpressionEngine 1 to ExpressionEngine 2.  We had to upgrade and deal with all the third-party extensions and work-arounds that were in place in order to make the three-year-old software do the wonderful things it did.

We came in and took all these changes, and looked at the new needs, came up with a plan, and then executed it.  Upgraded the server and the software.  Redesigned. Cleaned up the HTML code, and the templates.  Used the new features in the CMS to make the site editors’ job clearer and more simple.  Got rid of data that wasn’t being used, and added new functionality to allow students to get in touch with the school more efficiently.

It was a fun project, and very pleasing—pleasing results and a pleasant group of people to work with.

“Online Sports / News / Feature / Commentary” (yes, that’s one category) for a piece written by Mark Heisler, and

“Website, Exclusive to the Internet” for their site as a whole.  The judges said, “Good looking, interactive and deep website. Lots of work goes into this site and it shows.”

This pairing of awards clearly demonstrates the Hop Studios philosophy: when you start with great building blocks (stories, videos, photos, comments…) and you publish those blocks with a great design and a professional tool set, your Web site will get noticed and make waves.  Congratulations, Truthdig.

She’s cheerful as all-get out, which you can prove by calling Hop Studios—though if you’re a telemarketer, she’ll cheerfully give you the best brush-off I’ve ever heard.

She knows more about taxes and invoicing than anyone else in a nine-block radius, and we’re lucky to have her.  In addition to keeping the office running smoothly, she’s also in charge of finding us a new office space from which to work.  In fact, we have fabulous news about that, which we’ll be sharing with you soon.

Welcome to Hop, Nancy!

Problem? Sorry, I mean: Opportunity! We had just such a situation and build a book recommendation and sharing system for Sam Harris, a popular American non-fiction author.

Site visitors can now suggest books, and Sam can quickly review them, annotate them and publish them, along with a direct link to Amazon, which includes his affiliate link.

In his “Book Store”, books are organized by author last name, category, recent additions and Sam’s Recommendations.

So, it’s a good idea, but what’s happening behind the scenes? Well, the covers are fetched from Amazon automatically, the suggestions are made directly into entries in ExpressionEngine (even if the site visitor isn’t logged in—though if they are, the suggestion is tied to their member account).  Last name sorting is actually a little tricky, because not every author’s last name is simple to parse, but we’ve made this automatic and something Sam can override manually, too.

Sam is donating 50% of the revenue to charity; educating, sharing, and helping the world all from one Web tool; not bad.  I hope you check it out.

So when the Foursquare Church asked us if we thought they should have a mobile site, we said, “Woof! Woof!” (Yes! Yes!)

It’s important to stay extremely focused when building a mobile site.  Every pixel counts, and every kilobyte saved speeds up the page and might even save the end user money.  And probably most importantly, the more streamlined and simple the user interface, the more success people will have using the mobile site.

So for Foursquare, we trimmed away from the main site’s wide list of content and features, and we focused on four things that visitors would most like to do:

• Learn about Foursquare
• Find a nearby church
• Get the latest news
• Look at useful tools

We then dug into each of those specific actions and determined how we could optimize that task for someone with a mobile device.  We also tried to ensure that the site creators had to do the least amount of work to add to both the regular and the mobile site.

However, that doesn’t mean we made a simple site; there’s Twitter and Facebook integration, mobile search, embedded videos, fancy AJAX-ification of pages, contact forms, and more.

Despite the troubles we had with some of the current tools for mobile site building, we’re extremely happy with how the site came out, and the client is as well.  And based on user feedback (and the continued improvement in the smart phone world), we’ll refine the site over time, too.

Hop Studios to the rescue! We’ve completely refactored Christian’s code, making it compatible with the lasuccess Amazon product search API, and adding some additional useful features.

To use this tool you need a public/private key from AWS.  Get one here.

If you need to search for and display Amazon products in your ExpressionEngine Web site, this is the way to do it!  AWS Product 3.0.0 is compatible with EE 1.6.8 and EE 2.1.3, and requires PHP 5 with simple_xml.

Recently, a long thread about customer support started up in the ExpressionEngine forums, and I was going to post a simple response there… but then realized I had more to say than just a simple response.

I used to come to the EE forums frequently—sometimes daily—to:

• ask support questions
• look for how-to advice
• download add-ons
• get support for add-ons from other developers
• upload and support my own add-ons
• find out about community news

And when I came to the forums, I took part in the community, and answered other questions—just like I did today (I came with a question and stayed for a bit of discussion, which prompted this post).

But in decision after decision as EllisLab has changed the forums, their attitude generally seems to treat developers like “kids” they want to keep off “their” grass.

• They delete old posts (that, true, are often no longer relevant) which causes the oldest members to have post counts that appear as low as newcomers (I have made thousands of posts, but my counter currently says something around 400.)
• They merged and demoted forums for add-on developers
• They told developers to distribute and support their add-ons elsewhere
• They started closing threads after a short time in an attempt to make forums into support tickets. Those threads, for me, often provided jumping off points for followup questions or related issues. I almost always used to try to find an old thread, and add to it, when I had the same or a related problem. Then I’d get in a discussion with people who shared my same issues.  Now, users have to start a new thread, and thus their experiences are not shared.
• Tangentially (because what’s a blog post without a tangent) when they released documentation for EE2, they purged all the user-submitted annotations instead of bothering to keep the ones that were still appropriate; even though most of the old advice was valid in EE2. Again, it’s a case of ignoring or demoting value in non-EL provided material, and the feelings and effort of the people who contribute on an ongoing basis.

The line from the company in the thread that got me riled up talked about the unsustainable “unlimited free support” that they are considering doing away with.  But that line just isn’t true: It’s only “free” if you have never upgraded EE, which, presumably, means you won’t be doing much that’s new with your site.  Plus, you’re I’m sure you’ve all encountered the “are you running the latest version of EE or else we can’t help you” response from tech support. Basically, if you continued to upgrade your software, you continued to pay EllisLab for support.

Besides, ultimately, I believe support for older versions leads customers to eventually pay for a new license; the opposite, poor support (or no support), certainly won’t drive continued usage and upgrades… because people won’t keep using your software.

* * *

EllisLab, I feel bad for you, I really do.  You say you have many, many new people using the new version of EE, and that forum response time is the victim of success.  Well, unless all these new people are somehow getting a much cheaper version of EE than I am, you’re making as much money off new licenses as you ever used to.

So look past the stock answer (Basically: “your question is important to us, but we’re receiving higher than normal volumes of questions! Please stand by!”), and see what else has changed.  Look at who has stopped using the forums, and why, look at why people are currently using the forums, look at how the community is changing, and re-tool to meet their needs, not yours.

For instance, here are a few (possibly wrong, but quickly brainstormed) ideas:

* Set a better response time promise than “same business day” for the only support mechanism that you offer to paying customers. Fast response time means less time spent overall in back-and-forth, which means less time spent overall per post.

* Re-enage developers by bringing them onto the forums: Promise faster response time for people who have met a certain level of forum posts. Offer discounts on software to top forum posters.

* Make better, more obvious links between bug reports and forum threads when that’s a solution to an issue;

* Improve the forum search; it could be much better

* Change your forum titles from “Summer Student”, “Grad Student” to something that means something real—quick, is a research assistant better than a lab assistant, and what does either have to do with EE?

And lastly, @rmedek hit another nail on the head:

The biggest issues, in my perspective, are:

The high number of support requests dealing with EE 2.x bugs and broken features.

The higher number of support requests which aren’t answered by the community.

EllisLab doubled the price of ExpressionEngine; continued the trend of addressing missing features by pushing third-party products; forced support of third-party products out of the EE forums; changed the support forums from a typical open-ended thread to a “support ticket” style. It just seems that EllisLab wants the community to be a group of paying customers receiving terse but accurate solutions to small problems, when what it had before was a large group of freely contributing clients and developers. I get some of the reasoning for wanting to focus the support model, but it seems EllisLab threw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.

Support requests for bugs are the most wasteful kind of support request.  It goes something like this, I spend an hour troubleshooting what turns out to be a bug; I finally turn to the forums and post an question, you spend ages troubleshooting, too, and finally it becomes a bug report, which doesn’t get fixed for three months; meanwhile, the process repeats for every copy you sell where someone else stumbles across the same problem.

Test properly and fix bugs faster, and you solve a very big part of the forum problem—I would be very curious to analyze how many of the last, say, 500 forum posts were bug related, compared to two years ago…

And, let me end by saying.. this is posted with nothing but good wishes for improvement for all our sakes. The disconnect here is really puzzling to me.  Leslie (and Lisa and Sue and John, etc.) all actively and effectively do a great job reaching out and helping EE users on a daily (hourly!) basis, and the company goals are laudable in their efforts to empower and assist the EL customer. Nevertheless as a company, many of your policies and decisions in the past two years have me feeling like you’re more and more insular and brisker—less accessible and supportive and friendly. And I’m seeing more and more of my colleagues drifting away from EE because of it.

This trend needs to end.

In the 2011 Webbies (awards given for Web sites in a whole bunch of categories), just announced today, we did very well this year thanks to some wonderful clients.

Truthdig.com was nominated (again!) in the “Blog - Political” category, and newcomer client Foursquare.org is an honoree in the Religion and Spirituality category.

I like the Webby Awards (now in their 15th year) better than any other Web award because of the quality of the competition: the sites we’re up against are amazing.  And in that vein, I’d also like to give a shout-out to Vancouver firm HootSuite who also earned a nom…

Do you know of any other Vancouver companies who got tapped this year? Let us know!

Hop Studios is looking for someone who’s a good proposal writer, who sees what’s wrong with this sentence, and who can fix it.

In a nutshell, we need someone who can, on a part-time basis, take on some of the new business opportunities that Hop Studios identifies, and write clear, detailed and prompt proposals in order to secure new clients and projects.

To be the person (or company) we hire (or subcontract) for this, you have a know a fair bit about building Web sites, and you need to have a mixture of salesmanship, technical writing skills, and copy editing prowess.

If you do this for us and we work together well, we’ll pay you more than you might expect.  If you refer us to someone who ultimately becomes the person who does this for us, we’ll find a generous way to thank you, we promise.

Dear [CLIENT],

After some initial difficulty in replicating the error you reported, I believe I have tracked down a possible cause of the blank space seen in the position of the ad in the right-hand column.

In the right column, you have a 160x600 Realmedia [an ad network] ad spot.  It calls a javascript from this URL:
http://network.realmedia.com/RealMedia/ads/adstream_jx.ads/qqqqq/ros/160x600/jx/ss/a/qqqqqqq@x10

That javascript (from RealMedia) is calling a javascript from ValueClick [another ad network] from this URL:
http://cdn.fastclick.net/fastclick.net/site_defaults/qqq/qqqqq/default_qqqqqq-2.js

*THAT* javascript, from ValueClick, is calling an ad from RealMedia from the first URL… (uh oh!):

... and so on, and so on, until the browser stops doing that…

Basically, I think you have two ad networks, each calling the other as a fall-back when there are no native ads to serve.  This is causing the blank ad spot (and a lot of redundant ad calls on each page load).

I would advise you that you need to make sure that all your ad networks are set to call the SAME last-resort ad service, and not each other.

Yours sincerely,
Travis Smith

The new Foursquare.org (don’t get it confused with that .com site) simplifies the structure of the old site, cutting down on the multiple sub-domains, grouping content logically, and giving everything a bright, clean and approachable look.

It’s definitely not just cosmetic changes, though. We’ve added a host of new features:

• There’s a district locator that lets people put in their zip code and find out what district they’re in—this is most useful for getting relevant regional news and for church officers, volunteers and employees who want quick access to information about their district
• The church search is buffed up and easier to use, with a proximity search, integration with Google Maps, and the ability to search by type of church organization, like camps, schools and institutes.
• All the articles and resources on the site can now be commented on by site visitors
• Direct integration with Foursquare’s Vimeo video channel for display of video podcasts
• Tags and categories and resources browseable by author and artist and… well, there’s no shortage of ways to get to exactly the content you want…
• Some nice flourishes, like auto-resizing shadow-boxed images that you can click on to view at full size; and really SEO_friendly URLs compared to the last site

Attention geeks: The whole site is done in the new ExpressionEngine 2.1! And, though this will clearly not endure as a record, I believe it’s the most highly-trafficked (and perhaps the largest in terms of content) EE 2.1 site built so far.  One of the most interesting challenges on this site was making do with a subset of add-ons that have been converted for EE 2, and then trouble shooting those for bugs common to newly released software.  Here are the add-ons we used:

Allow EE Code 1.4,
Cookie 2.0,
Gravatar 2.1.2,
Hop Inject 2.0.0,
ImageSizer 2.6,
Magpie RSS Parser 1.3.5,
MX Calculator 1.0.2,
NSM Transplant 1.0.0,
TruncHTML 2.0,
XML Encode 1.3 (by Rick Ellis!),
Matrix 2.0.7.1,
MD Color Picker 1.0.2,
NSM Better Meta 1.0.3,
Playa 3.0.8,
Wygwam 2.0.4,
Tag,
NSM Add-on Updater (1.0.1),
Deeploy Helper,
Freeform
and
NSM Better Meta.

Developing with EE 2 was an adventure. Almost every single one of these add-ons had multiple updates during the project, and most (including my own!) had bugs that we needed to work around in order to launch.  Several add-ons had bugs that we simply couldn’t resolve, so we ended up not using Color Picker 0.9, Logiq Pagination or, sadly, Taggable—Jamie Rumbelow’s tagging module, which had a great interface and some fresh new ideas, but ultimately wasn’t robust enough to solve our client’s needs.

The ExpressionEngine software itself needed to be updated twice during the project because the number of fixes and improvements in each build was truly astounding, but the current version is definitely production-ready, and we’re looking forward to doing more projects with it.

Oh, and a shout out to local competitor the Vancouver Sun for their investigative journalism nom, too.

We were provided with a basic concept of what Gamezone was looking for and we worked closely with their staff to adapt and improve the designs we were giving to accommodate the content they will eventually be importing, and the needs of a Web- and game-savvy audience. The site is quite complex, with content areas for blogs, reviews, previews, products, cheats, downloads, news, forums, and more. On the development side of things, we’ve incorporated some of the EE community’s hottest add-ons, like Playa, Tracker and FieldFrame, and developed several add-ons of our own especially for this site.

It’s been a challenging project to work on and we’re excited to see all our hard work fully realized in the finished Gamezone site.

Rachael is a talented and innovative artist that works deftly in several mediums, among them photography and mixed-media collage. This year, she began to work with a new format: altered books. These beautiful pieces combine created, found, and purchased objects in collages where an old book is the canvas. She frequently cuts holes in the book’s pages, or folds and cuts the pages to incorporate them as elements of the collage. They are amazing pieces, and you don’ t have to take my word for it! A series of 25 (yes, 25!) of Rachael’s altered books is on display at the Pacific National Exhibition’s Container Art Show in Vancouver. Another piece is on display in the UK at the Artworks-mk exhibit.

I am lucky enough to own several of Rachael’s pieces, and I bought one of the altered books for my knitting studio early in the year. There’s something very special about having original artwork by a working artist in your home or work space. The pieces are creatively inspiring and of course beautiful to look at. So I’m very lucky, but I have good news: you, too, can own one of Rachael’s pieces. She has put quite a few of her photos, metal prints, collages, and altered books up for sale in her Etsy shop. And I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how wonderful artwork can be as a gift, for yourself or others.

Regardless of who you purchase one of these pieces for, you will be giving Rachael something invaluable: the ability to continue her work as an artist. Our culture needs people like her, that contribute so much creativity and beauty to our world, making it a richer and more enjoyable place for all of us. We do a poor job of supporting our artists, generally, so Rachael and other artists deserve extra thanks for choosing to do the work they do.

So, thank you, Rachael. Hop Studios can’t wait to see what you do next!