Expression Engine

Saturday, May 29, 2010

Where Are The Women?

When I look at conference lines-up, I tend to checkout how many women are on the speaker list. Imagine my disappointment to see that out of 25 speakers for next week's EECI conference, only two are women... Lea Alcantara and Leslie Flinger.

Come on EllisLabs, there are a ton of amazing women designers and developers who have rallied around ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter... surely you could have balanced that speaker list a little better.

Filed Under: Expression Engine

Sunday, May 16, 2010

ExpressionEngine Coder

For many years now I've worked exclusively as an ExpressionEngine coder and I'm pretty happy with that decision when I reflect on it. When I started I had the fortunate luck of being the go-to coder for an ad agency in Albuquerque that was just getting started themselves. Thus started my career as a coder for hire to agencies and designers.

My tool of choice at the time and now is ExpressionEngine for a myriad of reasons... the first being that I know any design I'm sent will work just fine within EE's templates. There might be a few tweaks needed, but nothing that will have me telling a client I can't build their project. Top that with the explosion of great EE addons and modules that have been coming out over the last couple of years and I know I can build just about any project that comes across my desk.

That isn't to say I don't tell people EE isn't right for their project... I actually say it a couple of times a month and as EE is becoming more popular, I seem to be saying it more often. Folks come to me saying "I want to use EE, oh and here are my project specs". They've selected EE as the software without fully understanding the software's limits. I personally don't get involved in projects that aren't right for EE. I don't want to be that coder who says "sorry, it actually can't be done" a month after the project started or "sorry, I need more money" to have someone recode EE to do what you want. I ask a ton of questions and know for sure I can build the project before I will quote it.

In the end, ExpressionEngine has proven to be a solid tool for me and I would like to tip my hat to all my fellow coders and to the folks at Ellis Labs who make it all possible. Cheers!

Filed Under: Expression Engine

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

MediaGirl Spotlight

A few weeks ago devot:ee started to run a "Spotlight" series of articles where members of the ExpressionEngine development community talk about their work. Take a few minutes to visit this great website to read a spotlight article featuring one of our ExpressionEngine projects!

Filed Under: Expression Engine

Thursday, December 10, 2009

My Start As An ExpressionEngine Consultant

My start as an ExpressionEngine consultant was initially out of frustration. About five years ago I worked on my first ExpressionEngine website. The site was a personal project I created to consolidate all the "cool" jobs in New Mexico into one central location. It was my contribution to the growth of New Mexico's creative class.

At the time I was using Moveable Type for the project and was getting frustrated because I had to manually remove old jobs every month and then had to republish the whole website. After a quick online search, I found ExpressionEngine which had the ability to expire entries. That's all I needed to make the switch really. Since that day, just about every project coming out of the MediaGirl's office has been built on the ExpressionEngine CMS.

The flexibility of ExpressionEngine has allowed us to create some great projects over the past five years... hopefully with more to come over the next five years!

Filed Under: Expression Engine

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

ExpressionEngine 2.0 Ready Add-ons

A list of add-ons that have been ported to EE 2.0. The list is compiled by the fine folks at Devote-EE.
http://www.devot-ee.com/add-ons/ee2/

Unfortunately, the list is short and doesn't include any of my "must have" ExpressionEngine add-ons.

Filed Under: Expression Engine