Working day in and day out with ExpressionEngine 2 I’m seeing ‘A LOT’ of things that really peeve me off from a usability perspective. I keep meaning to make note of them so perhaps someone will take notice… this is going to be an evolving blog post which sets about doing just that.
- jQuery crazyness is ruining the ‘Content > Edit’ screen – The number of times I click through to the edit screen and then click on a entry title to edit it ‘before the page has completely loaded’ escapes me, but every time I do I get a ‘different entry’. I can only assume this is because some kind of post page load processing hasn’t completed yet and so what I’m seeing in front of me isn’t actually accurate.
- Publish layouts are completely borked – Yes, sometimes we might want to install a module, extension or field type after having set up a publish layout. If doing so results in a billion PHP errors on the edit entry screen then I’m simply not going to use publish layouts.
- Primary navigation is lethargic – Again, I’m pretty sure this is jQuery related… the primary navigation drop downs are sloooooooooow. They need to be super fast responsive becuase right now I’m tripping up on them left right and center.
- Entry ordering – In EE1 entries in the ‘Content > Edit’ screen had a fixed order (by entry ID). EE2 apparently does away with that approach and gives us sporadic ordering. Everything is just fine until you start editing previously created entries, ordering then apparently takes on a mind of it’s own. Go figure.
- Forgetful Dialogs – The new File dialog is a big improvement over the complete mess that came before it, however all I really want is for it to have some memory. Make life easier for me if I’m uploading 30 images… pre-select that same upload location I used last time… you’re gonna save me 60 clicks!
- Inconsistent Terminology – This one manifests itself in numerous places but here’s an example. In the Admin area a ‘Channel’ has a “Full Channel Name” and a “Channel Name” whilst a custom field has a “Field Label” and a “Field Name”, why not make things uniform… “Channel Name, Channel Reference, Field Name, Field Reference”.
More to come as they hit me.
We all know it… it’s been a common accepted fact for far too long. We’ve been talking about the lack of interest from app developers at a regular local meet-up and decided it was about time we did something positive about it.
Project Meteor is a campaign for the web design app we all need, if you agree that current tools don’t cut it – visit the site and add your voice to the campaign by tweeting for the cause.
I will warn you, this ain’t going to be pretty but a few people have been asking. Feel free to tear these apart… do what you will with them… no license… no need to credit me… knock yourself out if you are that way inclined.
FireworksExtensionsSource.zip
I simply have no interest in writing extensions for Fireworks anymore… hopefully someone else might be able to pick these up and do something positive with them.
Sometimes it’s desirable to hide content on your website from users a specified date. With ExpressionEngine we already have built in functionality to do this with weblog/channel entries. If you want to achieve a similar effect for blocks of template code then you can simply combine the conditional and date tags as follows:
{if {current_time format="%Y%m%d"} >= "20110717"}...{/if}
Initially I thought I might need a plug-in to achieve the desired result but it was great to discover I could do just what I wanted out of the box. :)
Update: As pointed out by Philip there are some issues with this approach so tread carefully people, I’ve only tested this concept in a scenario where the current date falls within the same month/year etc.
Update: As suggested by Philip I’ve updated the code sample above to reverse the date format to Ymd, this ‘should’ prevent any issues as Ymd will always increment whereas dmY will not.
As a one time evangelist of Flash it’s interesting to see new tools floating to the surface over the course of the past few months. As browsers become more capable of delivering animation and effects without the need for plug-ins like the Adobe Flash Player I think this market will become increasingly competitive.
I’ve not had a chance to sit down and look at any of these tools in earnest, indeed some of them are not even available to download yet but I thought it would be worth creating a brief list and adding to it as time goes by. For now at least here’s the current crop of HTML5/CSS3 animation tools which I’ve stumbled across:
It will be interesting to see how these applications develop over the coming months and whether any on them particular gain traction with the community as the ‘go to’ tool for online animation, just as Flash did back in it’s glory days. Let me know if you’ve seen a tool that I’ve missed and I’ll add it to the list! :)
