Playa is a powerful one-to-many field for ExpressionEngine. It enables you to…

Pull content from multiple weblogs

Other relationship fields limit you to a single weblog. That suits most scenarios just fine, but for the times when it would be nice to pull from multiple weblogs, Playa is ready and waiting.

Limit the number of selectable entries

You can easily set a limit on the number of entries an author can select. When they’ve passed that limit, new selections will appear grayed-out to reflect that they will not show up in the template.

Order your selections with drag-and-drop

Alphabetical order is great and all, but sometimes it’s nice to have a little more control. Playa gives you that control.

Close your entries and mean it

Other relationship fields will display a related entry whether it’s open or not. Playa respects an entry’s status

Set selections as searchable

When setting up your Playa fields, you’re given the option to make them searchable. Unlike other relationship fields, this setting actually works with Playa. (This is limited to the related entries’ titles only. )

Installation Instructions

1. Download the latest version (below)
2. Upload ext.playa.php and the entire playa folder to system/extensions/
3. Enable Playa in the Extensions Manager

Usage

To set up a playa field, just select “Playa” from the Field Type drop-down when creating a new custom field. From there you can customize it just like any other field type.

To add a Playa field to a template, just use the Relationship field syntax:

{related_entries id="my_playa_field"}
    <h4>{title}</h4>
    <p>{body}</p>
{/related_entries}

That’s it! Playa will loop through that code block multiple times to display each entry.

• Download Playa 1.0.9 (requires ExpressionEngine 1.6 or later and PHP 5 or later)

Here is what Snitch’s Settings look like:

Installation Instructions

1. Download the latest version (below)
2. Upload ext.snitch.php to system/extensions/
3. Upload lang.snitch.php to system/language/english/
4. Enable Snitch in the Extensions Manager

E-mail Template Variables

The following variables are available both to the E-mail Subject Template and the E-mail Message Template:

{action}

the action that just took place (“created”, “updated”, or “deleted”)

{email}

the e-mail address of the user that performed the action

{entry_id}

{entry_status}

the status of your entry (“open” or “closed”)

{entry_title}

{name}

the username of the user that performed the action

{url}

the full URL: {weblog_url}+{url_title} (only shows if both URLs are set)

{url_title}

{weblog_name}

{weblog_url}

Troubleshooting

There are three Preference areas that effect Snitch:

1. Snitch Settings in Admin › Utilities › Extensions Manager
2. E-mail Configuration in Admin › System Preferences
3. Notification Preferences in Admin › Weblog Administration › Weblog Management › Edit Preferences (each weblog has its own)

If you’re not receiving notifications, be sure to check all three areas.

• Download Snitch 1.0.0 (requires ExpressionEngine 1.4.2 or later)

Installation Instructions

1. Download the latest version (below)
2. Upload ext.sarge.php to system/extensions/
3. Enable Sarge in the Extensions Manager

Example Syntax

If you were to enter the following code into the Select Options text box in the Field Settings…

Select an Option =

[optgroup] = Fruit
    Apple = apl
    Orange = org
    Mango = mgo
[/optgroup]
[optgroup] = Veggies
    Bell Pepper = bpr
    Carrot = crt
    Potato = pto
[/optgroup]


…It would become what follows in the Publish form.

<option value="">Select an Option...</option>
<option value=""></option>
<optgroup label="Fruit">
    <option value="apl">Apple</option>
    <option value="org">Orange</option>
    <option value="mgo">Mango</option>
</optgroup>
<optgroup label="Veggies">
    <option value="bpr">Bell Pepper</option>
    <option value="crt">Carrot</option>
    <option value="pto">Potato</option>
</optgroup>


If you do not specify a value for an option, it will behave just like it would without this extension (the value would be set to the label).

• Download Sarge 1.0.0 (requires ExpressionEngine 1.4 or later)

Meet the new NavigantConsulting.com, a truly beautiful website both on the inside and out. Ivan Kandi did most of the design work, and I did most of the development. It has completely consumed my time since the beginning of the year, sparing me only two days off up until Friday, March 7. But it was all worth it in the end; I have never been more proud of my work, and I even won a “Core Award” for my efforts.

The original plan was to build the site in Microsoft SharePoint, per client request. Design Reactor has no SharePoint experience, so we hired a consultant to lead development. I was on-board to oversee his work and help out with the CSS. But once Navigant got a glimpse of the hosting costs, they decided to let us use ExpressionEngine instead. (SharePoint is meant to be a corporate intranet tool, and was clearly not created with public-facing websites in mind.) At that point, I became the main developer on the project, tasked with all back-end and just about all front-end development. (The only thing I wasn’t involved in on the front-end was the Knowledge Center, a one-stop shop for informative PDFs, upcoming events, testimonials, etc.)

Two drop-down menu styles used in the site’s header

To my knowledge, this is the first major project that has gone through Design Reactor where the bulk of the work centered around good old-fashioned HTML, rather than Flash – a welcome change. Flash does play a role, though. For instance, many pages contain relevant PDF downloads, and if the user has Flash Player installed, they will have the option to add these PDFs to their “Virtual Briefcase”. When the user is ready, they can download the entire contents of their Virtual Briefcase as a single Zip file.

Another fun use of Flash can be found in the Locations page which contains an interactive map, much like the one I did for Basic Chemical Solutions a couple years back.

Downloadable files and the Virtual Briefcase

As a whole, this was a very fun and educational project for me. It gave me the opportunity to learn ExpressionEngine, presented some interesting CSS challenges, and acquainted me with the crazy world of localization. And most importantly, the client was very pleased with the outcome. It’s not feature-complete quite yet – a new section, new languages, and other features are on their way. Stay tuned!

• Visit Navigant Consulting

Design Reactor and Sapient have built a new website for Walt Disney World Resort. Design Reactor’s role was to create a motion graphics piece for the homepage, and assemble lifestyle slideshows for each park landing page. I ended up doing all the engineering for these pieces, working closely with Sapient engineers to integrate our work into their container.

• Visit Walt Disney World

Back in July I had the opportunity to code a new homepage for BEA, based on a design they provided. It's been a few months since I delivered it, and it looks like they’ve finally published it.

There are a lot of cool things going on in the JavaScript that help keep the HTML clean and simple. Most notably, there is a simple unordered list in the HTML that lists the Featured Downloads. If Flash Player 8+ is installed, JavaScript will grab all the links in the list, replace the list with a Flash object, and feed the links back to the Flash object. If the user does not have Flash Player 8+ installed, the list stays put, and is styled somewhat similarly to what the Flash object looks like through CSS.

• Visit BEA

I checked it out, and was delighted to find two sites that I had worked on featured on the page! They are Design Reactor and Palm Centro.

Check out the showcase here.

Just finished refreshing the look/markup of my neighbor’s interior design business website.

• Visit Before ‘n After

Now that Tinabi is accepting email addresses from people that would like to be notified when it’s time to cut the tape, I thought it would be convenient if I had a simple plugin for Mint that would help me keep track of the email count.

So I created Countertop, and it does exactly that. You specify the database and the table, and it does the rest. Very bare-bones, but it should get the job done.

• Download Countertop 1.0 (4 KB)

The Palm Treo 680 Tour microsite I worked on just won another award! This one comes from the Web Marketing Association, and is recognized for “Outstanding Achievement in Website Development”.

Previously, the site won a 2007 Bronze Award in the Consumer Information category from Horizon Interactive Awards.

• Visit Palm Treo 680 Tour

At which point I almost fell off my chair. You see, redsplash.com was my very first domain name, ever.

I bought it back in 2001 to be used as my portfolio site. Unfortunately a year later, I completely forgot to renew, and it was quickly snagged up by a bot. That being my sophomore year in high school, I did not exactly have $500 to spend on reclaiming a domain name, and was forced to part ways.

I clicked on the referral URL, which brought me to a site that didn’t appear to be one of those Buy-this-domain-now!-type of sites, but didn’t appear to be a normal business’ website either.

At any rate, I think my logo was quite better:

My Redsplash logo

Most of the comments are pretty square—they don’t exactly see the humor in it. Oh well…

Oct 9 Update: Fake Steve just posted the ad on his blog. See here.

Oct 9 Update 2: Now John Gruber of Daring Fireball is linking to it. (Yes, linking to a link is totally redundant, but that’s how you know it’s good.)

• Visit Tinabi

Left to right: Myself, Annie Liang, Jason Santa Maria, Erin Kissane. Via Annie.

I’ve been at An Event Apart the last couple days. This was the first big conference I’v ever been to, and I had an awesome time! Great speakers, great attendees, and great food.

What follows is a collection of the memorable things I took from most of the sessions.

My initial impression of this session was that it was slightly interesting, but mostly a waste of time. Eric spent the majority of the time going through the steps he took to style a financial table like a bar graph. I didn’t really learn anything new, and don’t think I will ever be doing this myself.

After giving it some time to sink in, however, I had a change of heart. I don’t think his point was to create something necessarily useful in our work, but rather to help us understand just how powerful CSS can be—that we have complete (or at least nearly complete) control over the appearance of every element within the DOM. Just because a browser wants something like a table to appear a certain way by default does not mean it has to.

Jason Santa Maria’s Design Your Way Out of a Paper Bag

This was a great session. Jason clued us in on his entire design process, complete with examples of how he gets his inspiration and the research he performs to get a deep understanding of the client’s business and demographic.

Jeffrey Zeldman’s Writing the User Interface

Not much here that I haven’t heard from Signal vs. Noise before, but interesting and hilarious nonetheless. I definitely need to keep this stuff in mind while working on Tinabi.

Joe Clark’s Why I Hate Online Captioning

About as enjoyable and worth-while as any opportunity to listen to someone bitch for an hour 43 minutes can be. (Thanks Joe)

Jared Spool’s Why Good Content Must Suck

This session was simply fascinating! Jared is a usability expert, and he spent most of his time going through various usability tests his firm has conducted over the years. His main point was that users are more than willing to click through several pages of a website to get at what they want, so long as the information on each succeeding page is more specific than the last, and the “scent” of what they’re after remains strong. And did I mention that he is hilarious?

Doug Bowman’s Design to Scale

Doug is the mastermind behind Blogger’s new look, and is now occupied working as Google’s Visual Design Lead. I found his session very insightful, and appreciated his excitement toward the design challenges that present themselves when you’re catering to hundreds of millions of people.

Aaron Gustafson’s Learning to Love Forms

Forms have always been the one part about CSS-based layouts that I completely despise. Until yesterday, that is. During the session, something changed psychologically. I now feel willing to deal with them, and embrace the constraints. Knowing which form elements to tweak and which to leave alone is a big part of it.

I am definitely going to keep his slides handy, lest I forget his words of wisdom the next time I approach form styling.

Jeffrey Zeldman’s Selling Design

Jeffrey once again took the stage to talk about how Happy Cog works with their clients throughout the design phase. As I’m not doing much design work for clients anymore, this was not extremely relevant to me, but I am absolutely going to share Jeffrey’s insights with my coworkers.