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ExpressionEngine Plugins on Erskine’s GitHub Page

30/10/09
Glen Swinfield

I’ve been organising our development workflow with an aim to start putting out more small plugins and extensions. They now live at GitHub: http://github.com/erskinedesign/, and I’ll keep adding more as I build them. This post’s purpose is to tell you that, and also quickly mention our current approach to add-on development.

Our Approach

We rarely have the time at Erskine to put a lot of hours into developing commercial ExpressionEngine add-ons, but we do accumulate a few bits and pieces that others might find useful, we’re now going to start pushing these out to the community as they arise – through the medium of GitHub. Documentation will be minimal but the usage examples in the code should suffice.

Currently on GitHub

ED ImageResizer – resizes, crops and caches images on the fly. Anyone at Jamie’s EECI conference workshop will have seen this. I think that there is another alternative out there already that does a similar thing but we’ve been using this for a while and it works well for us. See the plugin usage example for more.

ED Text – this has been kicking around for a while, it basically truncates text to a given length without breaking words -and strips html etc.

ED Conditionals – A simple plugin that takes weblog and category ID’s as parameters and then lets you use {if has_content} conditionals in your templates. The results are cached so using the plugin several times with the same parameters won’t keep blazing database queries.

Why use GitHub now, after all this time?..

We’ve been using the service Codebase for our code development/management needs and one of its new features is the ability to push updates to your Git repositories to a third-party (in our case GitHub). So through the magic of Codebase and GitHub, Erskine are now more likely to be making public the little things that make our ExpressionEngine lives easier.

I hope you find them useful. I will be converting the ImageResizer and conditionals plugin for EE2.0 – more here when that happens though.

Glen Swinfield published this at 12:46 on 30/10/09

16 Comments

  1. George Ornbo
    30/10/09 at 14:11

    Good stuff. Thanks for sharing this and good to see Erskine on GitHub.

    You may have made this decision already but there is an unofficial naming convention of addon-name.ee_addon on GitHub for ee add-ons.

  2. Glen Swinfield
    30/10/09 at 14:19

    Glen Swinfield

    Thanks George - I wasn’t aware of the naming convention you mention (a free rhyme for you too) ,but it seems to make sense so I’ll look at implementing that.

  3. Ryan Blaind
    30/10/09 at 14:50

    Hey guys nice work with the add-ons. I was just wondering why you chose to write your own image resizing script when there are several other options out there (particularly imgsizer).

    How is your plugin different than imgsizer?

  4. Glen Swinfield
    30/10/09 at 15:01

    Glen Swinfield

    No great reason Ryan, I just built it about 18 months ago so we could use it as an alternative to phpThumb and it has been evolving since then. I wasn’t aware of an alternative at the time.

    I can’t tell you what the difference between this and imgsizer is because I have never used it, I might have a look at it at some point though if I get time.

  5. Steven Hambleton
    30/10/09 at 17:48

    Don’t forget your YouTube plugin too :)

  6. Glen Swinfield
    30/10/09 at 17:53

    Glen Swinfield

    Steven - that’s deep in the archives, I’d forgotten that even existed - but I think I might update it and make it work with multiple video services or something…

    Cheers.

  7. Derek Hogue
    01/11/09 at 17:32

    I just caught a crucial difference between this and ImgSizer (much in ED’s favour): this plugin’s ability to set both maxWidth and maxHeight without cropping, with cropping instead triggered by specifying a crop ratio.
    Exactly how it should be.  Many thanks for this.

  8. Benjamin David
    03/11/09 at 17:36

    Thanks for sharing ! You also made me discover Codebase.I was looking for some service or product to store and backup websites and applications projects (for my future company, yeah !) and it’s just perfect.

    By the way, what was this YouTube plugin doing ? :)

  9. Glen
    03/11/09 at 17:50

    Glen

    The YouTube plugin just took a YouTube URL and parsed the ID out of it, then wrapped it in a player (i think) - It was for a site we developed about two years ago - I should dig it out and see if it’s still worth posting.

  10. Benjamin David
    04/11/09 at 21:18

    Nice !

    I’ve done something similar a few months ago with Code Igniter, that returned a player from a vimeo/dailymotion/youtube URL with width and height parameters. I didn’t think of it as a library or plugin (things were actually done in a controller) but maybe I should make one for Code Igniter.

    With EE2 around the corner, why not mix up everyone’s ideas to have a simple social player available on EE+CI, it would be great !

  11. Benjamin David
    06/11/09 at 15:44

    Here it is, I’ve modified my Youtube/Vimeo/Dailymotion script to make it work as an ExpressionEngine plugin : Video Player plugin

    I’ll add more services if people ask, and maybe some cross-player options if it’s possible.

    Cheers

  12. Josh
    13/11/09 at 13:52

    ED ImageResizer seems great so far.  Any insight to how you could add watermarking to it?

  13. Glen
    13/11/09 at 13:56

    Glen

    I actually did hack some watermarking into for a project I worked on a while back, but we use watermarking so rarely it didn’t make it into our day-to-day version.

    I might look at adding it for the next version though, if there’s a requirement.

  14. Chris Arnold
    09/02/10 at 21:11

    Hi Glen, is it possible to output imageresizer files as their native name with an append? e.g. File.jpg—> File10x10.jpg, and not a long string? We’re set to use this great feature but worried about a folder full of random file names.

  15. Glen
    09/02/10 at 21:19

    Glen

    With a small hack it is be possible, but you will still need the 40 character hash on the end so it would be a long filename like ‘yourfilename_sdbdbsfkjbsdfwefhiuwehfb.jpg’ or something. Would this help?

    If it will I’ll mail you an altered script.

  16. Chris Arnold
    09/02/10 at 21:25

    That would be terrific. Thank you for your help! Can you comment that spot in the pi file so I can learn a little something? Cheers.

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