Very cool—more details in the forum thread.

ExpressionEngine HowTo: FF Matrix + LG TinyMCE + imgsizer + LG Replace from AJ Penninga on Vimeo.

Yesterday I recieved an email, late in the afternoon, informing me that they had chosen to go with someone else. This is my first real rejection and it sure doesn’t feel very good. I’ve had other potential clients go elsewhere, but not after a face to face meeting. And definitely not so quickly after initiating discussions. It definitely doesn’t feel good. It probably hurt me more than it should since I was counting chickens, but only had a couple of eggs which didn’t hatch. Essentially at this point, I have one client site which I am going to finish up shortly and then no leads on any other work. EEforums4You hasn’t brought any work, but has cost me money—graphics and advertising which had me focusing on the income from a job which I hadn’t secured rather than on building a relationship with the client and better undersanding their business and goals.

I did reply to the client again and thanked them for their time and also for considering me for their project. I also said that I hoped we could work together in the future. This is all true and even if it wasn’t I would still say the same things as it is the professional approach. Sure I was am hurt, but it’s not going to help anyone by being anything other than professional.

I have thought carefully about what we talked about in the meeting and what was said in the rejection email and have determined what I probably did wrong. I will definitely be aware of this in the future and will be sure to not make the same mistake again.

The important thing here is that I learn from this experience. Rejection is going to happen as a freelancer, it’s just a matter of reducing how often it happens, learning from it and growning a thicker skin. What doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger.

I will use this time to tweak the design of CreateSean—I want it to be a little more exciting to look at. Perhaps some shiny, glossy gradients and drop shadow on the content boxes or a new background color instead of white. I’m happy with the basic colors and layouts, just need to bring the design to the next level. I’m also going to dive into learning some basic php and maybe write a plugin/extension for ExpressionEngine.

The people I got the most value from are other ExpressionEngine developers and Tweeters with a smaller following. This post is devoted to those people. You are the people I would really love to meet in person.

First I’m goint to mention the people I have met from twitter, which aren’t many. I met @Gord Sellar a few years ago at a expat Korean blogger meet up. He’s a great guy and I wish I had more opportunities to hook up with him. @Dave Jansen is a Dutch web developer and php programmer who moved to Korea to be with his girlfriend and is an all around great guy. Dave also did the graphic design on EE Forums 4you Next is @peacecheese He doesn’t have his real name on his twitter profile so I’m respecting his privacy. Peacechese has been in Korea longer than I have (a rarity) and is a great guy to chat with. Finally I’ve also met Daniel Craig—not James Bond, but another long time expat in Korea.

Next the people from twitter I would most like to meet and the reasons why. If you don’t get mentioned don’t be disappointed, that doesn’t mean I don’t value you, just that these people are most interesting to me.

Number one on the list has to be @Leslie Camacho who just happens to be the President of ExpressionEngine. Leslie is incredilby friendly and helpful and I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with him on The EE forums, email and twitter. It’s not every day that the president (though not at that time) of the best CMS on the planet does a video blog directed at you in response to a thread were I was asking about how to transition to web development. When I get the chance to meet Leslie I plan to take him out for the best dinner and beers he’s ever had.

Number two is @Andy Harris who went way above and beyond for me on both twitter and the EE forums when I first started out. Andy provided so much help for me that I was compelled to thank him by posting a gift to him in England where he lives. Andy also deserves some beers from me when/if we get a chance to meet.

Tied for third place are @Steven Hambo, @Micheal Boyink, and @Chad Crowell Steven, Micheal and Chad are all very helpful tweeters as well as interesting people. I’ve also had the pleasure of doing some outsource work for both Chad and Steven and will hopefully be able to do so in the future. I’m still debating on whether to move back to Canada or move to Australia (and possibly immigrate)—If I do make it to Australia, I am definitely planning on meeting Steven.

I also find following @Marcus Neto interesting—he really knows his stuff and also links to photography on occaision which I find interesting. @Mark Bowen has got to be one of the most prolific posters on the EE forums and is also a helpful guy on twitter. Bonus he flies helicopters—how cool is that. @Emily Lewis is just interesting and is passionate about microformats—something I still don’t fully get but find interesting to read on her blog.

Finally I would really really like to meet @Reese Spykerman and @John fuller who are also like myself expats living in Asian countries. Reese is in Malaysia and John is in The Philippines. Both of them are interesting to follow and I’d like to sit down with them and talk about expat life and running a small business abroad.

Anyhow these are the people on twitter that I would most like to meet in person. This post is not meant to be a popularity contest it’s here to make a big public thank you to those on twitter that have been incredibly helpful (and interesting) to me. Alternatively, you could consider it the ultimate #followfriday list.

Who do you want to meet and why? Who have you met?

EEforums4You is running off of the same install of ExpressionEngine as CreateSean is and is only using one third party add-on; Solspace FreeForm to run the contact form and file uploads. I’m also using the Simple Commerce Module to take care of the paypal integration.

Here’s hoping that it’s successful.

I needed to seperate the faq questions so they only appeared on the correct section of the site, but still allow for multiple categories of FAQ as well as questions that will appear in both sections. I seperated the sections into Categories, with conditionals based on segment_1 (segment_1 works here for me as I’m running the second section of the site in a subfolder with a seperate index.php and path.php file), with each section using subcategories to further divide the questions up.

I setup a single template to embed within the faq templates of each section. I had the {exp:weblog:entries} tag nested inside a {exp:weblog:categories} tag. This was necessary as I couldn’t limit category_name only inside the weblog:entries tag.

The problem I initially had when I set this up is that each category title repeated above every faq questions, I then tweaked it a little, and ended up with the questions divided nicely, but the main category showed up with questions under it and the subcateory heading followed that with the same questions. Clearly not what I wanted.

I little thinking later and I had it. I wrapped everything inside a conditional tag so that it would display only subcategories.

Here is the code that I used along with some jQuery magic to get the answer to show/hide on click or to have all answers do the same. Category 4 and 5 are the seperate sections of the site and all other categories will be child categories of those two.