Just like Edit This, Publish That creates a link from the public side of your Web site to the control panel, if the user viewing the content is logged into the control panel and has sufficient permissions.  But here’s the twist: Instead of outputting a link to edit something existing, Publish That outputs a link to publish something new.  So if you’ve ever wanted to create a link from the front end of your site to create a new template, category, gallery entry, or weblog entry, Publish That makes it a snap.

This plugin was suggested by and developed with help from a satisfied user of Edit This.  Thanks, Craig!  And thanks to everyone who uses Hop Studios add-ons; we always enjoy working with you to make sure our add-ons do what you want them to do.

Download Publish That.

Which means, if you have something interesting to say, and you want a room full of the smartest EE developers to hear it, get your talk submitted soon!  Possible ideas are, but aren’t limited to: building sites with EE, add-on development, dev approaches, or anything else you think other EE developers would love to learn or hear about. It’s a great way to share great information with the gang AND get yourself a whole bunch of buzz at the same time. Help us make this year’s conference the best it can be.

We’re expecting a whole lot of folks, and the space we’ve rented is twice as funky as the one we found for last year’s event.  So get ready for some educational, entertaining fun. And submit a talk!

(Also, if there’s a talk you’d like to hear, but you aren’t the one to do it, just drop me an email or a comment, and we’ll see if we can’t just make the magic happen for you!)

If you know of a large site, even if you think it’s not top-10 worthy, let me know in the comments or by contacting me.  Thanks!

Update May 20: After adding A List Apart, Kukla’s Korner and Gov.ca.gov, I decided to expand the list to the top 15.  The order is slightly different now.

Update May 15: I’ve had a number of good suggestions for big sites, and one has definitely made it into the top ten: Top Gear, the BBC racing show. I’m also tipped to two more “can’t-tell-you” sites about which I’m trying to find out. Stay tuned.

Clients often ask us, “Can your preferred CMS, ExpressionEngine, handle my HUGE site requirements? I’m planning to get [one gazzillion hits or something like that].”

The answer is yes (if you pay for proper hosting!), but it’s been hard to back that up with concrete examples of enormous sites, because there’s hasn’t been any single list of large, successful ExpressionEngine-powered Web sites. Well, that’s all about to change:  Here, then, is the definitive list of the 10 largest ExpressionEngine Web sites.

What exactly defines “largest”?  That’s a tough question, because a site that has a huge amount of traffic might be just one page.  Or a site that serves a niche audience and has a low Alexa ranking might have crazy active forums.  Consulting with other EE professionals, these factors seemed to be the most relevant ones that we should use to determine “largeness”:

• number of unique visitors and pages / month
• number of entries and comments
• number of members and forum posts
• awards and buzz

Combining all these data points gathered by investigating more than 50 potentially “large” sites, I came up with the ranking you see here, which was based on all the numbers I gathered plus a little bit of what I like to call “judgement” and you might call “shameful ignorance.”

Largest ExpressionEngine Web sites, May 2009

1. Change.gov: Transition site for Barack Obama
2. iLounge: All about iPod and iPhone
3. Peri�dicos Z�calo: newspaper in Mexico
4. Gear Live: gadget news
5. Top Gear: BBC car show
6. paidContent.org: news about online content
7. BMI Music: music licensing and artist
8. A List Apart: resource for CSS and design
9. Campaign Monitor: email campaign tool
10. allkpop: Korean celebrity news
11. Truthdig: independent political news
12. Grist: environmental news and commentary
13. Kukla’s Korner: hockey fans
14. Jewish Journal: large jewish newspaper in Los Angeles
15. CA Government: central page for California’s Gov’t
16. OpenGL: standards group

The largest confirmed traffic I was told of belongs to iLounge: 20,000,000 pages per month.  iLounge also has the most forum posts: a mind-blowing 1,300,000.  The largest number of entries I know of is JewishJournal.com: 70,000.  But there’s another site, ou.org, that apparently has WAY more entries—I just wasn’t able to confirm it.

Here are the caveats: I do think that Change.gov and Peri�dicos Z�calo might have higher traffic, but I wasn’t able to verify their numbers.  And you might consider it a bit of a “cheat”, but I’m including Change.gov as of its peak traffic in January 2009, not as of its May 2009 traffic. I also left ExpressionEngine’s own site out of the rankings, but they do have a very large site with a very large number of members and posts, and would rank close to if not in the top 10.  Other large sites include: Sundance Film Festival, ou.org, gov.ca.gov, abajournal.com and the Vancouver Public Library (which has more than 60 editors using it), but I wasn’t able to confirm enough information or they didn’t quite make the top ten.

The raw data is available for you, too, to look at.  Take a look:

Click here to view the spreadsheet directly

If you think I’ve left any significant sites out, mention it in the comments and I’ll research it.  The spreadsheet is a living document, so it may over time show a different ranking than the list in this article does.  Special thanks to the folks on Twitter who chipped in with suggestions, and to the folks who couldn’t help me on the record. Oh, and does anyone know of a similar resource for MT or WP?

After many months of planning, thinking and hard work, The Reason Project launched today. It’s a secular non-profit founded by Sam Harris, well known author of The End of Faith, and Letter to a Christian Nation, and his wife, Annaka Harris. Their official mission is thus:

“The Reason Project is devoted to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values in society. The foundation draws on the talents of prominent and creative thinkers in a wide range of disciplines to encourage critical thinking and erode the influence of dogmatism, superstition, and bigotry in our world.”

In aid of that, Sam has assembled an amazing group of advisors, volunteers and contributors to amass and create compelling content. Some of the many highlights of this long-in-development site are: an Archive of Articles culled from great thinkers on secular values; The Scripture Project, an annotated wiki with the full text of the Bible, the Quran and the Book of Mormon;. and several rich and wonderful galleries of art and images.

From a technological standpoint, the Reason Project is perhaps our most complex site ever. Built mostly in ExpressionEngine, it includes a wiki with extensive customization to allow intra-page linking and automatic navigation, a forum and registration system with custom design and all sorts of collections of blogs, articles archives and photo galleries.  A SalesForce donation CRM system is integrated into the EE member database in a clever way, too. Overlaying the structure are many layers of member permissions, allowing the site to be run by dedicated volunteers who can administer most of the site without ever needing to access the EE control panel. It also pulls in content automatically from other sites via RSS and Yahoo Pipes. 

It’s an fabulous, ambitious undertaking, and Hop Studios is proud to be a part of it.

Justin, our programmer who lives in Boulder, CO, has made the trek north again to meet with us in person and reconnect with the rest of the Hop Studios team.  We’re going to be talking about the future and how we’re going to be focusing our development efforts in the next months.

We all attended a great event last night, Beers with Brad.  We’re all helping to encourage the entrepreneurial spirit here in Vancouver.

Also, it’s nice to be out and about when the weather’s this nice.

They set up a fancy HD camera in our office, and asked me what someone at Hop Studios thought of the three Web sites of the political parties: the B.C. Liberals, the B.C. NDP, and the Green Party of B.C.  Since we build a lot of community-enabled sites, we had some good analysis to share.

Since you don’t own a time machine and can’t go back to listen to what I said, here’s a brief summary:

• The Liberals site looks like they used the Obama campaign as a template—and why not; it’s always better to copy a winner…  They also seem to have a better sense of the ways to interact on the various social sites, like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.
• The NDP has an excellent site that lacks ... something.  Call it focus, flair, a clear message; it’s a great technical site but doesn’t succeed from a design point of view.  (That said, if you agree with the NDP already, you’ll probably like their site a lot more than this quick analysis indicates, and that’s probably true for the other parties, too.)
• The Green site is very, very green—and by that I mean in color, and in organization.  It could use a UI overhaul, and an IA renovation, and some tips for the way they shoot YouTube videos, too.  They have the most to gain from having a good Web presence (a Web site can reach people 24/7, anywhere, and can help energize your supporters), but they are doing the least with it.

I was told I sounded very cogent at 6:50 a.m. on Friday on the radio; if only I could pre-record even more of my life.

Our client Truthdig has been nominated for a Webby for the third year in a row, and for the second time in the category of Politics.  Considering what a huge year for politics 2008 was, we’re tickled pink.

Please consider helping us out by clicking the link and voting for Truthdig.

Congratulations to the Truthdig team. The nomination really speaks to the great journalism they continue to produce.

Edit This handles weblog entries, templates, categories, and gallery entries.  Under the hood, it checks a user’s privileges before it renders the link; in other words, if you can’t access the control panel, you won’t see a link to edit the entry you’re reading.

By default, the plugin renders links with a cute little pencil icon.  But if you want more control over presentation, Edit This gives you the option to style your links however you want.

And yes—we’ll be porting this plugin to EE 2.0, whenever it comes out.

As always, drop us a line to tell us how you like it!

Alex (ribbit) and Mario (kermit) have gone all out, with detailed press releases, a “launch” party, and ridiculous requirements for their members. Luckily we were also able to launch the new “Frogcouver” attending system for events at the same time. Users visiting the site will find a new way to interact with the extensive list of francophone events and activities.

Not just some of the time, not with a lame response and then a 6 hour wait for a real response.  They fix the problem and get back to us within about 5 minutes or less, or they respond right away and then dig in and fix the problem as soon as you can possibly imagine.  They’ve done this day and night for years, and it’s the number one reason we choose them.

We also like that they’re friendly and affordable—not the cheapest Web hosting out there, but cheaper than most.

Nexcess promises, if I remember correctly, 99.5% uptime on shared hosting, which is only about 4 hours a month down time, and they over-perform regularly.  That’s pretty darn good, and for the low rates they charge, it’s excellent.  If you happen to need higher uptime than that, they can arrange for that as well, for a decent price.

They do virtual private servers, managed servers, clustered servers, and we haven’t seen a significant outage from them in years.  Their control panel is one of the best I’ve used (not the best, but darn close). And they offer all the latest Web technologies.  We’ve hosted ExpressionEngine, Movable Type, WordPress, MediaWiki, phpBB, phpList, OpenX/OpenAds and all sorts of other software there, and it’s handled it all.  The only thing they don’t offer, oddly, is true SFTP—we use a tunneled secure FTP instead, and it’s all fine, but it’s an odd omission from their otherwise stellar offerings.

In fewer words: Nexcess.net has our trust, and we appreciate their dedication and their support as Hop Studios has grown.

I’m recommending them today because we’ve been using them for years and it’s time we gave them their props.

If want more information, click one of the following links to visit their site.  If you end up signing up for a new account from this link,  we get a cut. If you use this link, we don’t—it’s up to you.