Insightful tips for the writing challenged—good advice for anyone writing, not just web designers.

http://www.webdesignerwall.com/general/5-writing-tips-for-web-designers/

Overview

Redesign Brett’s web site to reflect and show off his artwork and set him up on a web content management system to eliminate the publishing bottleneck. Initially, we met with Brett to better understand how he wanted to use his website more strategically to promote his artwork. Brett had several ideas and we countered with some of our own—by the end of the meeting we both felt good about the direction and we were ready to get to work. A simple, clean design was established and a web content management system was built out to meet his unique publishing needs. ExpressionEngine was used as the web content management system because of its flexibility and ease of use.

Highlights

• Increased web traffic and easy to use analytic tools so Brett can learn about what pages user's are viewing most.
• 100% web based content management.
• Featured paintings shown on homepage are all managed by Brett so he can showcase new artwork for extended periods of time.
• Paintings link to gallery to make it easy for potential customers to find where his work is at.

A good reference and reminder that HTML is chock full of useful tags.

http://entitycode.com/

Good practical ideas on making your jQuery code run faster and hence your sites load quicker.

http://www.artzstudio.com/2009/04/jquery-performance-rules/

Overview

Utilizing Promote, Natural Logic’s email marketing software, we designed and built a newsletter template to match his new website design. The newsletter template allows Brett to pull in content from his web content management system—saving him time and allowing him to send rich HTML emails to his subscribers. The emails are sent out monthly and include recent paintings, upcoming events and links to his recent blog posts.

Highlights

• Increased web traffic and sales.
• Increased visibility by communicating on a regular monthly basis.
• Detailed reports on email open rates, links clicked and much more.
• Communication with his subscribers is now much more professional and streamlined.

Overview

Working closely with Ben Craig—a complete design process was started with the goal of a user-friendly, feature-rich site that utilized photography that matches the laid back country lifestyle of Middle Tennessee. ExpressionEngine was used as the web content management system giving CW complete publishing control and the flexibility they needed.

Highlights

• Increased web traffic
• Company blog allows CW to have two way communication with clients and user's of the website.
• Rotating imagery keeps the site fresh and incorporate the different seasons and holidays.
• Simplified publishing process.

Overview

Utilizing Promote, Natural Logic’s email marketing software, a email template was designed and developed to allow CW to create campaigns for new auctions and measure the results. Detailed reporting on the email campaigns show email open rates, click rates and much more.

Highlights

• Flexibility to schedule auction email campaigns.
• Increased web traffic.
• Rich HTML emails.

Overview

A custom web application was developed that integrates property searches using RETS and the custom web application seamlessly matches the CW website design. Special features were added to allow users to save listings, save property searches, view slideshow images and video of properties and show property locations on a map.  The saved searches feature also allows users to get daily email alerts for their saved searches and for the tech savvy—users can also subscribe to property searches via RSS. The latter option is the best way to be notified first when property matching your search criteria is met; however - email notifications are still the most popular choice currently.

Highlights

• Users have many features to help them locate properties matching their criteria.
• Property searches now integrate with the relatively new RETS implementation.
• No local database of properties is needed, RETS integration happens live with the MLS system.

A javascript library to help you take advantage of CSS3 and HTML5.

http://www.modernizr.com/

Identifying the need for a partnership in your business

This is the easy part, in most cases, but shouldn’t be taken lightly either. There are certain products or services that you currently offer or want to offer that jump out immediately in your mind. Evaluate your options and choose a direction that you want to go.

Choosing a strategic partner and testing the waters

Finding a suitable partner to assist you with jumping into a new product or service offering is the second step. Although this step is a critical point, you are really looking to find like minded companies, get to know them and maybe test the waters with a single project. After an initial project, you will be able to evaluate whether the partnership is a good fit.

Five tips for choosing a strategic partner

• Evaluate your current contacts for possible partners
• Talk with others you trust to find possible partners
• Once potential partners are identified, talk to potential partners
• Evaluate potential partners knowledge and experience
• Lastly, after talking and review the possible strategic partner—do you feel comfortable testing the waters with them?

Collaborating Effectively

There are lots of tools available at low costs to help you and your strategic partners work more effectively and efficiently. Email is great and it has its purposes (think notifications about new issues, etc), but email should not be used as the sole means of collaboration between two partners.

Recommended collaboration tools

1. Time Tracking – Harvest
2. Issue Tracking – Sifter
3. Lightweight Project Management – Basecamp
4. Instant Messaging, Voice Communication and Video Conferencing – Skype

Benefits of Strategic Partnerships and Effective Collaboration

As laid out earlier, successful partnerships and collaboration can reap many benefits for your company, agency or firm. Identifying, finding and testing the waters with a partner is critical to the process and helps ensure successful partnerships. Here are a few benefits of strategic partnerships.

• Quicker time to market for your service or product via effective and efficient collaboration
• Better deliverables because both sides of the partnership are focused on areas they are most comfortable with
• Eases the burden on staff to learn or perform a task that they have little or no previous experience with
• Positions you to tackle bigger and better projects

Nice concept on using events in jQuery.

http://orderedlist.com/articles/jquery-evented-programming-primer

Some handy utilities for working with Google Maps.

http://code.google.com/p/gmaps-utility-library/

Findings that show sites tailored for mobile devices increase usability over viewing full sites. A no-brainer when you think about it, but having data to back up the concept is essential to convincing clients.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mobile-usability.html

A very thorough article on the process it takes to build an iPhone application.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/08/11/how-to-create-your-first-iphone-application/

Overview

Locomotion Creative came up with the design and brought us on board to assist with strategy and to do the website development. We utilized ExpressionEngine to manage and deliver the content for the site, including a Dealer and Media Extranet. The design was brought to life with hand-coded HTML, CSS and jQuery that works across modern browsers.

Highlights

• The Build Your Boat feature allows users to add and remove features to truly customize a boat to their desire.
• A Dealer Locator that allows users to search by address or zipcode and the radius to their location.
• Easy sharing of product features via the Dealer Extranet. Dealers can view and download product photos and ad templates.
• Photos of the month are user generated content providing a community feel for the site.
• Website built using web standards and organic SEO best practices.
• Intuitive content management system allows Century to manage all aspects of the site content.

Having latitude and longitude data associated with your content allows you to build all kinds of great functionality: dynamic maps, store locators and much more.

What problem does Geotagger solve?

Geotagger removes the need to go to external sites to get latitude and longitude coordinates for ExpressionEngine content. With Geotagger, latitude and longitude coordinates can be dynamically retrieved and populate your custom fields for latitude and longitude data.

What types of content need latitude and longitude associated with them?

Pretty much any content that has address data associated with it. Some examples to get your wheels turning:

• Retail Store Locations
• Event Venues
• Offices

Get more information

To learn more, visit Geotagger for ExpressionEngine.

A pocket reference for HTML 5, very handy.

http://adactio.com/extras/pocketbooks/html5/

A simple form gathers user entered address and radius (in miles) and queries ExpressionEngine entries to find matches within the defined radius. Results are sorted by the closest distance and result URL’s are bookmarkable for easy sharing.

What value does Geofinder offer?

Geofinder allows you to quickly build and create store-locator type functionality, saving you time and adding extra value to your ExpressionEngine based site. Your clients will rejoice!

Be creative with the results page

The results page allows you to present user’s with helpful options, some ideas:

• Show results on a Google map or as a list.
• Provide a “Get Directions” link, that uses Google Maps API to show detailed directions from the user’s address to the location entry address.
• If no results are found, allow users to increase the radius they specified without having to go back to the form.
• Make the results clickable so that users can view details about the location entry.

See Geofinder in action on the Century Boats website, http://centuryboats.com/dealers/locations/Nashville%2C+TN/300/.

Get more information

To learn more, visit Geofinder for ExpressionEngine.

Or as we say in the south, “Kick the tires”, and try a demo of Geofinder.

http://baselinecss.com/

Update: added configuration for compressing components with gzip to the sample .htaccess.

Apache is your friend and friends are good

Often described as the workhorse of the internet—Apache is a powerful web server, but often people do not know what performance gains can be obtained by adding a few simple lines in Apache’s configuration. Configuration for each site is usually controlled by the .htaccess file which resides at the root of your website or web application.

Sample .htaccess with caching options enabled

Header unset ETag
FileETag None
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ \
    no-gzip dont-vary
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \
    \.(?:exe|t?gz|zip|bz2|sit|rar)$ \
    no-gzip dont-vary
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.pdf$ no-gzip dont-vary
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
   	<FilesMatch "\.(gif|png|jpg|jpeg|js|css|swf|ico)$">
		ExpiresActive On
   		ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 years"
	</FilesMatch>
</IfModule>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(assets)/(js|css|img|swf)/(.*\.)v[0-9.]+\.(js|css|jpg|gif|png|swf)$ 	$1/$2/$3$4 [L]

Configuration explained

Now, let’s break down each section of the .htaccess and see what each is doing.

Disable Etag’s, they aren’t needed

Header unset ETag
FileETag None

ETag’s just increase overhead and well—we don’t want extra overhead if we are trying to reduce page load times. Enough said, let’s move on.

Compress with gzip

Straight from Yahoo:

Compression reduces response times by reducing the size of the HTTP response. Gzip is the most popular and effective compression method currently available and generally reduces the response size by about 70%.

Add a far-futures expires header to files

<IfModule mod_expires.c>
   	<FilesMatch "\.(gif|png|jpg|jpeg|js|css|swf|ico)$">
		ExpiresActive On
   		ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 years"
	</FilesMatch>
</IfModule>

Expiration headers tell the browser how long to cache files. In the lines above, we are setting a far-futures expiration header of “access plus 1 years” for all images, javascript, css, swf and even ico files.

An example scenario, you have carefully crafted your CSS and you reference it in the head of your page. Presumably the CSS doesn’t change that often, so why make site visitors download it on each visit?

By setting a far-futures header of “1 year” the CSS file is downloaded on the first visit and the first visit only.

Use version numbers to “push” updated static files

Ok expiration headers are cool and all, but what if I need to make changes to my CSS file? How will I make sure the site visitor gets the new version?

Simple, when you include your files in your pages just add a version number.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/assets/css/screen.v1.0.css" type="text/css" media="screen" charset="utf-8"/>

For most websites and applications, the process of how you update the version number can be manual. Using the example above, if I made changes to screen.css I would simply update my template to look like below:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/assets/css/screen.v1.1.css" type="text/css" media="screen" charset="utf-8"/>

Use a rewrite rule to strip out the version number

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(assets)/(js|css|img|swf)/(.*\.)v[0-9.]+\.(js|css|jpg|gif|png|swf)$ 	$1/$2/$3$4 [L]

It would be a huge inconvenience to maintain multiple versions of our files (e.g. screen.v1.0.css, screen.v1.1.css). Well you don’t have to, let Apache work its magic and you only have to maintain one copy of screen.css.

The first line turns the RewriteEngine on—simple enough. The second line tells Apache to look for any requests that are in the assets folder and are in js, css, img, or swf sub-directories of the assets folder. If these two conditions are met, look for a string like “v1.1” and remove it. Leaving “screen.css”, which is what we want. Having a different version number prompts the browser to download the new file.

Putting it all together

The example we used with screen.css is only the tip of the iceberg. You probably have a javascript file for your site or app and you can use this technique for that as well. The technique is useful inside of CSS files as well, especially for background-images.

Before you try this exercise, you might want to use the YSlow plugin for Firefox and run it on your site. Take note of the grade and then implement the .htaccess file, your grade should increase significantly.*

New features in Geofinder 1.1

• Now, in addition to location based searching for weblog entries—we’ve added location based searching for members. This opens the door for all kinds of interesting ideas.
• Inspired by our international friends, you can now search by miles or kilometers. A new parameter “distance_mode” allows you to pass in “miles” or “km” and the rest is taken care of by Geofinder.
• Lastly, just for kicks, we added a new tag that allows you to geocode addresses from within templates. This could come in handy when you need to do AJAX operations to geocode location data, batch geocoding data or whatever clever ideas you can think of. Since this is template code, you are in total control of the output format (JSON, XML, HTML).

Special promotion

Drum roll please – the next 100 purchases of Geofinder will get a free license of Geotagger, an extension that makes it easy for content authors to add latitude and longitude data to ExpressionEngine entries. So register with us, purchase a copy of Geofinder, download your free license of Geotagger from the purchases link and go build something awesome.

Get more information

To learn more and to purchase, visit Geofinder for ExpressionEngine.

We now have a demo of the member search, try it out now →.

What’s New?

1. Gypsy field support
2. Better geocoding support for UK postal codes
3. Show Geotagger mapped fields in Geotagger tab
4. When viewing an existing entry, Geotagger shows map of current location
5. Specify base map zoom level per weblog

Get Geotagger Free

That’s right! Be among the first 100 purchasers of Geofinder and you receive one license of Geotagger for free. The Geofinder licenses are going fast so be sure and pick up a copy today before the deal is over. You won’t be disappointed with having Geofinder/Geotagger in your ExpressionEngine tool-belt!

Special Thanks

I want to thank Paul Frost, who requested the new features in this release. Thank you Paul!

Get your Geo on

• Purchase Geofinder/Geotagger bundle promotion for $30 (save $10) – more info
• Purchase Geotagger for $10 – more info

Excellent and concise presentation on the ever confrontational—"the fold". Clear points and reasoning to help steer clients in the right direction.

http://www.oaktreecreative.com/blog/design/rethinking-the-fold/

New features for Location Results tag – {exp:geofinder:location_results}

• Extends Weblog Module more effectively giving you access to more parameters, variables & functionality.
• Multiple weblogs can now be searched.
• Category searching added.
• Related / Reverse Related entries support added.
• Pagination support added
• Caching support added
• New variable pair {search_categories}.
• New conditional variable {search_category_request}.

New features for Simple Search Form – {exp:geofinder:simple_form}

• Weblog categories can now be included in the search form.

Geofinder Demo Improvements

We’ve added more music venues from around the US and incorporated much of the new functionality for this release into the Geofinder Demo.

Get more information

To learn more or to purchase, visit Geofinder for ExpressionEngine.

http://building-iphone-apps.labs.oreilly.com/index.html

How Champagne came to life

Like all add-on’s that I’ve developed for EE thus far, Champagne was designed & built to solve a need and to simplify a process. My clients were using EE to manage web content and using CM to send e-mail campaigns. Both world-class applications and the clients were happy with these tools; however, clients campaigns were almost always comprised of content which already existed in EE.

I quickly came to the conclusion that there should be an easier way to publish campaigns to:

1. Reduce the level of effort to create campaigns that re-use existing EE content.
2. Remove the chance of clients copying a link incorrectly when creating campaigns that link to specific entries on their website.

Additionally, I was also keen on being able to use EE tags to create subscriber forms for CM.

An example use case

My client, Brett Weaver Studio, sends out a monthly newsletter campaign that includes an opening welcome message, recent paintings, upcoming events, recent blog posts. Of these four content areas of the newsletter, three of them are already managed via EE so there is no need to re-enter this content into CM. A sample newsletter.

The initial workflow for creating the newsletter was:

1. Determine the content for the monthly newsletter
2. Gather all of the URL’s & content for each item in the newsletter
3. Schedule & publish the campaign using CM’s template functionality

While this workflow isn’t that cumbersome or terrible, I knew there was a better way. Why not create a new channel and custom fields in EE to manage the newsletters. Playa came in handy for pulling in existing entry content for paintings, events and blog entries. The newsletter intro was a standard Textarea field type.

With the means to publish newsletters in EE, I needed to create EE templates to display the newsletter campaign (HTML & Text versions). I even crafted a handy plugin that comes with Champagne to convert HTML to Text. The plugin limits the characters per line to follow text email best practices.

With channels and templates built, I set forth to write the extension so that I could use Champagne to push the newsletter campaign to CM seamlessly. Many hours later I had a working product to push campaigns created in EE to CM.

The new workflow for creating the newsletter is:

1. Select & publish the content for the monthly newsletter from within EE
2. Schedule & publish the campaign via Champagne tab in the publish form

Immediate benefits from using Champagne

• Easier campaign publishing workflow.
• Reduced chance of bad links in the campaigns.
• A single publishing interface for managing web content and publishing campaigns, simplifying life for content authors.

Taking it further

While I was building the Champagne extension, I also felt it would be really nice if I could write an EE tag exp:champagne:subscribe to add CM Subscriber forms in my EE templates. The exp:champagne:subscribe tag provides complete HTML control over the form and the response presented to subscribers when they sign-up, thus maintaining visual consistency of the website and adding the subscriber to the CM subscriber list.

Learn more about Champagne

Champagne is available now. If you have a question or feature request idea for Champagne, we would love to hear it. Ideas and feature requests can be emailed to support@natural-logic.com.

Last week, I posted a Tweet about our new licensing option. The premise is simple, you can buy 3 licenses of the same add-on and save 20% on your cost. It’s our way of saying thanks to those who use our add-ons and are using them on multiple projects now.

A summary of the savings for each add-on:

Let us know if you have any questions in the comments and a big thanks to all who have purchased and supported our EE software add-ons.

For this post, we will focus on using the iPhone to implement this functionality, but it can certainly be used for other webkit based mobile browsers. I use the Geofinder Music Venue demo as our example.

Getting Started with iPhone Web Development

Building iPhone friendly versions of your website is not as difficult as you might think. Luckily, there is jQTouch to give you a starting point and handle lots of the heavy lifting. You’ll want to use one of jQTouch’s themes files as a starting point for your project. Doing so will save you lots of time. Simply customize the CSS to match your design.

I happen to have the iPhone SDK installed on my laptop and it comes with an iPhone simulator. It can be a bit tricky to track down the simulator. My simulator is installed at /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/Applications/iPhone Simulator.

If you don’t have the iPhone SDK you could use Safari to test, but you won’t be able to perform the location awareness bit since it’s not enabled in the current version (4) of Safari.

The Search Form

For our example, we are going to present the user with a form and allow them to use their current location or type in a location to search by. Getting a user’s location is made possible with a small bit of javascript.

navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(handler, showError, {enableHighAccuracy:true, maximumAge:600000});

The javascript calls a handler function, which retrieves the user’s latitude/longitude data. If there is an error or the user’s browser doesn’t support location awareness then showError is called. There are also some options you can pass in enableHighAccuracy, maximumAge, etc.

When you use exp:geofinder:simple_search to generate a Geofinder form it adds two hidden fields to the page. One called user_lat and the other is user_lng. Our javascript needs to populate these two hidden fields with the user’s location so that Geofinder knows we are doing a location awareness search.

Here is the complete form template code:

{exp:geofinder:simple_form id="geofinder" result_page="/m/results"}
        <div class="toolbar">
            <h1>Geofinder Demo</h1>
            <a class="back" href="#home">Back</a>
        </div>
		<div class="content form">
			<h2>Music Venues Near You</h2>
			<p class="form"><input type="text" name="geoquery" value="" placeholder="Address, city, state or zip" /></p>
			<p><span id="get_location">or <a href="#" id="get_location">Use Your Current Location</a></span></p>
			<p><select name="radius">
				<option value="100">100 miles</option>
				<option value="250">250 miles</option>
				<option value="500">500 miles</option>
			</select></p>
        	<p><a href="#" class="submit grayButton loading">Search</a></p>
		</div>
    {/exp:geofinder:simple_form}

Notice that the code above uses a normal link tag with a class of “submit” instead of a normal submit button. This is a requirement since we are using jQTouch. I really couldn’t find any documentation to tell why, but it works and that’s how the demo jQTouch code works.

The Results Page

You’ll notice our form code result_page is using “/m/results” to render our results. Our template code on the results page is:

<div id="results">
            <div class="toolbar">
                <h1>Results</h1>
            	<a class="back" href="#geofinder">Back</a>
            </div>
			<ul class="edgetoedge">{exp:geofinder:location_results weblog="venues" status="open" limit="10" geoquery="{segment_3}" radius="{segment_4}" latitude="{cf_venue_latitude}" longitude="{cf_venue_longitude}" google_maps_api_key="{google_maps_api_key}" distance_mode="miles" disable="member_data|category_fields|trackbacks"}
				<li><a target="_blank" href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q={cf_venue_address},{cf_venue_city},{cf_venue_state},{cf_venue_zip}">{title}<small>{distance} miles</small></a></li>
				{if no_results}<li>No results found.</li>{/if}
			{/exp:geofinder:location_results}</ul>
	</div>

Segment_3 is where our user’s location coordinates or the typed in location will be populated from. We also build our links for each result so they integrate with the maps application that comes with the iPhone. A user gets to the results page, and when they touch one of the results it will open up the maps application.

Recap

As you can see, it’s not difficult to integrate Geofinder into an iPhone enabled website. The value it brings to user’s of your website is well worth the development time. You can view the full demo/example on your iPhone at http://natural-logic.com/m.

A simple tool to find color variations for any given color.

http://0to255.com/

Champagne

• New feature – You can now set the subject for a campaign or default it to the title of the entry.
• New feature – When sending campaigns for immediate delivery, you are now prompted for a confirmation before the campaign is generated.
• New feature – Now you can preview campaigns that have a status not set to “open”.
• Better citizen – We’ve improved handling for certain Campaign Monitor status codes (e.g. When client’s don’t have approval to send to a large list and when payment details for a client need to be sorted out.)

Geotagger

• New feature – Now you can capture the map zoom level per entry. Thanks to the Shotwell Company for sponsoring this feature.

Geofinder

• Bug fix – Fixed encoding issue with geocode tag.

License Packs

We offer discounted license-packs on all of our add-ons, so please keep that in mind if you need to make an add-on purchase. Purchasing a license-pack saves you 20% on the license fee!

devot:ee Add-on Store

You can also purchase all of our add-ons and support the good work that devot:ee is doing for the EE Community.

Very clean form elements for checkboxes, drop down menus, radio buttons and file upload inputs.

http://pixelmatrixdesign.com/uniform/#themes

Lot's of great info regarding all the new bells and whistles that come with HTML5.

http://www.html5rocks.com/

Helpful code samples by Robert Nyman.

http://robertnyman.com/html5/

Nice guide for getting up and running with Mercurial.

http://hginit.com/

Found this gem that will come in extremely helpful for a current project.

http://chargeigniter.com/

Looks to be a promising new editor and can be extended with your own plug-ins.

http://aloha-editor.com/

Filing this for further review, it could fill a current void around file uploading/image resizing.

http://www.plupload.com/

Andy Clarke shares a boilerplate example to be used as a starting point for targeting multiple devices using CSS3 Media Queries.

http://forabeautifulweb.com/blog/about/hardboiled_css3_media_queries/

Overview

PopSlice is the vision of SemiBig Creative Industries, John McConnico and Wes Garcia. We worked with John & Wes to bring their design for a “visually tasty website builder” into a software-as-a-service web application. We acted as the technical lead, developing the application from the ground up, while providing strategic consulting and best practices for the application architecture.

Highlights

• Users of the application create and publish their personalized, unique website in minutes.
• Site sections allow users to add image galleries, basic web content, embedded videos, a resume and their own web contact form.
• Users choose from multiple layout/theme options.
• Fonts, font sizes, site colors and background images are all customizable.
• Users can use their own unique domain name with their PopSlice account.
• Google Analytics integration is offered for PopSlice sites using a custom domain.
• Typekit integration is available to PopSlice accounts.
• Four payment plans are offered to end users, two are monthly plans and two are yearly plans.
• PopSlice includes a full blown Image Manager for managing any images used on a site.
• CDN (Content Delivery Network) integration is implemented behind the scenes for optimal image loading and performance.
• Extensive site caching is used to improve performance and scalability of the application.
• Users can control meta data about their site.

jQuery BBQ leverages the HTML5 hashchange event to allow simple, yet powerful bookmarkable #hash.

http://benalman.com/projects/jquery-bbq-plugin/

Standardizes form elements to look and behave the same across browser vendors and versions.

http://formalize.me/

Overview

If you aren’t familiar with the original Champagne add-on, here are a couple brief points to get you up to speed:

• Allows you to publish Campaign Monitor campaigns from within ExpressionEngine. Campaigns can be completely new content or leverage content already stored in EE.
• Use EE tags to build subscriber forms for your site and control the look and feel when subscribers join your list(s).

What’s New?

• Streamlined publishing interface. We used the general publishing model from the Campaign Monitor web application to maintain consistency and usability.
• You can now send campaign test previews directly from the publish form! Additionally, you can send campaigns immediately or schedule the campaign for a future date.
• Easily set the name or subject for a campaign to the entry title or enter unique text for both.
• Subscriber forms can now have selectable lists.
• Extension Settings improvements for specifying channel templates for campaigns.
• We’ve added a handy exp:champagne:countries tag for populating Country field’s on subscriber forms.
• Included with Champagne 2 are example template code for rendering your campaigns as well as several examples of subscriber forms.
• Also included is the handy HTML to Text Email plugin, reworked for EE 2 as well.

Taking it further

We want to add more features and functionality to Champagne 2. We’re committed to further development based on your input and needs. Let us know if there are particular features you would like to see built into Champagne 2 (e.g. support for webhooks, list management via the EE control panel, etc).

Why make Champagne 2 a separate product from Champagne 1?

The decision to make Champagne 2 a separate product from the previous version was based on a number of reasons:

• Champagne 2 is a complete rewrite. We had to rewrite it because the hooks used in version 1 don’t exist any longer and Campaign Monitor recently released a much improved API.
• Since Champagne 2 is completely new, the functionality and documentation are fairly different from the previous version. It did not make sense to try and maintain these two distinct products in one package.

Can I upgrade from Champagne 1?

We are not offering free upgrades from Champagne 1. Previously, we have given free upgrades for our other add-ons (Geofinder and Geotagger); because it made sense from the functionality side of things. However, the same was not true for Champagne 2.

If you have purchased Champagne 1 in the last 30 days and would like to switch your license to Champagne 2, please get in touch. Please let us know if you purchased at Natural Logic or Devot:ee.

We spend a lot of time on development and support for our add-on’s. We also take great pride in providing top-notch support and development to our customers.

Go forth and learn more

Check out the new Champagne 2 page with screenshots and more feature explanations. We also invite you to read through the documentation. Let us know if you have any questions!

Many thanks to the kind folks who helped us with testing and Michelle Myers, of Locomotion Creative, for listening to my ideas and providing honest, relevant feedback.

What’s New?

• Pagination now works on EE2!
• No more Google API keys to keep track of — Geofinder now uses v3 of the Google Geocoding Service!
• Calls to Google’s Geocoding Service are now handled with cURL, with fallback support to simplexml_load_file.
• Full respect for the orderby and sort parameters, so you can override the default orderby of “distance”.
• Documentation has been refreshed and is now packaged with your download.
• Several bug fixes and some general code cleanup.

Geofinder 2.1 is available at Devot:ee and here on our website. Be sure to use the support area if you have any issues or questions.

Next in line for some spring cleaning is Geotagger, so follow me on Twitter or subscribe to our RSS feed to stay in the know.

List Management

We’ve added functionality that allows you to view/edit/delete your lists from within the EE Control Panel. Set the list name, list type (single or confirmed opt-in) and optionally specify success pages for new subscriber joins and unsubscribes.

List Stats

You can now get a quick view into recent activity for your lists.

• Total Subscribers
• New Subscribers this Month
• New Subscribers this Week
• Total Unsubscribes
• Unsubscribes this Month
• Unsubscribes this Week

View Sent Campaigns

Get campaign summary report info, view total recipients the campaign was sent to and access to links of the published web version of the campaign.

Next Up

As we shared previously, we want to keep adding features to Champagne 2. If you have ideas for new functionality that you would like to see, please let us know.

Geotagger was our first public add-on for EE and it’s been overdue for some serious re-thinking. With this release, we’ve taken out the unnecessary legacy leftovers (e.g. extension, module & tabs). We’ve also added some very interesting new features.

New Features

• Geotagger is now a proper fieldtype. No more automatic tabs or configuring settings in an extension.
• Geotagger fieldtypes now work with SafeCracker forms.
• You can now set Geotagger to geotag an entry automatically (e.g. on form submit) or manually (e.g. button click).
• Uses v3 of the Google Maps Javascript API.

In Addition

We’ve also cleaned up the documentation and packaged it with the download. There’s also an example template file provided that shows an example of SafeCracker / Geotagger usage.

Special Attention

If you plan on updating from a previous Geotagger 2.x release, please read the documentation on the proper steps to do so. It’s really simple we promise.

Geotagger 3.0 is for ExpressionEngine 2.x only, but the download also includes the EE 1.x version.

We are getting out of the ExpressionEngine Commercial Add-On business so that we can focus on growing our web consulting practice and to free up time to explore new web application ideas.

It has been a great experience selling and providing support for our add-ons. Along the way, I’ve gotten to know a lot of the members of the ExpressionEngine community personally and have nothing but good experiences to share.

For Existing Customers

First of all — thanks for supporting our efforts! It has been a pleasure serving each one of you.

Your existing licenses will be honored and carried over to the Mighty Big Robot website, Barrett Newton’s ExpressionEngine add-on division. You will be able to purchase, download and get support from the Mighty Big Robot website.