MediaGirl Toolbox

ExpressionEngine 2.0 Close to Beta2

ExpressionEngine fans have been waiting a long time for ExpressionEngine 2.0 to be released. With promises of a more sophisticated user interface and enhanced features, we are all a little giddy!

The official recent news from EllisLab is that Beta1 testing (which MediaGirl participated in) is nearing a close and Beta2 testing is about to start...

You can read the complete details here.

Filed Under: Expression Engine

Coder Girl

Love this video! Great to see female coders getting a song of their own.

*** Buy your Coder Girl t-shirt here



Coder Girl Lyrics:

to be the keys underneath her finger tips

Her class makes a brotha's back buffer wanna flip

and be number one on her link list

and get a callback, I'm in all caps

feels like my first hello world

what it is to run with a coder girl

and it ain't hard to like how she writes

with her pretty interface, plus her source is tight

wanna get in where I fit in like a plug-in

this is the true meaning of computer lovin'

She's got a data stack that's straight stunning

No mismatch, exceptions or debuggin

invariably, how would I pass this

when my coder girl grants me root access

basically, she's a certified A+

yo, it's more than just technolust

(chorus)

Feels like my first Hello World 'cause

She's my Coder Girl

Man, I had to dedicate this one

To my Coder Girl



I'll put it like this, so you can understand

She makes me wanna update to be a better man

When we compile she's easy to interpret

A cross-platform version I can work with

She's not wrapped in flash

all she wants is her java and a shell to bash

While, she's a sight to C, plus

Her smile glimmers just like a Ruby does

She could never be subroutine

The high priority process of my machine

Sharper than most chics ya' know

She's not another shallow copy actin' sudo

It's that good type dependancy

I function better with C.G. next to me

and it always leads to an overflow

When it's runtime and we take it slow

Filed Under: For Laughs

Coding Snippets

Bookmark the following links for great code snippets and coding advise.

• Position Absolute
• Ajax Rain
• Smashing Magazine
• DevSnippets
• CSS Tricks
• Noupe
• UX Booth
• Mini Ajax
• Ajax Daddy

Filed Under: Bookmarks, Coding, Tools

Devot:ee

Congratulations to Ryan Masuga for his recent launch of Devot:ee. Devot:ee is a website devoted to learning, teaching, tweaking, extending, and having fun with the Expression Engine CMS.

Filed Under: Expression Engine, Tools

EE’s New Traffic Management Control

In the most recent ExpressionEngine build release, 1.6.6, the ExpressionEngine coding team addressed a problem we recently have been struggling with on a high traffic project we coded and manage.

Specifically, on high traffic websites, EE's statistics tracking can overwhelm the MySQL database because it locks a table each time it writes new data to the database. Because EE frequently writes statistics data back to the database, things can quickly get out of control.

Derek Jones, Chief Technology Officer with EllisLab, details the new functionality in a recent blog posting: Traffic Management Features in the 20081212 Build.

Additionally, here is a nice writeup from the EE Docs on Handling Extreme Traffic with ExpressionEngine.

For our project, we turned all statistics tracking off because we were not using this data. Additionally, we installed Solspace's new Tracker module/extension to track statistics on which articles were being read on the website.

Time will tell if this solution helps reduce the MySQL server load that we experience when the site has traffic spikes. Our fingers are crossed.

Filed Under: Expression Engine