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Tag: engine

ExpressionEngine 2.0 sneak peek

Rick Turoczy on March 8, 2008

Bend-based EllisLab took SXSW as an opportunity to give attendees a sneak preview of the upcoming version of ExpressionEngine. [Update: EllisLab has released a video of the ExpressionEngine 2.0 sneak peek.]

From a user standpoint, the big news is the new ExpressionEngine control panel, which the team has designed to greatly simplify the usability of the product with a wealth of AJAX-y goodness.

From a coding standpoint, the big news is that ExpressionEngine 2.0 is now built on top of CodeIgniter, EllisLab’s open-source PHP framework. This means a huge leap forward in the options for customizing and extending the functionality of the tool.

Don’t like how that feature works? Build a new one yourself.

The most interesting thing about this move is that both the ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter community become one single community, which should push ExpressionEngine development farther and faster than ever before. Best of all, this marks a decided step forward in the EllisLab philosophy as it continues to embrace open-source collaboration.

Oh and one more thing? JQuery. Boom.

For those of you not familiar with ExpressionEngine, it’s designed for the power user or company who has grown beyond the capabilities of current blogging tools, but isn’t interested in wrestling more unwieldy content-management systems. Or, in EllisLab’s words:

ExpressionEngine is a flexible, feature-rich content management system that empowers thousands of individuals, organizations, and companies around the world to easily manage their website.

If you’re interested in seeing ExpressionEngine 2.0 for yourself, I’d recommend checking out Startupalooza where Kurt Deutscher, Chief Technology Evangelist for EllisLab, will be providing a similar preview of the product.

Showdango: Find and promote Webinars

Rick Turoczy on March 6, 2008

I like Webinars, Webcasts, and online presentations as much as the next guy, but it’s rare that I attend one without having randomly stumbled upon the opportunity.Well, all that may change with Showdango, a Portland-based startup that aims to be your source for finding Webinars.

Showdango’s community-driven Webinar index also provides RSS feeds and the ability to automagically add an event to Google Calendar and/or iCal (the GCal and iCal links are included in the RSS feeds to boot).How did Showdango come about?

It all began with a webinar that we attended by Seth Godin. We were so inspired by Seth’s webinar that we decided to look for other webinars, and that is when, regretfully, we found out that there weren’t any good resources for webinars… until now. showdango is the world’s first webinar index, and our vision is to provide a valuable resource that anyone can use to share, view, and track webinars. We hope that you will help us spread the word about showdango.

Showdango was build by CartoSoft, a small geospatial startup based out of Portland, Oregon. The company’s mission is to extend the reach of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to a broader audience through the use of Internet Mapping Solutions.For more information, see the Showdango post on the CartoSoft blog. Or to try it for yourself, visit Showdango.