I’m pleased to announce a nice little addition to one of my client’s sites.  Espec.com now has a product comparison tool that runs off the ExpressionEngine backend.

I’m considering a more detailed writeup of how it works down the road - but in a nutshell the select-boxes are dynamically populated by weblog:entries tags, a bit of Javascript assembles a URL from the entry_id of the selections, and the results are constructed with weblog:entries tags reading the entry_id’s from URL segments.

The nice part is that the results pages don’t use any cookies - and hence are able to be bookmarked by users, or sent via email by Espec sales people to prospective clients.

First - let me start off by saying that if you’re a Boyink.com visitor because I usually talk about web stuff - especially ExpressionEngine - then my apologies.  This post won’t (directly anyway) relate.

But between twitter and the new blog on Train-ee.com I’m actually a bit unsure what to use the Boyink.com blog for anymore.

So today it’s on taking long road trips with kids…

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I’m pleased to announce that I’ve added a blog to Train-ee.  The Train-ee.com blog will be the home of a new Building an ExpressionEngine Site Series, this time covering the build of a church website.  You can read the full announcement over at Train-ee.com.

So I keep having these conversations where ExpressionEngine 2.0 comes up and I struggle with a metaphor to explain the changes to people. 

If you’ve looked over the changes and watched the preview video you know the biggest changes are that EE 2.0 is based on CodeIgniter and that the control panel has been reorganized and redesigned.

So first I thought of describing it like a sandwich - where the meat is the same but the bread is different...but that doesn’t quite get it.

I often think of houses and architecture when it comes to websites and applications, so next I thought about a house where the foundation is being revamped.  But EE 2 has more than just redecorating happening in the control panel - it’s also been reorganized which doesn’t quite map to the house metaphor.

So my working metaphor is that EE 2.0 is like taking your current CD/ DVD collection, buying a much nicer/sturdier/more expandable rack to store them in, and then re-organizing them while moving them into the new rack.  Same music that you love - just better organized in a better environment.  And maybe a few new CD’s to boot.

That’s better...but it still seems like there should be a better way to describe the changes that EE 2 is bringing.  How about it - any better metaphors out there?

Now that we’ve been home a couple of days, and the house is pretty much recovered (just ignore the kitchen floor please) and some urgent pent-up client work is done, I can take a moment and jot some thoughts on the whole SXSW experience.

These are mainly for myself - so that if the opportunity comes up again next year I can look back and see what I’d do the same or differently.  These are going to be somewhat stream-of-consciousness - so just be forewarned. 

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