Oct 26
Derek Allard - Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants
- Categories:
- ExpressionEngine
- Tags:
- community, expressionengine, fieldframe
- Published:
- 10:13am on Monday 26th October, 2009
Derek Allard is EllisLab’s Technology Architect, and discussed how community shapes development at EllisLab.
Download the slides of Derek’s talk here (PDF): eeci2009_derek_allard_slides.pdf.
EllisLab’s Development Process
- Fell into teaching about web technology; spent 10 years freelancing and teaching
- How did we get the idea for Image Editor? EE 2.0 was supposed to be feature-neutral, but we’re trying to make EE work the way you work. Feature ideas come from the developers, the staff, blogs, but most often from the forums. We need compelling user-stories to justify new features, and they need to fit into our vision for EE
- We use Subversion, but have experimented with Git. There are eight people contributing to the EE codebase now
- EllisLab have adopted the Scrum methodology to run development; they work from a priority list, assign time estimates (using the PlanningPoker site to compare blind estimates from developers); tasks are assigned to whoever wants to work on it
EE 2.0’s Image Editor
- For Image Editing, we looked at other implementations, particularly non-web - EE 2.0 was heavily influenced by Mac OSX
- Live Demo: the new Image Editor features multiple upload directories, Quick Look-style popups, multi-select rows with the keyboard, download multiple files as a ZIP archive, auto-update the UI with no page reload, crop/resize/rotate/flip tools. We’ll be adding other tools like watermarking eventually
- Needed to integrate it into the Publish page - inspired by CoverFlow, initially I created an animated popup at the bottom of the screen. EPIC FAIL - unintuitive, set unrealistic expectations, so it was scrapped
- Came up with a much better interface. Work within constraints of bandwidth, thumbnails, natural flow, needed to work with keyboard navigation
- Live Demo: Publish page integration features paging, only loads images that are visible on the screen, caches thumbs, uses a custom File fieldtype - FieldFrame is an official part of EE 2.0
- Extensions will be packaged in their own folders (language, views, etc. all in the same place)
- Release and Review process - are we happy, is the community happy? All aspects of EE are under this scrutiny
Q&A
Is there edit history for images?
No, edits are destructive.
Can we upload multiple files?
Will be able to upload a zip archive of files, but not multiple files at once. There are security implications with using a Flash uploader to do that.
Is there any way to store data with image files (e.g. copyright)?
No.
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