It works more or less similarly to Akismet, but it gives a bit more control over how things are handled and a bit more feedback on how it’s doing. The guys at Hop Studios have been very enthusiastic about the development of this module and are looking to add even more features in the future (I’ve recommended an option that ignores comments from registered members). The module is free for use by anyone running EE 1.6.x so if you’re curious to see what it’s like then go download it and give it a whirl.

This means two things: First, I’ve disabled the blacklist module to see how good this new system is. Second, I’ve turned trackbacks back on for SEB (but not the other blogs) as BB2 is supposed to be pretty good at filtering our trackback spam as well as comment/referrer spam.

So if you happen to notice anything funky happening such as you’re suddenly unable to post comments then drop me a note and let me know. If it’s as effective for EE as it appears to be for WordPress and MediaWiki then I’ll leave trackbacks on and be a happy camper. If you want to help test it on your EE site then be sure to go post a comment in the thread on the forums and give Paul any feedback you come up with. Here goes nothing.

Do you have an ExpressionEngine website that you think is pretty cool?  Enter your website in the ExpressionEngine $15,000 Shootout! Contest entries can be Commercial, Personal, and Core sites so anybody with an ExpressionEngine powered site can enter. Your website will be judged on innovation, excellence of design, usability, and content.  Did we mention that the winners will divvy up $15,000 in cash and prizes? If you don’t have an ExpressionEngine site you can get one for free! Just register at pMachine.com and then go to your Download Area to get a copy of ExpressionEngine Core (it’s free). Or maybe this is the incentive you need to get that project you’ve been thinking about finished up. We will be accepting contest entries until midnight (Pacific time) February 28. That means you have a whole month to get your site cleaned up and entered or start a brand new site. On March 1st we’ll reveal all the entries. Our panel of world-class judges will score the entries and the winners will be announced on March 15.  So what are you waiting for, enter now!

Check the Official pMachine Shootout site for prize details. If you’ve been meaning to give EE a try this in combo with the free Core version now available should be a pretty good motivation to do so.

Back before ExpressionEngine, we developed a publishing app called pMachine, which was available in two flavors: Free and Pro. The feature-limited Free version helped us increase our user-base and create brand awareness, while the Pro version, with all the bells and whistles, allowed us to generate revenue.  As a business approach it worked pretty well.

When we released ExpressionEngine back in February of 2004, the idea of offering a free version appealed to me very much.  However, there was a problem:  EE didn’t have a lot of capability yet.  The first release only came with the bare essential core features.  It didn’t have a search module yet, or any of the APIs, or any of the ten additional modules, eighty plugins, and hundreds of features we’ve added since then.  There wasn’t enough meat on the bones initially to allow us to offer clearly demarcated free and paid versions, so we stuck to paid-only licenses.

As we approach the two year anniversary of the release of EE, it now has 19 available add-on modules and vastly more features and capability than it did when we started.  It has enough features, in fact, that we can now offer a very capable core system for free, while offering greatly enhanced capability for those who want more features. So that’s what we’ve decided to do.

ExpressionEngine will now come in three versions:

• EE Core License:  Free for personal use.  Limited features (10 modules).  Non-membership sites only.  No tech support.
• EE Personal License:  All features and tech support (18 modules).  Personal use only.
• EE Commercial License:  All features and tech support (18 modules).  Commercial use only.

In addition, we have reduced the price of our personal license to $99.95 (it was previously $149.95).  Anyone who purchased EE at the higher price on or after November 15th, 2005 is eligible for one of the following compensations:

• Option 1:  A free discussion forum module
• Option 2: Three years of additional access to our download area (normally it costs $19.95 per year)

If you purchased a personal license after November 15th, please email sales@pmachine.com indicating which of the two options you are interested in. Please include the username you use at pMachine.com.

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For ExpressionEngine 1.4, Rick and I have modified and added code for new functionality in both the Weblog module and conditionals, which are possibly the two most important things used in templates.  These two things combined with the including of Extensions had us considering naming this coming version 2.0 instead of 1.4.  I argued against though because I expect us to have even more to show for that version, and so we are definitely setting a very high bar for 2.0 now. At least one developer committed to the asylum or bust!

The Weblog module will now support relational fields where you can ascribe entries (and their data) from one weblog with another weblog’s entry.  Think of ascribing weblog entries about your favorite bands to a weblog entry about a concert with those bands playing.  All of the data about those bands that you have entered into your site is now available within your concert entry.  Or perhaps you are a chef with a weblog containing the details about each of your best dishes, well you can then use the entries about your dishes in a weblog being used to display the specials for the next few weeks at your restaurant.  Enter the data once, and you can use it everywhere.

This sounds very cool and I’m already beginning to imagine the ways it could be employed around SEB. In total SEB is composed of three separate weblogs two of which are currently viewable by the public (SEB and SEB Reviews) the third (SEB FAQ) is still a work in progress that may, someday, actually have enough content to make it viewable by the public. I’m already including entries from SEB Reviews into the main SEB display here on those infrequent occasions when I actually review something, but that’s not the same as being able to make the entries on SEB Reviews relational to entries I’m writing here. Being able to set things up as relational data opens up some pretty cool possibilities. As far as I’m aware this makes EE the first blogging tool out there to have relational data capabilities.

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Here are a few items we’ve already finished.  There’s more on the way, but I think we’ll keep some things secret.

* Added the ability to have Extensions.  One can now write extensions to the core EE code base to increase functionality without hacking
* Added relational capability to the PUBLISH page of the control panel. You can now pre-populate drop-down menus with content from fields in other weblogs.
* Added “Entry Versioning” feature, which will save previous revisions of your weblog entries.
* Added multi-entry editor, permitting multiple entries to be edited at one time.
* Added IP Search utility in the CP.  This utility will find all instances of an IP used in entries, comments, forum posts, and gallery posts.
* Added “search term log”.  This feature keeps a record of the search terms that your visitors submit in the search forms.
* Added an entry “hit tracker” that lets you show the number of “views” a particular post has received.
* Added ability for search results to display custom fields
* Added “dynamic parameters” feature, enabling the parameters in your weblog and comment tags to be set dynamically from POST data submitted via a form.
* Added mailing list templates. These permit each mailing list to contain default customization.
* Added enhanced “throttling” feature. There is now a throttling configuration page in the Admin area which permits you to set various parameters.
* Added category editing directly from the PUBLISH page.

I’m very excited about the new Extensions functionality as it plugs what I considered to be a hole in comparison to MovableType. With the 3.0 release of MT the folks at Six Apart unleashed a very impressive plugin system that allowed for some major flexibility for developers of add-ons. ExpressionEngine currently has both a plugins and a module system that together come to what I would estimate as around 80% as powerful in terms of how you can modify the way EE does things, but there was still a lot you could do with MT that wasn’t really possible with EE without hacking the code directly. The new Extensions option looks to make up the difference and then some and I can’t wait to see what people do with it.

Several of these other new features go a long way to setting ExpressionEngine apart from the rest of the offerings out there while further blurring the line between a CMS package and a blogging package. Can’t wait to see what other goodies are yet to be revealed. They’re hoping to have this version released by the end of the year at the latest so it shouldn’t be too much longer before we can get our hands on it.

1. Install the Metaweblog API module into ExpressionEngine if you haven’t already done so. If you’ve upgraded to version 1.3 or later then the module should already be on your server, but you’ll need to go into the Modules manager and tell it to install.
2. Once you’ve done that you should be presented with a new screen that already has a “default” configuration in place. You’ll see a link titled Default and a URL that follows it. That URL is what you’ll need to make w.bloggar work. The URL will consist of your base blog’s domain and index file followed by a question mark and a couple of codes. Highlight the URL starting at the index file (index.php unless you’ve changed it) and everything to the right of it and copy it to the clipboard.
3. Install w.bloggar if you haven’t already done so and then launch the program.
4. You’ll be asked if you have a blog already. Presumably the answer is yes so select the Yes option and click next.
5. Here’s where the magic happens. Click the Blog Tool drop down and select the MovableType tool.
6. Put in whatever you want for the Account Alias. If you want w.bloggar to ping for you then check that box and select the service you want it to ping.
7. If you need to use a proxy server then check that box and the next screen will allow you to define it.
8. Assuming you don’t need to define a proxy server, the next step will ask you for the host URL and path. Type in the URL for your base blog in the host URL box without the http:// part.
9. In the path box right click and select paste to put in your index file with the extra code that you highlighted back in step 2. It’ll look something like index.php?ACT=##&id=#. Click next.
10. You should now be prompted for a username and password. Use the same ones you’d use to login to your EE installation.

That should do it unless you’ve modified the default field groups used in your blog. If you have then you can change the default configuration in the Metaweblog API control panel to tell it which fields to associate with the standard MovableType Excerpt, Content, More, and Keywords fields. You can even define more than one Metaweblog API configuration if you have the need.

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In addition to that there’s going to be a bunch of new features in EE itself. A full list of changes hasn’t been made available yet, but digging around on the new homepage in the Feature Grid reveals a few tidbits of what’s coming. Things such as a Spell Checker, Member Avatars, Member Photos, and Member Signatures, support for both the MetaWeblog and MovableType APIs, and a new Updated Sites module. It’s been awhile since the last major update for ExpressionEngine was released so it should be fun seeing what the new version can do. The new forum module alone should make for some interesting possibilities. So stay tuned as I suspect the beta will probably be opened up to the public in about a week or so.