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ExpressionEngine Addon Development
Hi, my name is Bjørn Børresen and I offer addon development services for ExpressionEngine 2.x. You can have a look at some of my free addons over at Devot:ee or over at AddonBakery.
I’ve decided to focus exclusively on addon development, to be able to do this as effectively as possible.
My 3 Latest Projects
Get a feel of what I’ve been spending my time on lately … no specific order here. No wait, they’re ordered by the amount of blood and sweat involved. Most go first.
1. Qt Developer Network / Nokia
Qt Developer Network is a huge ExpressionEngine powered website which I have been involved in creating together with Trollweb Solutions. I’ve taken part in everything from frontend development (XHTML/JS) to the ExpressionEngine templates – but most of the work has been on addons. The site is powered by 40+ custom made addons.
Some cool stuff worth mentioning:
- The ExpressionEngine forum module, skinned + modified: http://developer.qt.nokia.com/forums
- The ExpressionEngine wiki module, skinned + modified: http://developer.qt.nokia.com/wiki
- A custom made Groups module, where people can create, join groups, take part in group discussions. It’s also possible to create wiki’s for groups (using the standard EE wiki module) + connect groups to forums. Check it out here: http://developer.qt.nokia.com/groups
Apart from the Groups module, which was a pretty big undertaking in itself, other custom addon work on the site involves rating (every piece of content can be rated, wiki pages, forum posts, blog entries, static pages, etc.), a pretty awesome Points & Ranks system where members get badges, openid registration/login, recaptcha plugin etc. I don’t think I’m underestimating when I say that we pushed EE to its limits on this one.
The Qt Developer Network is a work in progress and constantly evolving. It’s currently in public beta.
2. The WooThemes ExpressionEngine Themes
WooThemes wanted to expand it’s world famous theme business outside the borders of WordPress and I partnered with them to convert their themes to ExpressionEngine. [http://themes.addonbakery.com](You can see the results here)
It was challenging in the way that I had to create an installer that would export an EE install to a “theme package” if you will – something no documentation existed on at that point (it still doesn’t) – so I had to dissect the default theme that came with EE and make up my own solutions when it came to automatically installing extension hooks etc. The result? When you install one of our EE themes now it will look exactly like it does in the demo. Unlike their WordPress themes ;) hah, take that WordPress!
Of course it also involved some addon development – amongst other things addons to build the menu structure / navigation dynamically and a WooThemes Control Panel in the backend to enable the client to customize the theme (style etc).
Today hundreds of websites are powered by these themes and they are constantly updated to work with the latest version of ExpressionEngine.
And hey, the launch was also covered by TechCrunch which was very cool as well.
http://www.woothemes.com/2010/01/welcome-to-weethemes/ + you can demo all our current themes here.
3. Thomas Dybdahl
The website of Thomas Dybdahl is a 100% flash / actionscript powered website using ExpressionEngine in the back.
Thomas is one of Norway’s most popular singer-songwriters and is quite the A-List celebrity here. Luckily he lives in my town so I got a chance to work on his website when I worked at Mixmaster Solutions. We were a team of people working on this site – I was involved in both the ActionScript (frontend) and ExpressionEngine backend (we used the standard EE XML templates to communicate between the two).
Check it out here: http://www.thomasdybdahl.com. You can also listen to some of his music there by the way.
That’s it!
Don’t hesitate to contact me if you’d like a quote or ask a question :-)
And yeah follow me on Twitter.