EE Insider Tips: View Files in 1.6.8

Alright ExpressionEngine devs, Jason Ferell has contributed a great tip for using view files in 1.6.8:

With EE 1.6.8, we now have the ability to use view files in modules and that’s great news for add-on developers. Recently I wanted to use view files for an extension I was developing but the EE docs don’t contain a way to do that. Specifically, I wanted to use view files for the extension settings form and for the contents of the publish tab for the extension. Here’s a snippet of how to use view files in a custom extension:

$DSP->body .= $DSP->view(PATH_EXT.'ext_widget/ext_settings.php', $vars, TRUE); 

I created a folder called ext_widget to hold my view files, keeping the view file separated from other extension files.

Thanks to Jason for the great tip, and if you haven’t, add your own tip!

Don’t Forget to Leave a Tip

There’s a little feature on our site we’ve been trying to grow called Tips. If you subscribe to EE Insider via RSS you would miss them. We’re excited about how many have contributed and want this resource to grow so we can all solve those snags we get into.

Here, for example, are our most popular tips:

• Create a performance indicator
• Copyright date
• Embedding solves a lot of issues
• Using if count == total_results

We work to bring you the best learning material here at EE Insider and would love for you to drop-in and leave us a tip.

Keep the Change: The Week in Tips

This week we only have a single tip added for your viewing pleasure:

 
• Dropping Your Extra Relationship Fields Once Your Discover Playa

EE Insider Tips relies on you the reader to contribute it. The more thorough and more jam-packed it gets, the better it serves our community. Learned something interesting lately? Found a great plugin and an interesting way to use it? Have a common set of steps you use to find or solve a specific problem? Post it on Tips, and if it’s great we’ll feature the tip, yourself, and your respective company here on EE Insider. 

Tip: Create member groups first

Jason Morehead offers up a good process tip when starting a new EE website. He suggests you first set up your member groups:

Several aspects of EE, such as weblog category groups, statuses, and file upload directories, have assignments for member groups. (For example, you can determine if a particular member group has access to add/edit/delete categories for a specific group).

Read Jason’s entire Tip: Create member groups first.

Tip: More precise date comparisons

Jason Morehead (winner of a free EE Code T-shirt), offered up a helpful EE Insider Tip for doing date comparisons, which includes comparing two date variables.

Very handy, indeed.  Be sure to read the entire tip and if it’s helpful, mark it so!

Do you have some EE tips to share with the community? Check out EE Insider Tips, a community-powered mini how-to database. Create tips, edit tips, save tips and search tips. It’s a great resource for those little nuggets of EE information that may make the difference in your next project.

EE Insider Tips Winner #2

Last Friday I gave away another free EE Code T-shirt to a contributor to EE Insider Tips. Congratulations to Jason Morehead for winning and being the author of some excellent (and helpful!) Tips. The tip by Jason that people found the most helpful was his suggestion to create a performance indicator:

When setting up a site, I often create a performance indicator that displays the number of queries and the time it took for EE to generate the page. This is helpful for debugging purposes, to test caching, etc.

How can you win? Add at least three EE Insider Tips to the system and if one of them is helpful to me or a lot of others, you could win. The winner is up to me, but I’m heavily influenced by how helpful others find the tips. To create tips, you need to sign up for a free EE Insider account.

Looking forward to seeing your tips!

Tip: Properly Format Dynamic Lists

I’m really enjoying all of the interesting and helpful EE Insider Tips that have been coming in; I’ve been learning a lot of new stuff. From time to time I’ll share a tip that I’ve found helpful, so here’s one for you.

Yesterday user JonnyUK added a nice tip on making sure your dynamic lists don’t leave behind ul tags when there is no content to display.

The problem occurs when there are actually no results/entries returned for whatever reason. This then leaves you with an empty and incorrectly formatted list…

Read his entire tip: Make sure to format/code your dynamic lists properly

If you find it helpful like I did, be sure to mark it so!