Custom header image

In this example, we’ve defined the default header image in a CSS file. We’ll override that by adding a <style> block to our templates. But first, we need to create a variable with type ‘Select Files’. Let’s name the variable {my_custom_header}. Select the upload destination(s) that the user can choose images from and check the ‘Allow uploads’ checkbox.

Then, just add this code to your templates:

<style type="text/css">
	#header {background-image:url({my_custom_header})}
</style>

Random masthead image

For a random image, create a similar variable, for example {my_custom_masthead}. Enable early parsing and allow for multiple files to be selected. We need early parsing to be enabled, because we’re using the variable as input for the Low Random plugin.

Here’s how it would look in our templates:

<img src="{exp:low_random:items}{my_custom_masthead}{/exp:low_random:items}" alt="" />

That’s all there is to it; custom and random images with Low Variables.

Multilingual sites in ExpressionEngine 1.6.x often use a Path.php variable to determine the current language. Something like this, perhaps:

$global_vars['country_code'] = 'es';

Let’s take this approach and apply it to Low Variables.

Create a variable for each piece of text that needs to be translated. Make sure Early Parsing is turned off for these variables. In my example, I created these: {low_snippets_payoff_en}, {low_snippets_payoff_es}, {low_snippets_footer_en} and {low_snippets_footer_es}.

Then, all you have to do in your templates, is add these variables, combined with the Path.php variable we made earlier:

<p id="payoff">{low_snippets_payoff_{country_code}}</p>

<!-- More code -->

<p id="footer">{low_snippets_footer_{country_code}}</p>

But don’t stop there; all static bits of text throughout your templates can be treated like this. Your users will hug you and send you flowers ’cause they can now edit them without the heartache!

Elwin and I have agreed that I will take over development for these add-ons. I’m not sure exactly when, but you can expect something like a Low Reeorder or Low Navigator in the near future. If you’re using any of Elwin’s add-ons and want to see them ported to 2.0, let me know, along with any feature requests. I’ll do my best to add a little Low-sauce while I’m at it. Thanks to Elwin for not letting his work wither and die — there’s a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé here with your name on it, buddy!

Let’s take a look at the current home page of the sandbox site. There’s a heading that reads “Latest news”. Below that are two articles. There’s also a sidebar with some contact information. In order to customize the home page, we’ll need to add a couple of variables. Here’s what I added:

• {low_home_heading}: to edit the heading. Variable type: Text Input.
• {low_home_categories}: so the user can select categories from which to pull entries. Variable type: Select Categories (see image below).
• {low_home_status}: so the user can select the statuses of entries to show. Variable type: Checkbox group.
• {low_home_limit}: so the user can select how many entries are shown on the home page. Variable type: Radio group.
• {low_home_no_results}: the message shown if no entries match the given criteria. Variable type: Textarea.
• {low_home_sidebar}: option to show or hide the sidebar. Variable type: Checkbox.

{low_home_heading} and {low_home_no_results} do not need early parsing to be enabled, but the others do. They are used as input for the {exp:weblog:entries} tag in the template. {low_home_sidebar} is used as a global conditional. Here’s how the template might look:

<div id="content">

	<div id="primary">
		<h2>{low_home_heading}</h2>
		{exp:weblog:entries category="{low_home_categories}" status="{low_home_status}" limit="{low_home_limit}"}
			<div class="article">
				<h3>{title}</h3>
				{body}
			</div>
			{if no_results}
				<p>{low_home_no_results}</p>
			{/if}
		{/exp:weblog:entries}
	</div>

	{if low_home_sidebar == 'y'}
	<div id="aside">
		<!-- Sidebar here -->
	</div>
	{/if}

</div>

There you go! You can use Low Variables to customize your template tags without the heartache!

Say you want the company name, address and other contact data displayed on the site. Basically, this is vCard information, which you might want to re-use. On my sandbox site, I’m using the company name in the footer, the full address on the contact page, marked up using the hCard microformat, and the email address is also used as the contact form recipient.

In order to re-use the data properly, we’ll create four variables: {low_contact_fn}, {low_contact_street-address}, {low_contact_locality} and {low_contact_email}. I’m using the prefix low, so regular users can edit them. The middle part of the variable name, contact groups them in the same group (you might also want to check out my Introduction to Low Variables screencast on YouTube). I’ve changed the type of each variable to Text Input. For {low_contact_email}, I enabled Early Parsing (so I can use it as input for other tags) and I’ve added a regular expression to the Pattern field, so only valid email addresses can be saved.

That only leaves the template bit. Here’s how that might look:

<div id="footer">&copy; {current_time format="%Y"} - {low_contact_fn}</div>

<div class="vcard">
	<span class="fn">{low_contact_fn}</span><br />
	<span class="street-address">{low_contact_street-address}</span><br />
	<span class="locality">{low_contact_locality}</span><br />
	<a class="email" href="mailto:{low_contact_email}">{low_contact_email}</a>
</div>

{exp:email:contact_form recipients="{low_contact_email}"}
	<!-- the contact form -->
{/exp:email:contact_form}

That’s it! You can now use Low Variables to manage contact data without the heartache!

Birth

As most EE Add-ons, Low Variables was born out of necessity. I wanted to give regular users access to the User Defined Global Variables, without giving them access to the Templates section. Basically, I’d be giving them the ability to edit static bits of content throughout the site. I asked if it was a good idea and I got enough response to go ahead with my plan.

Baby steps

Completely ignoring Paul Burdick’s advice, I just started coding, thinking it would be a small job. And it was, at first. I had a very basic version of what I had in mind up and running in no time. But then it hit me: with a bit more effort, I could take it a step further. And with even more effort, I could take it a lot further. Gotta love your own, self-induced scope creep.

Adolescence

Inspired by the most popular EE Add-on, I started to rebuild the basic structure of the module, allowing for Variable Types. Before I knew it, I had a handful of different Types and a setup that would allow for many more. Then it hit me again: people might pay for this. Brandon Kelly’s presentation at EECI2009 had already nudged me in that direction, so I decided I’d make this my first commercial add-on.

Adulthood, almost

Low Variables could well be the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything EE, so I thought a price tag of 42 USD would be appropriate. However, it turned out that selling software online isn’t as easy as it seems, especially if you want to do it right for the Dutch/European tax laws. Eventually, I caved in and settled for a price in Euros instead: 29.75 (which, depending on the rates, is about 42 bucks).

So there you have it. Available today, for the bargain price of €29.75: Low Variables. An ExpressionEngine add-on that takes User Defined Global Variables, Fresh Variables and FieldFrame and puts them in a blender to make a shiny new smoothee.

Be gentle… It’s my first time

PayPal is used to handle the purchases and refunds are given within 30 days. Please note that, since it’s the first time I actually sell stuff online, things might not go as planned. If that’s the case, please let me know, and I’ll sort things out. As for support, I’m giving Get Satisfaction a go, so go there for bug reports, questions and ideas.

Future plans

The current version of Low Variables is compatible with EE 1.6.8. There will also be a 2.x compatible version available later. As soon as it is, a single license will allow you to use either the 1.6.8 or the 2.x compatible version, in the same way EllisLab is doing with EE 2.0 PB at the moment.

Many thanks to Brandon Kelly, Jamie Pittock, Erwin Heiser, Robert Eerhart and Albert de Klein for their help and suggestions.

Roadmap

I’m planning on adding Google Site Search to the Google Mini Plugin, hence the later date. Also, you might notice that some of my add-ons aren’t present in this table. Those are being discontinued.

Discontinued

• Akismet for ExpressionEngine (replaced by Low NoSpam)
• File Manager Module (due to new spiffy native file manager in EE2.0)
• Low CP extension (due to new control panel)
• Allow PHP plugin
• Exif plugin

These add-ons will not be ported to EE2.0, but will still be available for the 1.6.x branch.

Ajax & EE/CI: the Hi road & the Low road workshop

EECI2009 also gave me the opportunity to be on stage as a speaker for the first time. I talked about using Ajax responsibly with ExpressionEngine or CodeIgniter. It being a workshop, I considered giving some exercises to the audience, but I decided against it due to practical reasons and just went through a bunch of code instead. That way, I hoped non-developers would get the general idea of what was going on, and proper geeks might pick up a thing or two along the way.

The slides are available on SlideShare and the example site is live right now, so you can look at the code in action and order a bottle of wine while you’re at it. ;-)

Another one, please

It’s been fantastic to speak with so many EE/CI-superstars and even better to be able to invite some of them to my home. Actually, I’m still having a hard time believing it! All this has made me hungry for more. I think I heard Robert saying that he’s planning on putting together another shindig like this, and if he does, I’ll be the first in line.

The second workshop I attended was about JavaScript by Stuart Langridge. Between the jokes and the put-downs, Stuart had his class do a couple of exercises. I managed to help out my neighbour a bit, who turned out to be an EE enthusiast herself and had recently used one of my add-ons.

I promised Emily I’d write a blog post about a little trick I sometimes use to retrieve certain entries from the database when the default weblog:entries tag won’t let you. In her case, she needed to get all entries from a given month, regardless of the year. She ended up using categories, which is fine, but here’s an approach you could also use.

Check the database

Weblog entries are stored in the table exp_weblog_titles. In that table you’ll find values for year, month and day. This means we can filter entries per month, regardless of the year, albeit not with regular EE tags. We’ll need to get them manually.

Set up a template, use PHP

Create a template (for example: archives/month) and turn on PHP on input. We’re going to use PHP to fetch all entry ids for any given month. In this case, a numeric value of the month will be available in {segment_3}: http://domain.com/archives/month/5. The PHP will look something like this:

<?php
global $IN, $DB;

// get database-safe segment
$seg3 = $DB->escape_str($IN->fetch_uri_segment(3));

// query to get all entry_ids for a given month
$query = $DB->query("SELECT entry_id FROM exp_weblog_titles WHERE month = '{$seg3}'");

// initiate ids array
$ids = array();

// loop through results, populate array
foreach ($query->result AS $row):
	$ids[] = $row['entry_id'];
endforeach;
?>

Use IDs as input for {exp:weblog:entries}

You now have an array filled with all the right entry_ids. You only need to display them with the {exp:weblog:entries} tag, using the entry_id parameter to limit the entries to the ones you’ve just retrieved. That would look something like this:

{exp:weblog:entries weblog="articles" entry_id="<?=implode('|', $ids)?>" dynamic="off" disable="pagination"}
	[...]
{/exp:weblog:entries}

You could add further filtering, like statuses or categories, but all the entries will be from the given month, because of the entry_id parameter.

Remember dynamic=”off”

I’ve used this approach on many occasions. Use PHP to get the right ids first, then use them as input for your regular EE tags. It works like a charm, but has its down side as well. Because you’re using the segments in custom way, you’ll need to set dynamic="off". This will disable the use of pagination. That might be a bad thing, or on the other hand, it might not matter at all.