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ProForm has an extensive list of available hooks with which you can extend it's behavior by writing fairly simple custom extensions. You can find a complete list and description of each hook on the ProForm Extension documentation page.

In this post, I'm going to walk you through a simple custom notification extension for ProForm, built using one of these hooks.

Let's say you want to send an SMS notification out to a service technician when a particular form is filled out on your site. With ProForm, we can easily accomplish this using the Twilio API and a simple custom extension.

If you want to follow along, create a new blank extension using the ExpressionEngine package builder pkg.io. I'll also include the complete source code at the end of this post.

I'll be using the name Sms_custom_notification_ext for this example extension. pkg.io will create a file named ext.sms_custom_notification.php for the extension, according to the ExpressionEngine conventions.

Open the ext.sms_custom_notification.php file and add the following code to register the proform_insert_end hook in the extension:

<?php // Snippet:

    public function activate_extension()
    {
        $extensions = array(
            array(
                'class'     => __CLASS__,
                'method'    => 'proform_insert_end',
                'hook'      => 'proform_insert_end',
                'settings'  => serialize($this->settings),
                'version'   => $this->version,
                'enabled'   => 'y'
            ),
        );

        foreach($extensions as $data)
        {
            $this->EE->db->insert('extensions', $data);
        }
    }

Here's the documentation for the hook that we're using:

Description

This hook is called just after inserting the data

I've been playing with a new extension I'm calling AJaxPublish. It basically hooks into the publish page to prevent the need for a full page reload when saving an entry.

By combining this with my field type Illuminated and the awesome Publish Bar extension, I've been able to put together a combination that almost feels like editing in a local editor like TextMate. Kind of cool if I do say so myself.

Looks like the RSS feed was broken there. Should be all fixed now!

Tired of struggling with a WYSIWYG editor to edit content on your site? Speak HTML? Then Illuminated is for you - a high quality editing surface that supports full syntax highlighting for HTML and JavaScript code - right in your publish page.

Illuminated is the anti-WYSIWYG editor - Illuminate your content and get work done.

Features output parsing to make entering content a bit easier:

• {page_url:url_title} will be replaced with the full URL to any page
• {image:filename.jpg} will be replaced with a full image tag
• {image_src:filename.jpg} will be replaced with the full URL to the image

• Purchase and Documentation on Devot:ee

Imagine a scenario where you have some special data that you wish to query out of either built in ExpressionEngine tables or out of custom tables added by a third-party package.

Usually what most people would do at this point is resort to using the query plugin to obtain data from a custom query. However, I want to show you a better way to achieve the same kind of access to data in internal tables, but in a much safer and more controllable way.

First a little about why the query plugin isn't such a great idea in this situation. Generally, when we need to query tables in a MySQL database, we need to pass in some information that we have been given by the user or at least which has passed through the user's machine in the form of a link in a URL segment, or in a value posted to a form. For instance, you may want to get some custom member information based on a member ID. You could do this using the Query plugin like in the following example.

Imagine we have a template group named account and a template named member_info which performs this custom query. The root URL of our example site site is http://www.example.com/.

<h2>Member Info</h2>
{exp:query sql="SELECT * FROM exp_members WHERE member_id={segment_3}"}
	  Screen Name: {screen_name}<br/>
	  Registered Email Address: {email}<br/>
	  Username: {username}<br/>
	  <a href="{
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I've been thinking about the way that file handling is done in ExpressionEngine 2.0 lately. I think I've come up with a design that would be a lot easier to work with and provide a lot of additional options beyond what we have right now. Basically the idea boils down to this:

Files should be stored as channel entries.

Actually, the idea is pretty obvious just from looking at the UI of ExpressionEngine 2.0. The Files listing is even put under the Content menu item, and has a very similar look to the listing of channel entries - but where it breaks down with the current implementation is the backend. Files aren't stored as channel entries, even though the UI implies that they would be.

Imagine being able to create multiple File Channels, each one with it's own meta data fields created as Channel Fields. Relationship fields like Playa would allow more complex relationships between files and the content that uses them. Every existing custom field type could be used to provide really advanced meta data for file uploads. The possibilities are endless.

Basically this implementation would need two things:

1. Create a simple File Upload field that is available in all channels. Create a Channel Preference that shows or hides this field. Each channel with this option enabled becomes what we currently know as a "File Upload Preference".
2. Re-work file management UI (including the built in File upload field type) to use this new data backend instead of the current files tables and File Upload Preferences.

So that's my idea. Your thoughts?

Just in time for the new year, I'm finally launching the all new metasushi.com!

I'm planning a series of blog posts with tutorial content on ExpressionEngine as well as my own add-ons. Stay tuned!