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The Power Behind EE Hash

The Power Behind EE Hash

July 27, 2010 0 Comments

Background

As many of you know ExpressionEngine is my favorite CMS to use. So about a month ago, I released a new site called EE Hash to show how much I love EE. The goal of this site was to stream the latest ExpressionEngine news. There are so many resources that are in relation to ExpressionEngine. But, I didn't want to have to visit each one to get the latest news, so the goal of EE Hash is to centralize all that information. The idea for EE Hash originated with Zac Gordon. But, he never got around to fully transporting his idea into reality, so I got the privilege of creating it.

What Does EE Hash Do?

So EE Hash takes info from The ExpressionEngine Blog, EE Insider, devot:ee, Train-ee, show-ee, Director-ee, #eecms on Twitter, and a series of user submitted sites to create the ultimate ExpressionEngine resource.

EE Hash takes all the RSS Feeds from theses sites and displays them in an organized fashion. The best part of all is all content is displayed in real time! EE Hash also allows users to submit their own sites that host ExpressionEngine related content.

What Runs EE Hash?

You may be wondering what it takes to run EE Hash? In reality, the process is really quite simple. We utilize the SimplePie feed parser. This powerful tool allows you to build an official feed roll (with the ability to add multiple feeds). This is the central system that runs EE Hash. Of course, we also use ExpressionEngine to run the site! In order for users to submit their sites, we use the SAEF. Then, in our template with the SimplePie code, we just spit out whatever sites were submitted and add them to the feed roll.

Along with SimplePie, EE Hash uses some AJAX to allow live updating to the site. That way you are guaranteed to have real time results. Although we do cache everything to save our server, it is a short amount of time, so you are getting near real time results.

Our filtering process was the only truly complicated part. We couldn't pull in all other entries in from the user submitted sites, because they might not always be about ExpressionEngine. So, we use regular expressions to filter out content. I'd like to personally thank Erik Reagan for helping me get that regular expression query as efficient as possible. EE Hash only displays content with the following phrases in the description section of the feed: "EE" (case sensitive), "EE1", "EE2", "ExpressionEngine", and "Expression Engine".

And that's all there is to getting content and displaying it on EE Hash.

The Design

The design is really a tribute to ExpressionEngine. The color scheme features colors from both ExpressionEngine 1, and ExpressionEngine 2. The rounded sections were a unique twist on the EE2 CP home screen sections. We mimicked the ExpressionEngine layout, while still being unique.

I'm truly happy with the design, and feel it displays the relevant content in an orderly and efficient way.

Final Thoughts

Honestly this has been one of my funest projects to work on yet. Maybe it's due to the fact its for the EE community. On that note, I'd like to give a huge THANKS to the EE community as a whole. Without your support EE Hash wouldn't be what it is. The response to the site has been overwhelming, and has me awestruck. I can't believe how many people have appreciated it, and I'd like to truly thank you all!

Also, a huge thanks goes out to all the people who let me use their content and logos! You all were so nice and very supportive of what I was trying to do!

In conclusion I think the EE community is the best, and you can and will get the personal attention you need if you need it. Unlike the WordPress and other CMS communities, the EE community is a close knit family, and will help you out when you need it.

EE Hash is there for the community. And that was its main goal; to be there for the community!

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