Friday, December 18th, 2009 (updated 2 Jan ’10)

Adam Khan | Brighton, England

http://engaging.net/news/introducing-external-entries

Display any database table in an ExpressionEngine template using External Entries

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Another excellent piece by Andy Rutledge, an admonition/checklist for being a professional designer/developer.

Both the BBC and Fox news web sites have recently been redesigned, with the BBC losing its looks and Fox getting neat and serious.

jQuery diagramming with jsPlumb — cool.

Another wonderful blog post by Walter Russell Mead, this time hoping that the blogosphere find a not-so-distant mirror in 18th-century London.

Google argues that its mobile YouTube site is better than its YouTube iPhone app.

Jakob Nielsen tests reading usability on the iPad and Kindle and reports that they’re almost as good as reading on paper. People didn’t like reading on PCs — it reminded them of work.

Falling out of love with the iPad. None of this surprises me.

Wow, icons made entirely in CSS3 (currently Safari, Chrome only).

Short film created entirely on the iPhone 4.

A day in the early life of an iPhone 4.

A

s ExpressionEngine becomes more deeply embedded in organizations’ business processes, there’s more of a need to integrate it with other systems. The External Entries plugin makes this easy.

The plugin enables you to select from, update, insert into and delete from a table either within your EE database or any other MySQL database on the internet to which you have administrative access. This means your site can easily import and export data to and from EE and among the backends of any number of other MySQL-based systems.

Put the plugin in its own EE template, call the template with jQuery’s .load() and .live() functions for AJAXy goodness, and your web site is now a web app!

One possible use is when deciding how to approach a catalog for ecommerce. Do you publish your product catalog as EE entries? Or as entries in your ecommerce package? Or both? This plugin could tip the balance towards keeping them in the ecommerce package only, as it enables EE to easily view, edit, create and delete them over there.

External Entries costs $25 per EE installation and is free to try before you buy. It works in both EE v1.x and v2.x.

As of May 7th, 2010, the Select Entries, Update Entries, Insert Entries and Delete Entries plugins have been wrapped into the External Entries plugin and are no longer being developed. The price to upgrade from any of these plugins to External Entries is simply the difference between its license cost and that of External Entries: