January

• Decided to spend Christmas and New Year's in Japan, which is the second time I have ever done so (for Christmas). Went to Senso-ji in Inage, Chiba, and had a much better New Years than last time I was there for the occasion. Lots more people, too: hundreds of people waiting to pray at the shrine once 2011 came in.
• Finally, really decided that 2011 was the year I would return to Canada, for real. Date: end of March. A very tough decision to make, but promised to keep ties with Japan, which I am still doing now.

February

• February 14th, in a small, quiet park under beautiful snowfall (very rare in the Tokyo area), I proposed.

March

• 3/11. Anyone who was in Japan at the time will remember this date. On a cool, sunny day returning from a store launch event, the Great Tohoku Earthquake struck while I was on the Sobu line at Ochanomizu station.
• What followed was a different world, full of worries, uncertainty, a hightened sensitivity to ground movement (which lasted for months), and odd calm and order. In contrast, I felt a hard-to-describe sense of crisis I have rarely, if ever, felt, which led to my return to Canada (while somewhat forcibly dragging my fiancée with me) in late March. Although planned in any case, it was a heartbreaking goodbye to a country I love so much.
• AC Japan commercials collectively burned in everyone's minds. I still get a chill down my back when seeing these.

April-August

• Can't remember the details as I write this, but those months were all about adjusting back to life in Canada, and work on sites/Zenbu and compatibility with other add-ons.
• Father has and successfully recovers from open-heart surgery after months waiting in cardiac insufficiency. 
• I was hired by Solspace on the Technical Support Team, a position I am still holding now and is good fun! The Solspace team is great.
• Bought an Android phone. Realized cell phone plans are a bit more expensive than Japan and you get much less for your money, including no Caller ID, a no brainer to have anywhere else in the world.
• Looking for a house/condo, then realized I'm moving too fast and should settle for an appartment instead for now.
• Found an appartment, which is like 3x the size and cheaper (!) then my already "fairly large" appartment in Japan. Now that's a perk to living in Canada! ^_^
• Painting my appartment, and realized I don't like painting appartments.

September

• Return to Japan with fiancée, for about a month for work and visiting friends and family. Tokyo slowly returning to normal, but with markedly less lights.
• Japanese government still trying to promote nuclear power. Please, get a clue.
• Trip to Hokkaido. Lots of fun and good food!
• Appeared on the EE Podcast, second part on talking about building Multilingual sites in EE. Thanks @lealea and @emilylewis!

October

• CICON 2011 in New York! CodeIgniter conference with good food and Wi-Fi. About 90 people attended. Traveled by bus, which I hope I'll never do again.
• EECI Conference 2011 in New Tork! Expressionengine/CodeIgniter conference with food (Dev Day only? I forget), no Wi-Fi. Great and useful talks. About 300 people attended. Traveled by air, which is much more (read: too) expensive but almost worth it not to travel by bus.
• Made many friends and met online friends in the flesh in both conferences, which is awesome!

November

• Zenbu is really shaping up!
• Bought my first vehicle (in Canada) - Toyota Matrix! Much bigger than my Subaru Vivio in Japan ^^;

December

• Zenbu is nominated for Module of the Year on Devot:ee (on a smaller note, I was nominated for Dev of the Year). Zenbu was second-runner up for Module of the Year! Yay! ...and congratualtions to the winners!
  (Zenbu is compatible with Module of the Year, Assets, and first runner-up, Better Workflow, by the way ^_-)
• Registered a few domains and a few other things. More to come in 2012! ^_-
• Decided on wedding date (paperwork version). Great start to 2012!
• Writing this review. ^o^

Other highlights:

• My first sister's ups and downs with her ulcerous colitis. Hope she gets much better in 2012
• My thrid sister's one-day operation. (3/6 family members... man, lots of hospital time this year!)
• Nadeshiko Japan Women's Soccer Team wins World Championship.
• Steve Jobs... Thank you, for so much!

I'll let the changelog speak for itself since there are too many new features to discuss here. One interesting feature for developers is my Zenbu fieldtype framework, which enables custom field developers to add support for their add-on in Zenbu by adding a few Zenbu-specific functions to their ft.fieldtype.php file. Previously, developers could put the same content in the zenbu/fieldtypes folder in a file named after their fieldtype name stored in the database, but this new version brings this one step further. I hope to write extensive documentation on this soon.

That way, if a certain fieldtype isn't supported, users have the extra option of asking the fieldtype developer for Zenbu support. Of course, I'm also open to projects to add support for a certain fieldtype.

There are so many changes that it's probably best to point you to the change log. (I swear I'll add some anchor links there one day!)

Hope you enjoy this latest version!

This was my first attendance at an EECI conference, so meeting people that I've been following solely on what is basically a TV set felt like meeting dozens and dozens of rock stars! Thank you everyone for the heartwarming experience *wipes a tear*. If I didn't have the chance to talk to you or shake your hand, I hope to talk to you soon online or at the next EECI meeting.

In celebration of EECI and this awesome community (and my 33rd birthday today), my entry list manager module Zenbu is available on Devot-ee at 33% off the regular price! Sale will end on Friday, October 28th at 6:00 PM EST

Now's your chance to try out the most powerful Control Panel entry list manager available on EE!

Devot:ee store: http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/zenbu

For some reason, though, my tech seems to be turning against me. I must have wasted a total of a day with the following problems:

• My Android smartphone constantly goes into "car mode", which launches on its own for no reason. This started while I was in Japan, but it bothers me more now that I need to use the phone. Apparently this has something to do with a possible faulty USB connection, but this happens even when the phone isn't plugged in!
  Since I have no time to send my phone for repairs, especially that I might need to use the phone in NY, I just deleted the Car Mode app, which seems to have worked. Thanks, Titanium!
• My MacBook doesn't want to play nice with my external monitor. I like to keep my laptop closed and plug it to an external, bigger monitor. This worked well in Snow Leopard, but since I updated to Mac OSX Lion, my MacBook has a hard time understanding that my laptop screen is closed and to only use my monitor. Both stay on, or stay off, with my main monitor flickering on/off for a while, and my laptop screen remaining possibly on, but I wouldn't know without opening the lid, which in that case I'm sure it is on. *Sigh*
  Possibly remedied this by resetting the PRAM on the MacBook (at launch, press Command+Option+p+r)
• My MacBook wouldn't recognize "Find my Mac" once I updated to 10.7.2. I was asked to use System Update to update the Lion Recovery Software, which wasn't showing up in System Update, of course.
  Remedied that by manually downloading the Lion Recovery Tool (after a few failed attempts, guess it's a popular file).
• My iPad update to iOS 5 hit a speed bump when iTunes was telling me my model wasn't compatible. An iPad 2... really?
  Remedied that by commenting out a line in /etc/hosts. Still, the update itself took quite a while as well!

In the grand scheme of things, no big deal, really However, these issues are still a bit stressful before getting ready for a big conference, while fighting jet lag ("I'm not sleepy, let's repair this... it's 3 AM now. I'll never get over this jet lag!").

I should be able to hold while I'm out in the states though. Maybe everything will be back to normal in a few days!

What better time than now to give a quick tour of the major changes and features in this version? Here are some of the major highlights (with full changelog available here):

Rules-based entry filtering

Up to now, entries in Zenbu were filtered in a similar way as EE's standard Edit Channel Entries section (with the addition of a few more filters, of course). In this new version, I have changed the way entries are filtered and searched by using "filtering rules", similar to email filtering rules you can find in email software. You can add and remove as many filtering rules as you wish and entry results will display accordingly. This has the added benefit of making Zenbu much, much more flexible and powerful than before.

For example, you can filter entries that are associated with Category A and Category B, but not Category C. You can look for closed entries written by Author A and B, containing the word "pineapple" in the main body field. You can look for all entries in the "Blog" channel with a title starting with "My first", except for entries #3, #25 and #47. The combinations are endless!

Add to this a handful of new search terms, such as "contains", "does not contain", "starts with", "does not start with", "ends with", "does not end with", "contains exactly", and you start running out of ideas on how to filter your entries.

Save entry search filters for later use

With entries with a bunch of filtering rules, wouldn't it be nice to be able to save searches to avoid building your rules every time, right? Zenbu lets you save your searches for later use. You can also label them for easy access!

Oh, and these settings are per member, so each member can have their own set of searches

Choice of plain or HTML markup text display

I always felt that having HTML markup displayed in custom field columns in Zenbu was much more informative than plain text, but not all agree. You can now decide, per custom field, whether your custom field data will be displayed as plain text or include HTML markup.

LiveLook... the way it was meant to work

EE's standard LiveLook settings are nice, but not very flexible, as it assumes your URLs follow the template_group/template synthax. In Zenbu, in addition to having LiveLook displaying your entry previews without having to leave the control panel, you now have control on the LiveLook URL: you can have LiveLook follow your channel's settings (eg. template_group/template/), or you can build your own LiveLook URL (eg. about/). You can even choose the last segment as an entry ID or url title. Your clients will love the accuracy of live previews and the confort of viewing their site pages without leaving the control panel. 

Compatibility

Zenbu works great in the latest EE 2.2.1, supports DevDemon's Channel Images 5, as well as MX Cloner, for those who want to be able to clone/duplicate their entries with ease.

More to come...

This is going to be big, people. I hope you're as excited as I am for this new version. It's also good to know that Zenbu is constantly growing in functionality and power, so there's almost always a surprise in each version

With the arrival of the custom date format in Zenbu, which lets you format your entry date, expiration date, edit date and date-type custom fields using EE's date variable nomenclature (eg. %Y-%m-%d), I noticed during development that more can be done than simply playing with date variables. Similarly to decorating your custom field labels, HTML can be used to give color or generally give style to date fields.

In Zenbu, in Display settings, find the "Date format" option for columns displaying date. For example, %Y-%m-%d displays 2011-06-24 in Zenbu. Let's give it some Japanese style like this:

%Y年%n月%d日

which will display

2011年6月24日

Unfortunately, the above tends to wrap in tight result tables (eg. tables with many columns set to be displayed). Try this to avoid line wrapping:

<span style="white-space: nowrap;">%Y-%m-%d</span>

To the left is a comparison of date formatted with (right) and without (left) word wrap. Text alignment and line breaks, for example to break the year and rest of the date into two or three lines, would probably work as well.

How about some color? Try:

<span style="color: green;">%Y-%m-%d</span>

This will give green color to your text, which can be handy to differentiate entry date with expiration date, for example. Depending on your control panel's theme, bold, italicized, underline, etc text should also work well.

Images could be used as a visual cue as well:

<img src="/img/icons/calendar-exclamation-mark.png" /> %Y-%m-%d

This trick might come in handy to visually distinguish entries with or without expiration dates, for example. Feel free to experiment with different ways to display date and time, and if you happen to have an interesting use of custom date display, feel free to let me know. Hope you enjoy this extra little feature in the most flexible addon for entry data for EE2!

Want to see a real-life example of Zenbu being used in a project? As featured on Show-ee, for the Wohlsen Construction website, a project led by Versa Studio, Zenbu was used to display additional entry and custom field data for administrators in the control panel. From the project summary:

Since EE’s default edit view doesn’t give much detail about entries, we added Zenbu, which shows rich meta data about entries, like their categories and excerpts of text fields.

This is typical use for Zenbu: seeing entry data without having to go to each entry form. I'm sure this saves a considerable amount of time for the website adminstrators, as well as facilitates entry management. Thank you Versa Studio for considering Zenbu in your project!

Link: Show-ee: Wohlsen Construction

Recent visitors to the site may have noticed a few changes. I made a few design tweaks and template loading improvements. I used SASS/SCSS to build the latest stylesheets, which is a great way to more rapidly code in CSS and even add vendor-specific CSS3 features without repeating your work too much.

Now that I have returned to beautiful Montréal, Canada, I decided to add French to the available languages on the site, making this site trilingual. So again, bienvenue au site!

I also added a mobile version of the site for those reading on smaller screens, such as handheld devices. I never really liked loading a ~960 pixel-wide site on my mobile device and having to zoom in because the text is too small; I often wind up clicking on a link and being taken elsewhere. Now the site will be much easier to read on these smaller devices, so enjoy!

Thanks to license purchasers' help, and after adding some of my personal money on top of the Zenbu sales, 40000 yen (approx. 495 $ US) were sent to the Japanese Red Cross through Google.
This should provide food, warm clothing, and support to the earthquake/tsunami victims.

Again, an enormous ありがとう ("arigato") and much bowing thanking you for your help, kindness and generosity.

You all know about the M9.0 earthquake that hit Japan, and I lived the experience first hand in Tokyo. I was returning to my place in Chiba City (map) after a store launch party (for which I'm building an EE-based site), when the earthquake hit after my train suddenly stopped at Ochanomizu station (center of Tokyo, map). After my train stopped violently shaking, I exited the station with the rest of the surprisingly calm crowd to see buildings literally bend during a subsequent aftershock. In my more than 7 years here, this was definitely the biggest earthquake I experienced.

Although I could not reach home for about 24 hours, I consider myself very lucky to have been safe and discover only trivial damage to my appartment (a fallen CD rack, see picture). It's after being able to watch TV that I realized that this was serious and people up north in the Tohoku area are living an absolute nightmare.

I'm leaving for Canada in about two weeks, and hope to be able to give most of my furniture and belongings to these people who have lost everything (I'm still looking for how I can do this, but I guess it's too early now). This is a good step, but I thought: "What else can I do?". This is where you can help:

For until Friday evening (Japan time), for each sale of my Zenbu addon on Devot:ee I will give 100% of what I receive from the addon sale to the Japanese Red Cross.

You get to help out Japan get back on its feet, and get an awesome addon for your next EE site (details about Zenbu). Thank you in advance for your support.

UPDATE: I updated the amount based on comments I received, It does make more sense this way. I apologize for not thinking straight on this one, was bit shaken myself.

The list of new and improved features, as well as fixes, is quite long, and can be viewed on Zenbu's changelog. Thank you also for all the great feedback: clearly Zenbu still has potential to grow as an easy way to deal with multiple entries.

Zenbu information can be found here and is on sale at the Devot:ee store.

• I'm not the only one who was attracted by the ease of use of CI and its excellent documentation, which version 2.0 is already almost completely translated in Japanese. お疲れ様です！
• CodeIgniter is not very well known in Japan yet, probably less than elsewhere, as older frameworks are still dominant. That's probably the case in other parts of the world, though. We therefore had the chance to get the full range of CI talks, from beginner to "I only got maybe half of that"
• Very few participants knew CodeIgniter is part of EllisLab. Bet they were confused to see the introductory video from EllisLab Software Engineer Pascal Kriete then!
• Almost no one knew about ExpressionEngine, even less that from version 2, ExpressionEngine is a full-blown CodeIgniter application!
• I said almost no one... there was actually another ExpressionEngine developer there, which briefly presented EE, Devot:ee, Show-ee, EE Insider, etc. We then started converting others at the after-party ^_^. Could a EE community be (re-)born in Japan?
• This brings the number of ExpressionEngine developers in Japan that I know of to about... four now?
• Only a small fraction of people use git for versioning or know of GitHub. SVN is still dominant, followed by Mercurial. Being a CI conference, that makes sense, though.
• No AC power and very flaky WiFi makes for an unhappy MacBook (and a dead battery after a few hours). Hopefully next year will improve on that.
• Problems with garbled Japanese text is not just an EE problem, it's a CI one as well. The struggle with the email class continues...
• We were introduced to Seezoo, a CI-based CMS built by one developer (Sugimoto-san). Drag & drop file manager with easy sub-folder creation, front-end text editing similar to Mojomotor, widgets, movable section "blocks"... I was very impressed for a CMS built in a little over a year. I can see a few good concepts that ExpressionEngine/Mojomotor should adopt from Seezoo. I'm even thinking of trying this out for future work. Seezoo is Japanese-only for now, but English support should come soon.
• Computer preferences: looked like about 1/3 each for MacOS, Ubuntu and... Windows. Yes, people still actually develop on Windows machines in Japan! Even saw some of those godawful IBM Thinkpads people seem to love so much here.
• There's some smart cookies out there doing cool stuff with CI. FileMaker integration for example? Never thought of that.
• I was the only gaijin (foreigner) there! A little surprising, thought there would be more...
• There are Battlestar Galactica fans in Japan, too ^_-

CICON2011 was a great experience, I learned tons and met some great people. I'm thinking of flying over for next year's conference...

Admission is free, but seats are filling up fast. As of this writing, apparently 90% of seats are filled (I have no idea 90% of how many participants, though). Hurry!

Conference information and application can be found here. Hope to see you there!

I have been hard at work over the holidays and all through January with site development and launches, as well as addon development for ExpressionEngine.

If you use ExpressionEngine for Japanese sites, I published a Japanese Language pack for the EE2 Control Panel (Github link), as well as launched Japanese kana typing (Devot:ee link), small free extension that will help Japanese writers when you need to switch from zenkaku to hankaku characters for the URL title.

I also managed to squeeze a bit of time to make some minor changes to the site, uncluding separating my addon pages into general information, documentation and changelog. I think this will make for easier reading and reference compared to one full page containing all addon information. Besides, some addons require much more documentation than others. Which brings me to my next point...

I have been hard at work developing an addon similar to the NB Show Custom Field Data for EE 1.x (Devot:ee link), but with many improvements. If you liked NB Show Custom Field Data, you are going to love what is coming up for EE2.

To get you on your appetite, the screenshot to your right is a glimpse of what the addon is shaping up to look like. Looks like your regular Edit Entries screen but... Categories? Extra columns? and what is that "in" dropdown? And this is just scratching the surface. I have been using the addon on a few of my own projects, and it really saves me some time when sifting through entries. I have been ironing out bugs with the help of StudioKong's Koen Veestraeten, and believe I'm close to having a launchable product soon. So stay tuned!

Since I posted two of them, might as well keep going: here's another recent Nisshin Cup Noodle ad using Japanese lyrics praising the sodium-packed carbohydrates. This one features Freddie Mercury singing on what would be I was born to love you. As in the other ads, lips were CG'ed to fit the lyrics.

I remember this song (the original, not the noodle version) being the theme song for a not-so-interesting hockey-themed drama in Japan (Canadians, think of the "Lance et compte/He Shoots, He Scores" series from a long time ago), so I was born to love you is a well-known song in Japan. Enjoy!

Just in time for the holidays, I released my first commercial addon: Kyara. This module allows you to extend the capabilities of some ExpressionEngine fields by allowing more characters in entry titles, for example. There is also simple a database backup tool included to allow downloading database backups of your site from the control panel.

I intend to write more about the various uses of Kyara. I'll give some examples of where Kyara comes in very handy. Stay tuned on this blog for more information.

I have ideas on improving the addon further, but suggestions/feature requests are welcome. I suggest writing these in the Kyara official support forums over at Devot:ee.

Kyara is available for sale over at Devot:ee for 19.95$. A great deal for the bundle of tools you receive!

Links

• Kyara summary and documentation
• Official support forum
• Kyara purchase from Devot:ee

Did you know that you can add some HTML to your custom field labels? For example, in your custom field manager (Admin => Channel Administration => Custom Fields), you can italicize words in your field label like so:

In your entry form, your entry field will look like this:

You can also change the color of the label like this:

...with the following result:

Images can also be used. This can be useful in multilingual sites to show the language of each field. For example, I use the famfamfam country flag icon set, and add the following in the Field label field:

This makes it more obvious that this field should be written in Japanese:

Mix in the great NSM Publish hints addon, and create an instructions field with a logo.

NOTE: Writing double quotes (") in the field label seems to cause problems with certain javascript scripts and may stop some fieldtype addons from working correctly. Single quotes ('), however, seem to have no effect. This seems to be the case for "quoted" words as well, even without any HTML in the field label.

Unfortunately, the field label field has limited space (50 characters), so it's best to keep the HTML code, and field label, short.

Need more space, you say? Well, there's an addon coming soon that should help add more kyara-cters to a number of fields in EE.

Let's say, for example, that a user fills out a form built with Solspace's Freeform module and attaches a file, which in turn gets sent to you by email and is also stored in one of your upload directories. However, you also want that file to stay out of reach from the outside world. An upload folder above webroot in this case would do the trick. Blocking/password protecting the folder below webroot with an .htaccess file, or playing with the folder's permissions could also do, but can be complicated in some cases. Let's go with placing the folder above webroot here.

Given the following EE installation structure, with "uploads" being the directory in which files are uploaded:

/public_html
     /images
     index.php
     /system
     /expressionengine
     /uploads

First move your "uploads" folder above root:

/public_html
     /images
     index.php
     /system
     /expressionengine
/uploads

Then, in EE's control panel under Admin => Content Administration => File Upload Preferences, create a new upload directory and write the full path to your uploads folder:

A relative path can also work. In this case, the "../../" goes to our uploads folder above both our system and public_html directories.

Unless you have a symlink or other fancy way to access files above webroot, you can write a non-working URL in the "URL for Upload Directory" field: this will keep your files inaccessible from the outside world.

Save these settings and that's it! Set up a freeform form with an upload field, and set the file_upload="" parameter to the name of your Upload destination, as well as the notify="", send_attachment="" and template="" parameters:

{exp:freeform:form file_upload="Upload directory" notify="me@mydomain.com" send_attachment="yes" template="my_email_template"}

	// Your form with a file upload field

{/exp:freeform:form}

If someone completes your form and attaches a file, the file will be sent to you by email and be stored in your uploads folder. You could set the form not to send the file, and the file would only be stored in your uploads folder.

Another way to use your uploads folder above webroot is through EE2's file manager. Uploading files this way also stores them in your uploads directory. Again, depending how you set up the URL for the upload directory, you may not be able to access the file from your browser, even from the Control Panel. FTP, SFTP, etc would give you access to the file, of course.

I'm sure there may be other ways to deal with "secret files", as is often the case with doing anything in ExpressionEngine, given it's flexibility. I'm also sure there are also ways of working on top of what is presented here to make things even more interesting. I agree this isn't a perfect solution for all situations, but I hope this tip might come in handy for some special cases dealing with uploaded files.

Here's the video, although I bet the Japanese media will ask Youtube to pull this one down as they did with the video in my other post. I still don't get how an ad, that is shown on TV, is a no-go on youtube. Isn't more visibility a good thing? Then people wonder why the Japanese economy isn't so great...

So, enjoy it while you can.