Delete Entries

As of May 7th, 2010, the Delete Entries plugin has been wrapped into the External Entries plugin and is no longer available separately.

External Entries ($25)

As 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 helps make this easier. It also helps you manage your EE database.

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:

• 
  
  
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  
  
  


• 
  
  
  
  
  

lili

External SAEF (Free)

The External SAEF module lets you use a form on an ExpressionEngine template to insert a row into any database table — whether into your EE installation’s own database or into any to which you have administrator access. It may help you integrate EE with other MySQL-based systems, such as a commerce platform.

For more information, and an important warning, see the docs.

If you need to insert data into a database without an entry form, see the External Entries plugin.

Insert Entries ()

As of May 7th, 2010, the Insert Entries plugin has been wrapped into the External Entries plugin and is no longer available separately.

Nearby Entries ($15)

Sometimes a site needs more access to next and previous entries than ExpressionEngine’s built-in next/previous tags provide.

With the Nearby Entries plugin, you can display not just one but any number of next and previous links. Order them not only chronologically by entry date but by any column in the exp_weblog_titles table, such as edit date, expiration date, entry id or title. Filter them using standard weblog:entries parameters such as status, category, author and custom fields. And display their custom fields.

For more information, see the docs.

The price per ExpressionEngine installation is $15, it works for both EE v1 and v2, and it’s free to try before you buy.

ExpressionEngine Forums threads where Nearby Entries is mentioned as a solution:

How to construct a URL to the entry before most recent?

PHPStringFun (Free)

This widely-installed ExpressionEngine add-on is a general-use text-formatting plugin that enables access to PHP string functions without activating PHP in the template.

Why would you not want to activate PHP in your template? One important scenario for the plugin is that you actually have activated PHP, but set to parse at the input stage, while you need something else done in the same template requiring PHP to be set at the output stage. Also, people just like using it, particular in templates where not much PHP is needed.

The download file contains a version of the plugin for both EE v1.x and v2.x.

Threads at the ExpressionEngine Forums where PHPStringFun is mentioned as a solution:

• String Functions?
• removing a specific set of characters from a variable
• phpStringFun and Magpie
• Plugin: Child Categories
• Test if field contains string?
• Checking the first 4 characters of a field
• Limiting Summary
• Plugin to delete some segment of text
• Deleting a string segment
• how to shorten (format) a text/string?
• Force lower case
• Variable modification: lowercase/uppercase transformations, etc.
• How to extract the 3 left characters of a string
• Simple Breadcrumb Menu Code
• Format numbers using EE
• Displaying “read more” next to the body’s last character
• Dropcaps Plugin

Select Entries ()

As of May 7th, 2010, the Select Entries plugin has been wrapped into the External Entries plugin and is no longer available separately.

Send Email (Free)

This free plugin lets you send an email from within an ExpressionEngine template without the user submitting a form. It works in both EE v1.x and v2.x.

It’s probably most likely to be useful when placed within an embedded template that is loaded using ajax by some user action in the parent template.

Michael Rog has written a similar plugin: Email-from-Template.

Tied Entries ($20)

Fully compatible with Playa 4!

From the start, one of the big attractions of ExpressionEngine has been the ability to add unlimited custom fields to an unlimited variety of channels (formerly known as weblogs). It’s vital to be able to relate these various channels to each other, and this is done with relationship fields — and extended by such 3rd-party add-ons as the beloved Playa.

But even the grace and power of Playa is stymied by the limited way its relationships can be displayed on EE templates; while a channel’s related entries can be displayed, those related in turn to its related entries cannot; that is, Playa’s children, parents and siblings tags cannot be nested — nor can the native EE related_entries and reverse_related_entries tags.

Tied Entries overcomes this limitation, enabling unlimited traversal across a site’s various channels via their relationship and Playa fields. It’s like having a fully relational database for your channels.

While there are other ways for the undeterred EE developer to achieve this here and there in templates, either with direct MySQL queries or with a series of embedded templates (as Pixel & Tonic suggests), the Tied Entries plugin is more powerful than the former and more flexible and less resource-consuming than the latter. Plus it’s much easier — increasingly so as the number of relationships grows.

The plugin can also be used as a substitute for the standard related_entries and reverse_related tags when displaying entries just one relationship away because, unlike those tags, results can be filtered by categories and custom fields.

Tied Entries is compatible with both EEv1.x and EEv2.x. The EE2 version is fully compatible with Playa 4; the EE1 version works with Playa 3 and older but only passively, that is, in reverse relationships.

Update Entries ()

As of May 7th, 2010, the Update Entries plugin has been wrapped into the External Entries plugin and is no longer available separately.