This might not be of interest to many, but thought I'd write down some highlights of my year 2011. Maybe for posterity, maybe because I feel a lot of stuff happened this year.

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...

It's been more or less a month since the last release of Zenbu, and boy have I been busy adding new features!

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...

I've been holding on to this version for too long, testing it in different environments and conditions, so decided to finally release Zenbu 1.4.0, which includes a number of internal changes and new features, such as Assets, Pages, and CartThrob support. A new "General settings" section under "Display settings" is also available to tweak how Zenbu initially sets filtering rules and orders...

I just returned from the ExpressionEngine-CodeIgniter (EECI) Conference in New York, my head full of new information and memories of good times.

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*....

Just got back from Japan and getting ready to go to New York for the ExpressionEngine-CodeIgniter conference, but I wouldn't go to a tech conference without making sure my tools aren't working, right?

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",...

After a long wait (sorry about that >_<;), it's time to soon release the next major version of the very powerful entry manager for ExpressionEngine 2, Zenbu. Along with major internal code changes, EE 2.2+ compatibility and a number of bug fixes, many features have been added to make this version of Zenbu even more powerful and flexible. If you liked Zenbu up to now, you've seen nothing yet.

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...

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...