| Developed for | MojoMotor |
| Current Version | 1.2.3 |
| Project Page | Link |
I was at EECI2010 in San Francisco when Derek Allard announced MojoMotor (actually, I had predicted it the night before to Lance), and I thought it was a very cool product. I really liked the idea of having as much outside of an admin panel. The edit-in-place functionality was in products like Concrete5 (and now even Wordpress), but there was still a large and complicated back end.
After MojoMotor was released, there was an early flurry of activity for add-ons. A lot of them had very singular purposes, like an add-on to show Tweets. The problem is, MojoMotor is only $50, so if you are dropping $50 on a CMS license for a site in the first place, why would you pay $15 or so to get added functionality that is almost certainly going to be requested by a client?
After looking at the existing add-on marketplace, I had the idea for a low-cost Swiss Army-knife type of add-on that would be something you could buy and meet a wide-variety of client requests with. In addition, it would require absolutely zero control panel screens to function - it would look and feel exactly like MojoMotor's editable regions.
MojoBlocks was my first add-on, so it took a long time to create. jQuery isn't my strongest area, so it was a lot of time slogging through the MojoMotor JS to see how they were doing certain items so MojoBlocks could piggback and make it feel like it is part of the native system. (Thankfully I was developing with MM before Ellislab stopped including non-minified JS files!)
MojoBlocks was released in October 2010, and since has been a steady seller which I think can be attributed to a focus on making sure I was providing two important factors when dealing with a lower-cost (in comparison to ExpressionEngine2) CMS add-on: versatility and value.