ExpressionEngine How-to Articles
Topics range from beginner to advanced, but are all born out of real world, professional, day-to-day use of ExpressionEngine.
Multi-server Setup for EE 2
Now that ExpressionEngine 2 is growing closer to a non-beta release, and EllisLab has published a timeline for phasing out new distributions of ExpressionEngine 1, our Vector Media Group team has been choosing EE2 for more and more client projects. One of the first difficulties we ran into when we started using EE2 was the same one we ran into when we started using EE1 many years ago—how to handle our multiple server environments gracefully.
At Vector (like many other development shops) we’re typically concerned with three primary servers: the local machines we use for day-to-day coding, the staging site where we deploy releases for the client to see and build new features, and the production server where the live site actually exists. These machines all typically have completely different URLs and file paths. While one common approach is to keep different config.php files on each server, we’ve found a single dynamic configuration file works better for our workflow.
A Primer on Relationships (with EE)
It’s about time we got serious and defined this relationship. You know the one where we pair a couple of ExpressionEngine entries together like an eHarmony match made in nerd heaven. If you’ve never dabbled in the ways of Cupid, then it’s time you learn. Relationships or Related Entries in ExpressionEngine are a simple and powerful way to reuse existing data and avoid the ultimate no-no: duplicate data.
One of the best bits of advice that I received as a young developer was to make sure that my data was only in the database once. Database optimization, only editing data in one place, the reasons go on and on, and are perhaps best saved for an article in _DBA’s Rule The World_ magazine. What about us EE users though? How can we be cautious about duplicate data by taking advantage of EE Relationships? How does it benefit us, and more importantly our end users?
Simplifying How Content Works
When building a website it’s easy to get focused on the stuff that’s under the hood. You want to minimize database queries and find smart ways to use your markup and styles. Those things are absolutely important, but what’s also important is to make sure the site makes sense for those running it. With this article, I’m going to dive into one way to simplify how content works in ExpressionEngine by expanding the use of the Pages module to contain not just static content on a site, but a centralized hub for all those other bits of content that one might need to edit.
When I first started using the Pages module, I looked at it as a handy way to gather “static” pages in their own separate area in the Control Panel. This was an excellent solution for About pages, Privacy Policies and the like. The Pages module filled a gaping hole in how ExpressionEngine works.
Then I started using it for some slightly more non-traditional ways and the usefulness of the Pages module for me elevated to a new level.
Securing ExpressionEngine 2
Last month EE Insider asked the readers “What do you rename your system folder to?” The responses ranged from common dictionary words to random strings and everything in between. The responders are obviously concerned about security and doing what they can to ensure malicious users or bots cannot attack their Control Panel. Let’s take a look at a simple way to secure your ExpressionEngine 2 (EE2) installation.
Extending Default Member Templates
ExpressionEngine is often used to manage membership sites, something it excels at. To help you manage member functions on the front end EE includes a comprehensive set of member templates that can be themed. You can of course choose to not use them at all and there are at least a couple of 3rd party member function options.
I want to show you how you can extend the functionality of the membership templates and/or change their default behaviour. We’re going to do that with a very simple extension. This type of extension will work in both EE 1.5.2+ and EE 2.x. The examples will use EE 1.x and the default site but you can find extensions for both EE versions at the end of this article.
Cartthrob: A Closer Look
A couple of weeks ago the latest attempt at e-commerce on ExpressionEngine—Cartthrob—was released. Anyone that has been using ExpressionEngine long enough knows that flexible e-commerce inside of EE has always been an elusive, slippery goal. Cartthrob is trying to change that.
I took a closer, hands-on look at the new add-on and how it impacts doing e-commerce with ExpressionEngine.
Password Protected Content Made Simple
Every so often I come across a project where part of the spec involves a private area of content accessible via a password. ExpressionEngine gives us a number of ways to protect content out of the box.
One of the basic approaches is to restrict content to member groups thus requiring a member account for each person. If your content is not member-specific another approach is to create a generic user account and supply each individual with the username and password with which to log in.
Each approach would work in numerous scenarios. However, today I want to look at how we can utilize weblogs on a very basic level to manage password protected content very easily. Our goal is to result in a process that uses default EE functionality and that the “average client” can manage with little difficulty or confusion.
We will be using a single weblog to manage the password-protected content. The type of content is irrelevant at this point so let’s focus on how we can achieve this.
Creating Aside Content
Say you’re building a site for a small business with the following sections: Home, News, About Us and Contact. Each of these sections contains its own static content, blog or a combination of both. But each section also contains so-called “aside” content, with things like quotes, testimonials, call to actions and so on. Aside content is so ubiquitous nowadays, HTML5 has even given it its own HTML tag!
But how do you manage aside content in ExpressionEngine? Here’s one way of doing it using categories and the Low Seg2Cat extension.
Ask the Pro: Shopping Cart Solutions for EE
So here we are, our first entry on this new journey we’re calling “Ask the Pro”. For those of you that don’t know me I’m Fred Boyle, the Digital Chef at nGen Works in Jacksonville, FL. I take care of all things EE among other geeky tasks.
Don’t forget to email askthepro@eeinsider.com to ask your question. But what you’ve really come here for are the answers to the questions, so let’s get on with the show!
Travis Schmeisser on Structure
Editor’s Note: Travis Schmeisser is one of the creators of the popular Structure module. Travis kindly agreed to write an article explaining how Structure came about and how it’s used.
Structure is an alternate method for building ExpressionEngine sites which focuses on pages to create hierarchy for your content. We recently released version 2.0, which is now a commercial module ($65 per site license) and includes several of the most highly requested features to date. There are tutorials and code samples for how to actually setup Structure at both Jambor-EE and the Structure site, but with this article I hope to explain some of the thinking behind the add-on and reveal why it can not only speed up your development, but make your client’s lives a lot easier.
Yearly Archive with YearList
A few years ago, a client needed to list out all of the years in which there were articles on the site and allow people to click on the years and get a list of all of the articles in that year; the result being an archive of the entries by year. For those of you that have tried, you probably know that ExpressionEngine does not handle this out-of-the-box. But it does help us about half-way.
My solution was very simple. I wanted to create a list of years and make them clickable so I can access a results page with all of the articles from that year.
Improving CP Comments View without Code
Recently, I found myself needing to tweak how the ExpressionEngine Control Panel displays the list of comments for an entry. The editors of a website I help maintain wanted to get a more complete overview of the comments on an entry, so they could quickly tell which are spam comments and mark them to be deleted.
In the Control Panel, there is the View Comments/Trackbacks page, which you can access by clicking the “View” in the “Comments” column of the Edit entry listing. But in order to see the entire comment, you have to click on the comment link, view the complete comment text and then go back to mark the comment as spam or delete it. When each entry receives dozens of comments, this quickly becomes a lot of clicking and tremendous wasted effort.
Learn how, through a process of discovery, I found a solution to my problem that required no code, but just a couple of config.php settings.
Building with CodeIgniter: Using Libraries
So now that we have Building a blog with CodeIgniter, in order to make it lifestreamy, to make it tumble we need to add our delicious and twitter links to it. To do this, we’re going to employ an area outside of the MVC structure called “Libraries.”
Building with CodeIgniter: Adding the Blog
There is nothing in the world everyone wishes to hear more than your opinion. The primary vehicle for this is your blog. In the last article we began the process of building a tumblelog with CodeIgniter. In this, Part 2 of a four-part series, we will be building the blog in CodeIgniter.
Developing EE Sites on Windows
Editors Note: I’d like to welcome Sean Smith as the newest guest author on EE Insider. Sean is a Canadian web developer based in Seoul, South Korea. He is an avid ExpressionEngine fan and runs EEforums4You, which helps other EE developers skin the Forum module. If you want to know more about Sean he can be found on Twitter @createsean or in a coffeeshop drinking coffee.
When talking to web developers it seems that the overwhelming majority are Mac users. That certainly seems to be the case in the ExpressionEngine community, but there are still a large number of developers using Windows XP, Vista or soon Windows 7. This article will discuss several tools and applications that are essential for developers using the Windows platform.
Building with CodeIgniter: Beginning your Tumblelog
Editors Note: I’d like to welcome back Kenny Meyers as a guest author on EE Insider. Kenny is a web developer at Seattle, WA based Blue Flavor. He loves ExpressionEngine & CodeIgniter for their “less is more” approach and the ability to generate good, clean standards-compliant markup. He will be writing a series of articles on building a simple web application with CodeIgniter.
In my previous article, we went over the basics of CodeIgniter. Now we’re going to actually build something. For this four-part series we’ll build a tumblelog using many of the features CodeIgniter has built-in as well as third-party libraries.
Let’s get started.
Resources for Optimizing Your EE Website
Many of us have been in this situation. You launch a snazzy new website and once the traffic starts to hit it, the site drops to its knees and begins crawling its way through the day. Your client or boss starts emailing and then calling, asking: “Why is the site so slow? Can you fix it?”
With a little planning and an eye towards EE template coding best practices, you can prevent the situation I described above.
Filtering Content with Dynamic Parameters
Dynamic Parameters are a documented feature of the ExpressionEngine weblog entry tag pair but it’s something you might not have used before or even know about. In this article we’ll walk through two simple ways to allow your content to be filtered using Dynamic Parameters.
EE Quick Reference Chart
So, you’re starting out building your first site with ExpressionEngine and you’re thinking to yourself: “I wish there was an easy one-page document I could use to reference some of the most commonly used ExpressionEngine tags and variables.” Well, you’re in luck.
Essential ExpressionEngine Add-ons
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of ExpressionEngine add-ons out in the wild. Many of those are critical to any sites I develop, so I thought I’d share a list of ExpressionEngine add-ons that I use for almost every project.
A Gentle Introduction to CodeIgniter
So you’ve heard the news that ExpressionEngine 2.0 is built entirely on CodeIgniter and with EE 2.0’s release slowly creeping up on us it’s time to brush up on the framework. The following is a light introduction to the philosophy of CodeIgniter.
Getting Started with Git and Github
If you’re looking into implementing version control (what’s version control? A Visual Guide to Version Control) in your workflow, there are a few options out there. A popular and solid choice is Subversion (SVN), a free system that has one main repository on a centrally located server. It’s a great system and I use it for some of my personal projects and it’s our version control system for Airbag projects. Last summer I wrote about Subversion, and how it can improve how you collaborate on project, for A List Apart magazine.
Using the Custom Profile Data Tag
If you’ve ever built an ExpressionEngine site with significant membership capabilities, you may have run into the less-than-ideal situation that is the Member Templates. I usually use a third party module to handle membership functionality in the templates. But there is a way to display member data on your site without the need for a third-party module.
Creating a Robust Config.php File
A frequent question in the forums is how to easily move a site from a staging or local server to a production server without everything breaking. While site migration is out of the scope of this article, I do want to address one simple way you can make moving sites easier: create a robust config.php file.
In recent versions of ExpressionEngine, the config.php file has become leaner as more of the installation settings have been moved into the database. This can be a inconvenience when moving a site to a different server because it requires making so many database changes and isn’t as portable as file.
Luckily, we can still use the config.php file to override settings in the database.
Feeding Entries with LG Data Matrix
Editors Note: I’d like to welcome web developer Brandon Kelly as a guest author on EE Insider. Brandon is also active in the EE developer community, having released five EE Add-ons, including the popular extension Playa.
As an extension developer, I want to make it as easy as possible for people to track updates to my extensions. I tend to promote major updates on the EE Extensions Forum and Twitter, and LG Addon Updater carries a lot of weight as well. Recently I decided to open up a new avenue for tracking updates: Change Log feeds. A lot of people use feed readers to subscribe to the websites they enjoy, so why not use them to track extension updates as well?
A Simple Script to Upgrade ExpressionEngine
Last week I showed you how to rebuild an EE sandbox using a simple shell script that pulled from a database dump and tarball of ExpressionEngine files that create a fresh install of ExpressionEngine. Well, now here’s another shell script that I think you might find very useful.
Automatically Rebuilding an EE Sandbox
As part of this site and other development work, I find myself testing a lot of EE add-ons. I also work on my own add-ons. For both of these activities it’s required to have a local install of ExpressionEngine, configured just how I like it. I call it my EE Sandbox, a place where I can play in EE. I had been creating my sandbox manually each time I needed to refresh it, but that quickly became too much work each and every time I needed to start over.
What are EE Add-Ons?
If ExpressionEngine doesn’t do exactly what you need it to, don’t worry. The developers of EE have created a way to extend and customize ExpressionEngine using EE Add-ons. Add-ons are small pieces of software that you download and install and which allow you to add features to ExpressionEngine without any programming knowledge or altering the core application files.
The (not always) Simple Search Form
If you’ve implemented the Simple Search Form before, you’ve probably come across this. For me, it’s the small thing that I usually forget until I go to test some search terms to make sure the search functionality is working as expected and the results have the proper URLs.
So what am I talking about?
Hand-rolled Social Bookmark Links
If you’re building a website it’s probably a good idea to make it as easy as possible for your site visitors and readers to share your content with their online community and friends. We’ll look at the easy way to do it and then the hand-rolled way.
ExpressionEngine Tags Primer
So, EE tags. They’re the things that start and end with curly braces and that you use all over your EE templates to make your content appear. This short tutorial will give you an overview of EE tags, the different kinds and how they’re made.
Case Study: Social Networking with ExpressionEngine, Part 2
Along with the ability for users to join networks, the client also required that users are able to connect individually as “colleagues.” This is, as you probably know, basic functionality for any social networking website. We’re not breaking new ground here…except that this type of functionality isn’t built-in to ExpressionEngine.
Case Study: Social Networking with ExpressionEngine, Part 1
ExpressionEngine is a great tool to manage content, allow commenting on content and dozens of other ways of interacting with the content (ratings, saving or favoriting, tagging) using third party add-ons. But the client also wanted some more traditional social networking features: groups and friends.
The Tools I Use - TextMate EE Bundle and Color Theme
Earlier this week, Eric posted to the PragProg EE Screencast forum asking about how I get the EE tags to be color coded in TextMate in the ExpressionEngine training videos. I realized that I never explicitly mentioned this and want to now for those who use Macs and TextMate. It might make it even easier to follow along with the screencasts if our code matches colors.
Developing an ExpressionEngine Site Locally
I know I’m not the only one who develops ExpressionEngine sites on the local computer first, but I’m also certain there are many people who do not and would like to learn more. If you’re one of those people, this ExpressionEngine tutorial is for you.
Installing ExpressionEngine
So, you’re ready to jump into the world of ExpressionEngine? You’ve got your tutorials in front you and are ready to start building your first EE-powered website. All you need to do is install ExpressionEngine on your local computer of web server and then it’s off to the races! This guide to installing EE will help you kick start the EE learning process.
