All articles filed under “ExpressionEngine Development”
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.
Read entire article →
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.
Read entire article →
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.
Read entire article →
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.
Read entire article →
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.
Read entire article →
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.
Read entire article →
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.
Read entire article →
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.
Read entire article →
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.
Read entire article →
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?
Read entire article →
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.
Read entire article →
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.
Read entire article →
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?
Read entire article →
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.
Read entire article →
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.
Read entire article →
