All articles filed under “How-To”
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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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