All articles filed under “How-To”
Whenever ExpressionEngine renders a page, a variety of things happen. A parsing engine runs through the code, database calls are made, variables are replaced, conditional statements are evaluated, third party add-on scripts are run and more. While servers are amazingly fast at doing all of this, sometimes all of these processes can make a page take too many valuable seconds to load.
While it is always best practice to write your code so that the page loads as fast as possible, there are times where caching can come in and save the day by providing lighting-fast load times even for pages with a lot of processing needs. However, there are also times where caching can work against you and actually make the page slower than loading the page without it. I’ll cover the basics of caching in ExpressionEngine, including when not to do it.
Read entire article →
Recently on Twitter someone wondered aloud how he could find freelancers that do ExpressionEngine work. It’s really not that hard and there are a few different ways to go about it. Let’s run through them quickly so you can be on your way to finding the person you need.
These tips will help you find an ExpressionEngine professional, not just a freelancer. Some of the professionals you’ll find are agencies (larger and small), not individuals.
Read entire article →
At Republic Factory we’ve been working with ExpressionEngine for quite a few years now. We have more or less been lurking on Twitter and searching the forums now and then. Since being to EECI in Leiden the last two years and, as I write this, looking forward to going to NY in a few weeks we thought that this would be a good time to share a few tips with the community. Over the last few years we’ve gained a lot of experience building multi lingual sites with ExpressionEngine and that we feel hopefully could lend a hand to people starting out.
Being situated in Sweden we don’t have English as our first language, so most things we develop will be in Swedish and/or English. A lot of our projects also get translated to Norwegian, Danish, or Finnish. Recently, when working with a couple of bigger clients, we’ve also worked with languages like Russian, Spanish, Italian and Turkish. In this article we’ll give a few tips based on our experience of building multi lingual websites in ExpressionEngine, and introduce a couple of things to think about when starting out.
Read entire article →
One of the greatest strengths of ExpressionEngine is its flexibility, so it’s no surprise that there are usually multiple ways of accomplishing the same task. But as you continue to work more and more with EE, you sometimes find better ways of doing things, whether it’s getting something done more efficiently or with less code (or hey, maybe both!).
A good place to start when you’re new has always been with the optional Agile Records site that can be set up with a new installation. EllisLab put together the channels, custom fields and templates in there to help beginners understand how EE works and allow them to become familiar with the template language. But like anything else, you need to be able to run before you can walk, so while the Agile Records site is great for starters and allows you to build a quite capable EE site, there’s certainly room for optimization.
Read entire article →
Last year I gave a talk at the EngineSummit 2 on documenting EE projects. I’ve learned a lot the hard way in the past and I want to share the ideas and approaches with you. Hopefully you can avoid the mistakes I made.
While it’s important to supply your clients or content editors with some form of documentation—that’s not the form of documentation we’re talking about right now. We’re talking about documentation for you, the developer. Documentation for other developers who aren’t inside your head 24/7. It’s important (and I’m not the only one that thinks so) and we’ll talk about why.
Read entire article →
Earlier this year, Ty Wangsness wrote a great article over at EMarketSouth which established the basics for enabling members of a site to edit channel entries outside the EE 2 control panel. While it was an excellent primer, his article only included instructions for enabling text input and text area fields, which left a lot of us wondering how to make richer fieldtypes work. Additionally, there were some sections which might have been unfamiliar for those of us who don’t have experience with EE 1.x SAEFs.
With that in mind, I’ve built on Ty’s article to write a more complete guide to creating an edit SAEF from start to finish, including how to get checkbox fields, radio buttons and image uploads working. To me, the lack of edit SAEF support is one of EE 2’s more glaring flaws, but this is a very solid if somewhat tedious workaround that will largely correct it.
Read entire article →
In this two part tutorial we’re going to walk you through building an accessory. The first part will cover creating a very simple HTML-based accessory with your contact information. The second part will build on the first using ExpressionEngine’s native code to create a fully functional contact form. Part I assumes you understand HTML, while part II will assume you know some PHP.
Let’s get started.
Read entire article →
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.
Read entire article →
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?
Read entire article →
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.
Read entire article →
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.
Read entire article →
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.
Read entire article →
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.
Read entire article →
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.
Read entire article →
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.
Read entire article →
