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