All articles filed under “Web Development”
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.
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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 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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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
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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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