Digitalmash: EE Quick & dirty
Last week Rob Morris of Digitalmash put together a nice overview article, ExpressionEngine: Quick & dirty, which documented his experience as a new ExpressionEngine user.
Not surprisingly, Rob was confused by the “weblog” terminology that will be banished to the wasteland when EE 2.0 arrives:
In ExpressionEngine (pre 2.0) these groupings of information are called ‘weblogs’. Now this is a major source of confusion starting out, so if it helps you, think of them as ‘sections’ or ‘channels’. A weblog isn’t the whole blog in EE, it’s just a grouping of information. Of course, there are other things on my site that don’t fit into these 4 ‘weblogs’, but they’re ‘one off’ items like a contact form, for example, so we’ll leave them out for the moment.
Rob continues describing how he built the site, all the while having to fumble around with the terminology. This is exactly why I teach people to first change the term “weblog” to “section.” It makes much more sense to think of the content that way (and a lot to talk about it), especially since a lot of people use EE to build non-weblog websites.
It was nice to see Rob quickly pick up on the usefulness of embedded variables and all the things you can accomplish when you start passing them from template to template. Additionally, the recommendation of useful plugins is a great starting point for EE users looking to solve some very common problems.
One suggestion: to Rob’s list of Misc Handy Resources, I’d also add this site and my ExpressionEngine training videos.
Posted on Mar 24, 2009 by Ryan Irelan
Share on Twitter
Rob Morris — 19:49 on 03.24.2009
Thanks for the feedback guys. I’ll add the link to the bottom list of resources.
Even though I was aware of the ability to change ‘weblog’ to something else in the admin, I felt that helping new users to reassociate the word from the get-go was probably more beneficial given how much it’s thrown around in tutorials and on the forums.
Mark Bowen — 02:19 on 03.25.2009
I’m actually considered an outsider as I like the term weblog. I think I just got so used to it that now it’s stuck in my head.
Does cause confusion around the other way though when you are trying to tell people what menu option to click on and they are saying it doesn’t exist as you have absolutely no way of knowing what they have changed their word to!!
Best wishes,
Mark
Ryan Irelan — 04:24 on 03.25.2009
Rob,
My comments about the “weblog” terminology wasn’t directed at you (or a criticism of you), but just an observation at how confusing it can be for new users and consequently how confusing it can be to even explain it clearly. I think you write-up demonstrated that moving from “weblog” to “channel” in EE 2.0 is a great move.
Thanks for adding the links!
LynneL — 08:31 on 03.25.2009
I’ve started to use the term “input modules” because that’s what one of my biggest clients uses. It sort of makes sense - describes the publish page/container aspect of data functions. Of course, this client is pretty nontechnical with regards to implementing web software, he’s just a front end designer, so his eyes glaze over pretty quick in a meeting where I start saying things like “I could implement a weblog using member group restrictions and xyz plugin in order to iterate these sets of data onto a web page.”
He mostly just says, go make it work. ^_^
Sandy — 05:32 on 03.26.2009
Right from the start, I change “weblog” to “content type”. I find that it makes a lot sense for the end user, as that’s exactly what they are—different types of content. I definitely like “channel” better than “weblog”, but if the option still exists to customize it, I’ll still probably go with “content type”.