EE in the Wild: LogoGala
Newly launched LogoGala archives all sorts of logos as a source of information and design inspiration. The site is powered by ExpressionEngine and was built by Deron Sizemore.
I asked Deron to share some of the EE details of the site. Here’s his response (edited by me for space):
One weblog for “featured” designs and general “gallery” designs.
Initially I started out development with a featured weblog and a gallery weblog. The featured weblog would hold the “featured” designs and the “gallery” weblog would hold all of the designs not featured. The more I thought about it, the less I liked the idea. So, I went with one weblog called “gallery” and am only showing the featured designs where needed using the weblog entries “search” parameter.
To start, I needed one additional custom field in the gallery weblog. This custom field would be a drop down list field type, would have two values (yes and no) and would ask the question “Is this design a featured design?” Then, if I wanted to show only the featured designs from the gallery, all I would need is to add this parameter to my opening weblog entries tag:
search:gallery_featured=”=Yes”That parameter will search the gallery weblog for the “gallery_featured” custom field and all designs with a value of “Yes” in this custom field will be shown.Display Popular Entries from the Gallery
To display the popular gallery entries on the homepage and in the sidebar of the internal pages, I’m using the track views feature in EE. The track views feature is a very simple way to keep track of how many views a single entry template receives. So, in my case, on the /gallery/details/ page which is the single entry template for the gallery I needed to make use of this track view feature. In the opening weblog entries tag on my single entry page I used the parameter: track_views=“one”
From there, to actually display the “most popular” list, you need to simply display a list of entries using normal weblog entries tags and be sure to orderby=“view_count_one” like this:
{exp:weblog:entries weblog=“gallery” disable=”{weblog_disable}|pagination|categories" orderby="view_count_one" limit="10" dynamic="off"}
Visit: Fresh Logo Design Inspiration: LogoGala
Posted on Jan 14, 2009 by Ryan Irelan
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Richard Lomas — 06:29 on 01.14.2009
Loving these daily posts Ryan!
These helpful insights into what actual developers are doing with their sites are so much easier to comprehend than the Wiki or Docs sometimes.
Thanks a million!
Richard Lomas — 06:30 on 01.14.2009
Question actually.
Is it a bit resource intensive on a site to using the Search function in the way mentioned?
Would that pose issues as a site’s traffic grew?
Deron Sizemore — 07:23 on 01.14.2009
Thanks Ryan for posting this about my newly launched site! I hope someone finds the article and site useful.
<blockquote>Is it a bit resource intensive on a site to using the Search function in the way mentioned?
Would that pose issues as a site
Richard Lomas — 07:42 on 01.14.2009
Hi Deron. Love the site.
I myself barely know my ass from my elbow with regard to EE. I was just curious and was hopeful that Ryan’s answer could help us all learn.
Cheers!
R
Deron Sizeore — 10:01 on 01.14.2009
Thanks Richard. I appreciate it.
Yeah, I’m ready to learn more about it too now that you brought it up. Definitely want to know if I’m doing something that could potentially hurt the site.
Might make for good discussion in the EEScreencasts chat tonight. I’ll try to stop by and ask.
John Faulds — 10:36 on 01.14.2009
An EE weblog tag is basically just a different way to write an SQL query of the database. So I would’ve thought that any parameters that you can add to the tag would equate to ‘where’ parameters that you’d add to a query,
e.g. SELECT from exp_weblog_data WHERE weblog_id = X AND custom_field = ‘yes’
Maybe the choice of ‘search’ for its name is a bit misleading because it implies searching the whole database for a snippet of information, but I think it’s really just a way of further filtering a query.
Travis Schmeisser — 11:14 on 01.14.2009
That’s a handy way to filter and move entries to different areas of the site. I use custom fields the same way quite often. It’s simple for clients and makes it a snap to get items into different places.
Deron Sizemore — 13:46 on 01.14.2009
Thanks for the explanation John. Me, not having a coding background, I never really knew the weblog entries tag was just a query. Makes sense though as you can either use a weblog entries tag to query the database or you can write a custom query to get information the database. One way is just EE’s built in way I guess is what it boils down too?
So, what you’re saying by your comment is that using the search parameter in this fashion should not increase any server load?
Richard Angstmann — 04:06 on 01.15.2009
Hey Deron, really great to see an insight into how LogoGala was constructed from an EE point of view, and thanks Ryan for publishing the details here.
Richard Angstmann — 04:28 on 01.15.2009
By the way - I didn’t even know the weblog entries search parameter existed, so I’m pretty excited to see how you’ve used it on LogoGala. Its given me a few ideas for my upcoming projects!
Deron Sizemore — 04:51 on 01.15.2009
Thanks Richard. Yeah I didn’t know about the search parameter either until a few months ago. It’s helped me out a few times. I use it on another site to show events. I have a main events page and then a “featured events” section in the header. Well, with the search parameter, I just add one additional custom field to ask is this event featured? If yes, it adds it to the header area, if not, it just places the event in the general events page which just shows all events and does not use the search parameter.