EE Insider

How to Find an ExpressionEngine Freelancer

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...

Cartthrob: A Closer Look

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.

Yearly Archive with YearList

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...

Improving CP Comments View without Code

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...

Resources for Optimizing Your EE Website

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...

Filtering Content with Dynamic Parameters

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 known about. There are many different applications for the Dynamic Parameters functionality. In this article we’ll walk through two simple ways to...

EE Quick Reference Chart

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.

The Quick Reference Chart has...

Essential ExpressionEngine Add-ons

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.

Extensions

• Edit Tab Ajax - AJAXifies the Edit screen search so...

Getting Started with Git and Github

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...

Using the Custom Profile Data Tag

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 Profile Templates.

For the uninitiated, Member Profile Templates in EE are not the same as normal templates that you create and...

Creating a Robust Config.php File

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...

A Simple Script to Upgrade ExpressionEngine

Last week I showed you how to rebuild an EE sandbox using a simple shell script that pulled from a database dump and tarball of ExpressionEngine files to create a fresh install of ExpressionEngine. Well, here’s another shell script that I think you might find very useful.

This shell script...

Automatically Rebuilding an EE Sandbox

As part of this site and other development work, I find myself testing a lot of EE add-ons. I also work on my own add-ons. For both of these activities it’s required to have a local install of ExpressionEngine, configured just how I like it. I call it my EE Sandbox, a place where I can play in...

What are EE Add-Ons?

If ExpressionEngine doesn’t do exactly what you need it to, don’t worry. The developers of EE have created a way to extend and customize ExpressionEngine using EE Add-ons. Add-ons are small pieces of software that you download and install and which allow you to add features to ExpressionEngine...

The (not always) Simple Search Form

If you’ve implemented the Simple Search Form before, you’ve probably come across this. For me, it’s the small thing that I usually forget until I go to test some search terms to make sure the search functionality is working as expected and the results have the proper URLs.

So what am I...

Hand-rolled Social Bookmark Links

If you’re building a website it’s probably a good idea to make it as easy as possible for your site visitors and readers to share your content with their online community and friends.

A typical way—and one that is built in to ExpressionEngine is the ability email a link to a friend. This...

ExpressionEngine Tags Primer

So, EE tags. They’re the things that start and end with curly braces and that you use all over your EE templates to make your content appear. This short tutorial will give you an overview of EE tags, the different kinds and how they’re made.

There are three basic types of EE tags.

• Tag...

Case Study: Social Networking with ExpressionEngine, Part 2

In this part of the short series of articles on my experience building social networking tools for ExpressionEngine, I will be focusing on the “Friending” functionality built for the Clinician1 website (see previous article on the Networks module for more information).

Along with the ability...

Case Study: Social Networking with ExpressionEngine, Part 1

Last week Greg posted to the Airbag blog detailing some recent projects that were hatched by Team Airbag. I thought I would point out (again, as Greg did mention this in the comments of his write-up) that three of those projects were developed on ExpressionEngine. However, I’d like to talk...

The Tools I Use - TextMate EE Bundle and Color Theme

Earlier this week, Eric posted to the PragProg EE Screencast forum asking about how I get the EE tags to be color coded in TextMate in the ExpressionEngine training videos. I realized that I never explicitly mentioned this and want to now for those who use Macs and TextMate. It might make it...

Developing an ExpressionEngine Site Locally

While building the site for the EE Screencasts “Building a Dynamic Website with ExpressionEngine” series, I didn’t use a remote server. Instead, I developed the site on my local computer. The reason I did it this way was because it’s an easier way to work; I can work offline and the pages load...

Installing ExpressionEngine

For the latest tutorial on installing ExpressionEngine 2, please see Mijingo’s Installing ExpressionEngine video. It walks you through the process step-by-step!

So, you’re ready to jump into the world of ExpressionEngine? You’ve got your tutorials in front you and are ready to start building...