Tips tagged “Templates”
- Use conditionals to design your own URL structure
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Posted on June 08, 2009 by JonnyUK
The EE docs state that URL’s at their simplest should be formatted using the following formula:
http://www.example.com/index.php/template_group/template/But what if you want a more customised (or even dynamic) URL that doesn’t necessarily match the template name?
If you try to visit a URL
- Custom counter for loops that don’t support {count}
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Posted on June 01, 2009 by JonnyUK
Every now and then you might come across a situation where you want to count within a loop but unfortunately the {count} variable is not available.
This is a common problem when dealing with related entries because they are cached internally causing various dynamic statistical variables such as
- Close PHP tags in your templates
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Posted on June 01, 2009 by johndwells
If you’ve taken the time to learn some of PHP’s best coding practices, you may have come across the technique of omitting the PHP closing tag to avoid unintentional output of white space. For example, the Zend Framework’s coding standard has adopted this, explaining that:
“For files that contain
- Save Templates to Files
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Posted on May 29, 2009 by Sean Smith
if you prefer working on templates in your favorite text editor, and who doesn’t, you can still do that in ExpressionEngine.
Go to CP Home › Templates › Template Preferences
check “allow templates to be saved as files” and then enter the path to the folder on your server where the files
- Use custom global variables in your templates
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Posted on May 29, 2009 by Jason Morehead
While you can use sub-templates to contain common elements of your design (e.g., header, footer), you can also use custom global variables. For example, I often create a global variable called “analytics” that contains my Google Analytics code, and I insert this global variable throughout my
- Create a “global” template group
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Posted on May 29, 2009 by Jason Morehead
To take advantage of EE’s flexible templating system, I use “sub-templates” for aspects of my design that are common across the site (e.g., header, footer, menus, copyright info).
To keep these organized, I’ll create a “global” template group that contains all of these templates. Of course, you
- Create a performance indicator
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Posted on May 29, 2009 by Jason Morehead
When setting up a site, I often create a performance indicator that displays the number of queries and the time it took for EE to generate the page. This is helpful for debugging purposes, to test caching, etc.
I create a sub-template called something like “performance” (I use a sub-template so I
- Clear the Caches
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Posted on May 14, 2009 by Ryan Irelan
If you’re making changes to templates and the browser isn’t displaying what you think it should, try clearing the cache of your browser and the caches in ExpressionEngine.
You can find the Clear Cache utility under Admin - Utilities. You can also manually delete the files from the cache