Getting Started With ExpressionEngine

Earlier this year I was looking for a CMS to use in the redesign of a client’s website. I had used WordPress in the past, but I wasn’t comfortable letting my client make sense of the admin area, especially with the amount of custom fields that needed to be used for this website. I had tinkered a bit with ExpressionEngine once before, but never actually built anything with it. After watching a series of tutorials over at train-ee, I was convinced that ExpressionEngine was the way to go. ExpressionEngine has now become the CMS tool of choice for almost all of the web projects I work on. Wheather it’s a blog or a static site. There is a slight learning curve but once you get your head around ExpressionEngine you’ll never go back. If you are starting out with ExpressionEngine there are a couple of things I suggest you do right out of the gate. ExpressionEngine uses the term “weblog” to refer to a bucket of content. This can get a bit confusing at first because typically we think of a “weblog” as a blog. However, in ExpressionEngine it simply means a place to hold your content. It’s easier to think of a ‘weblog’ as a section within your site. To make it easier to remember and get my head around the concept, the first thing I do is change the word “weblog” to “section.” In Admin>System Preferances>General Configurations Look for the “Section Designation Word” and replace “weblog” with the word “section.” This will update every instance of the word “weblog” in the control panel to “section” making it easy to remember the relationship that a “weblog” has to your site. You will still need to use the word “weblog” in ExpressionEngine tags as you build your site, but this “weblog” concept is unique to ExpressionEngine and this small change will go a long way in helping you get your brain around it. The second thing you should do is make ExpressionEngine’s templates available as .php files. In my opinion ExpressionEngine’s flexibility lies in its template structure. In ExpressionEngine you build your websites by creating “Template Groups” that house “Templates.” ExpressionEngine provides you with a pretty descent text editor to edit your Template, but you can also make ExpressionEngine save your template files as .php files in order to work on them in the editor of your choice. You can do this in the “Templates” tab. Click on “Global Template Preferences” and change the “Allow Templates to be Saved as Files?” option to “yes.” You also need to update the path where the templates are stored. This path will typically be populated for you, but you can change it to what ever you want. If you do change the directory path, make sure that the directory exists (if not you can create it) and that you have changed the permissions to 755. That’s it! Now you can edit your templates in any text editor. ExpressionEngine is a powerful CMS tool. I hope you enjoy it as much as me.

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