ExpressionEngine is one of the fastest growing content management systems on the web. It's the power behind many high-traffic sites, and it can power yours, too. With this Quick-Start Guide, you'll get hands-on experience developing with the latest ExpressionEngine 2.0 by building a complete web site from start to finish. You'll learn advanced techniques for customizing and optimizing your sites, including templates, add-ons, and more.
In this book, noted expert Ryan Irelan walks you through creating an online news site, Engine City Times. You'll get hands-on experience working with dynamic content, categories, an RSS feed, site search, and more as you build your news site.
You'll further improve your ExpressionEngine skills with advanced techniques for creating powerful and manageable templates, effectively managing site files and assets, and optimizing your ExpressionEngine website to handle thousands of visitors. Go beyond the native ExpressionEngine functionality and customize the system through the use of add-ons. You'll discover how add-ons can help you build better websites, and you'll also build your own add-ons from scratch.
Whether you're a web designer, web developer, or web master, this book will get you up to speed quickly building sites with ExpressionEngine.
Acknowledgments xi
Foreword xiii
Introduction xv
What's New in ExpressionEngine 2 xv
Who Should Read This Book xv
What's in This Book? xvi
How to Read This Book xvii
Online Resources xviii
I Getting Started with ExpressionEngine 1
1 Installing ExpressionEngine 3
1.1 Evaluating Hosting 34
1.2 Getting the Software 5
1.3 Installing ExpressionEngine 6
1.4 Exploring the ExpressionEngine Directories and Files 9
1.5 Touring the Control Panel 11
1.6 What We Learned 16
2 Hands-on Templating 19
2.1 Building Our First Template 19
2.2 Dissecting ExpressionEngine URLs 24
2.3 Displaying Dynamic Content 25
2.4 Working with ExpressionEngine Variables 26
2.5 Bringing Life to Templates with ExpressionEngine Tags 28
2.6 What We Learned 34
II Building Our First ExpressionEngine Site 35
3 What We're Building 37
3.1 Engine City Times Home Page 38
3.2 Engine City Times Article Page 40
3.3 Engine City Times Category Page 40
3.4 Moving Forward 40
Creating and Configuring the Site 43
4.1 Setting the Preferences 43
4.2 Cleaning Up the Default Site 44
4.3 Representing the Content 45
4.4 Controlling Content with Custom Statuses 54
4.5 Working with Categories 57
4.6 Creating Authors and Members 60
4.7 What We Learned 65
5 Making the Pages 67
5.1 Building Out the Home Page 67
5.2 Displaying the Categories 78
5.3 Embedding Reusable Code 80
5.4 Building Out the Article Template 83
5.5 Lighting Up the Category Template 90
5.6 What We Learned 93
6 Adding the Final Touches 95
6.1 Adding a Static Page 95
6.2 Lighting Up the Navigation 98
6.3 Cleaning Up Using Conditionals 101
6.4 Creating an RSS Feed 104
6.5 Adding Search Functionality 106
6.6 On Your Own 109
6.7 What We Learned 109
III Digging In 111
7 Creating Relationships Between Entries 113
7.1 Building Entry Relationships 114
7.2 Setting Up Related Entries 116
7.3 Writing Related Entries Template Code 118
7.4 What We Learned 120
8 Managing Files and Images 123
8.1 Exploring the File Manager 123
8.2 Creating and Managing Upload Destinations 125
8.3 Editing Image Files 129
8.4 Embedding Images in Entries 131
8.5 Adding Files to Entries 132
8.6 What We Learned 135
9 Advanced Templating 137
9.1 A More Powerful Channel Entries Tag 137
9.2 Writing Custom MySQL Queries 142
9.3 Adding Content Outside of the Control Panel 145
9.4 Sharing Data Between Templates 151
9.5 Edit Templates Anywhere 153
9.6 What We Learned 155
10 Optimizing Our ExpressionEngine Site 157
10.1 Setting Permissions and Establishing a Baseline 157
10.2 Optimizing with Four Types of Caching 158
10.3 Disabling Unneeded Queries 164
10.4 Optimizing for High Traffic 165
10.5 What We Learned 167
11 Extending ExpressionEngine with Add-Ons 169
11.1 Exploring the Different Types of Add-Ons 169
11.2 The Add-on Developer Community 180
Index 183
Overview
ExpressionEngine is one of the fastest growing content management systems on the web. It's the power behind many high-traffic sites, and it can power yours, too. With this Quick-Start Guide, you'll get hands-on experience developing with the latest ExpressionEngine 2.0 by building a complete web site from start to finish. You'll learn advanced techniques for customizing and optimizing your sites, including templates, add-ons, and more.
In this book, noted expert Ryan Irelan ...