Articles

ExpressionEngine 2 has been out since July.  Here’s a quick review of what’s going on.

Some web development firms built their sites in their own proprietary CMS. Why this is a bad idea.

It’s here! It’s here!  Read first impressions of ExpressionEngine 2.0.

It’s coming!  Boo-yah.

By default, ExpressionEngine URLs are ugly, always prefixed by index.php.  With a little work, you can vanquish this unneccesary piece of your URLs.

Google maps are great, but the default maps aren’t always accurate.  Learn how to generate customized and flexible Google maps and links within ExpressionEngine.

Flash detection is a very important thing. I wish that all visitors had a current version of the flash player. I also wish that I could eat ice cream 3 meals a day, but that’s just not reality. It’s up to us to make sure that the website our visitors come to directs them to download the right version of the flash player so that they can see the content we intended them to see the way we intended them to see it.

Are you editing your ExpressionEngine templates and laboriously uploading them again and again with FTP? There’s a better way.

If you find yourself repeating information in your ExpressionEngine code, global variables will save you time and headache.

Most clients know they need a quality web site.  However, they may be wary of using a CMS.  Here are some tips for convincing them of the value of an ExpressionEngine-driven site.  These reasons may seem obvious to you, but perhaps they are not obvious to your clients.

Hard-coding sidebars in to your Expression Engine templates is easy, but inflexible.  Using the Playa Multi Relationship extension, a template group and a simple weblog, gives you great flexibility in how you order content for sidebars.

With thousands of web hosts to choose from, who should you rely on to host your Expression Engine sites?

If your server is happy with it, replacing index.php in your Expression Engine site URLs is quick and easy, and will make your URLs much prettier.

One of the best things about Expression Engine is the pieces you can add on do it.  If this CMS doesn’t do everthing you like, you can add specific functionality quite easily.  Let’s look at five must-have extensions.

If you’re writing a tutorial or demonstrating your code, and you want to show HTML verbatim, rather that having the browser interpret it, Postable is your friend.

Combining Expression Engine’s Image Gallery module with Lightbox creates nice galleries with clickable thumbnails that pop up a larger image.  It’s easy to implement, and your customers will appreciate it.

Michael Boyink provides an excellent answer to the question: “Just exactly how do categories in URLs work”?

Let’s face it—editing templates in Expression Engine’s textareas is not fun. The It’s All Text extension for Mozilla Firefox comes to save the day.

Copying an Expression Engine installing is straightforward.  If you have an installation working the way you like it, why not copy it instead of going through all the steps to install a new one? By copying an existing installation, you’ll preserve all the settings, extensions, modules and plugins that you use. You can even login to the new installation with the same username and password!