Book Image

Building Websites with ExpressionEngine 1.6

By : Leonard Murphy
Book Image

Building Websites with ExpressionEngine 1.6

By: Leonard Murphy

Overview of this book

<p>ExpressionEngine is a flexible, feature-rich open-source content management system used by thousands of individuals, organizations, and companies to easily manage their websites. It is written in the world's most popular web scripting language, PHP, and built on the MySQL database server. This book is written for ExpressionEngine 1.6 users, although it will still be a good introduction for those using other versions.<br /><br />If you're eager to start creating websites with ExpressionEngine, this is your book. This book gives you clear, concise and, of course, practical guidance to take you from the basics of setting up ExpressionEngine to developing the skills you need to create professional ExpressionEngine websites to be reckoned with.<br /><br />This book will take you through the process of setting up a website with ExpressionEngine with the help of an example site. By creating a site for selling toast online, you will learn all the stages required for building a professional website in a plain, articulate manner.<br /><br />This book is aimed at beginners new to ExpressionEngine, but will allow readers to advance rapidly up the learning curve to the point where they can tackle any task with confidence.<br /><br />Once you're set up with a basic installation of ExpressionEngine, you will move on to learn about creating and managing your content, customizing the look of your site, managing users and groups, allowing visitors to post comments and feedback, building an events calendar, and building a photo gallery. The book also covers the discussion forum module, the simple commerce module, and the wiki module as well as basics such as creating search-engine friendly URLs, 404 "page not found" pages, removing the index.php file for cleaner URLs and updating ExpressionEngine to the latest version.</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Practical Data Analysis and Reporting with BIRT
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface

What Can ExpressionEngine Do?


Although ExpressionEngine makes it easy for the HTML-illiterate to update a website, that alone would not be worth the $99.95+ price tag.

ExpressionEngine not only allows us to separate out the code, but makes it easy to implement very advanced features, which are more often associated with large social-networking websites, like Facebook or MySpace. Visitors can leave comments, or join your site as fully-fledged members. You can set up RSS feeds, a photo gallery, a mailing list, a calendar, a wiki, or a discussion forum, and you can sell items through PayPal.

ExpressionEngine also comes packed with industry-leading features to keep your website secure and spam-free amid all the activity. You can force people to register as members before they can submit comments to your site; you can personally review every member application before approving; or you can allow non-members to submit data if they type in a captcha correctly. (A captcha is an image of letters that a person must correctly type in order to submit data; it ensures that it is not an automated spambot that is submitting the comment or member application.)

Further, you can prevent people from submitting the same comment twice, restrict how much data a person can request from your website in a certain timeframe (to prevent denial of service attacks), blacklist certain words so that they cannot be used in comments, and blacklist URLs or IP addresses of spammers that you don't want accessing your site.