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

Chapter 4. Creating an Easy to Maintain Website

By now, we have already used ExpressionEngine to create our first weblog. While ExpressionEngine makes it easy to create and maintain a weblog on the internet, it is just as easy to create and maintain a more conventional website. In this chapter we will:

  • Create a new weblog (or section) that will hold the text of our website pages

  • Add customized fields to our weblog

  • Create a template that will be used for our conventional website pages

  • Create the first few pages of our new website using our new weblog and template

  • Create a menu to navigate between these pages

  • Create a 404 page for visitors who may otherwise get lost on our site

Note that this chapter will require the Pages module, included with the ExpressionEngine Personal or Commercial installations but not available in the free ExpressionEngine Core.

The Pages module allows us to use one template and one weblog for all the conventional pages on our website. Each posting to the weblog corresponds...