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

Define a 404 Page Not Found


One of the challenges of ExpressionEngine is that, because we are not dealing with physical files, it is not always clear to ExpressionEngine if a page being requested is a valid page or not. Try visiting http://localhost/ihatetoast or http://www.example.com/ihatetoast; ExpressionEngine does not recognize ihatetoast, and so returns the index page of the default template group. This is terrible for search engines as it can make our website look like it has thousands of pages all with the same content. To combat this, we can define our own 404 page.

Note

In some situations, defining a 404 page can cause existing URLs on your ExpressionEngine site to stop working. If you have URLs on your site that do not include the template group name and do not use the Pages module, those pages will be returned 404. To work around this, either use the Pages module to maintain your existing URL structure or do not turn on the 404 functionality.

  1. 1. First, we need to create a template...