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

Improving Our 404 Page Not Found Capabilities


In our last chapter, we created a 404 Page Not Found template that appears when we type in a non-existent URL (such as http://localhost/ihatetoast or http://www.example.com/ihatetoast) Now that we are using single-entry pages there is a new flaw. When we go to a second layer URL that does not exist (such as http://localhost/products/ihatetoast or http://www.example.com/products/ihatehotast), we see an actual page with content instead of our 404 template. This can be both confusing to visitors (who mistype a URL) and to search engine robots that will see hundreds of URLs for your site (all with the same duplicate content).

We can alter this default behavior so that instead of our most recent entry being displayed, our 404 page is displayed.

  1. 1. To do this, we need to edit the index template of the products template group. Insert the following code:

    {if segment_2}
    {exp:weblog:entries weblog="toastproducts" limit="1" require_entry="yes"}
    {if no_results...