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

Creating a Member-Only Section


So far we have discussed the options available to us in the control panel when setting up member groups. For members with control panel access, our options were very comprehensive—we could disable entire tabs (like the Admin tab), or disable individual items within a tab. For members without control panel access, there is a lot less that we can control—why is this?

From the standpoint of a member of the public joining our site, it is entirely up to us how attractive we make membership of our site, because any member-only features have to be specifically coded that way in our templates. We can do this by using a few conditional tags.

To demonstrate this, we are going to make our Promotions page a member- only page.

Note

The Promotions page was created as part of an exercise at the end of Chapter 4 (Creating an Easy to Maintain Website)—we can use any page of our website as an example.

Making Content Visible to Members Only

The first step in creating a member...