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 Photo Gallery without the Photo Gallery Module


With all the flexibility that is built into the photo gallery module, it can be tempting to think that we have to use the photo gallery module in order to create a photo gallery in ExpressionEngine. Not so!

Some ExpressionEngine users choose to use the default weblog module to build a photo gallery (the same module we used to create our product showcase). The main argument for doing this is flexibility. Whereas the photo gallery has six custom fields, the weblog module offers many more, and you can take advantage of all the advanced features available in the weblog module (related entries, custom entry statuses, standalone entry forms, more granular membership control).

Finally, in the photo gallery module URLs are not quite as user-friendly (photos and categories have numbers whereas in the weblog module it is possible to use category URL titles in links, rather than the category ID number).

However, choosing not to use the photo...