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

Using XAMPP


The XAMPP control panel is used to control and monitor the status of services that XAMPP has installed. When the control panel is running, the following icon will be visible in your system tray:

Double-clicking on this icon will bring up the Control Panel.

For ExpressionEngine to be able to install and run, both Apache and MySQL need to be running. If they are not, check the box marked Svc, and click Start to start them as services.

Note

If the Apache service will not start and stay started, verify that you have exited out of Skype and/or ISS.

Allowing .htaccess Files to Be Used

To take advantage of some features in ExpressionEngine (such as removing the index.php from ExpressionEngine URLs), we need to use a .htaccess file, which requires the Apache module mod_rewrite to be enabled.

  1. 1. First, browse to C:\xampp\apache\conf in Windows Explorer, and open the file httpd.conf in a text editor.

  2. 2. Do a search for the phase mod_rewrite and you should find a line that reads:

    #LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so
    
  3. 3. Remove the leading # symbol, and save the file. (This uncomments the line in question).

Your .htaccess files should now be recognized—we will be using them in Chapter 2.

XAMPP in Action

With Apache and MySQL running, we are ready to go.

  1. 1. Open up a browser and navigate to http://localhost/.

  2. 2. If XAMPP is running, you should see a splash screen as follows. Select English.

  3. 3. We are then brought to the main XAMPP home page.

Now that XAMPP is installed, there is one important folder to note: C:\xampp\htdocs. This is our web server root. A file placed in this folder will be accessible via our http://localhost/ domain. Right now, this folder contains all the files for the web page shown in the previous screenshot. we can remove or backup these files so that they do not conflict in anyway with ExpressionEngine when we install it.