As with anything, you will learn ExpressionEngine best by using it. That is where this book comes in. By working through these tutorials on your own installation (particularly the first few chapters), you will gain practical insights into how ExpressionEngine can be used to build a website. Each chapter has step-by-step instructions; not a mouse click is missed. This makes it easy to follow-along and understand everything that you are doing and why you are doing it.

At the end of each chapter, there are exercises. These exercises are not designed to be particularly difficult, but rather to encourage you to problem-solve for yourself. Once you have completed the exercises, feel free to compare your solution with the suggested solution in Appendix B. You never know — you may even find a better solution on your own than that proposed at the back of the book!

Note that taking a step-by-step approach means that each chapter is not comprehensive — it does not tell you all the possibilities that could be. There are always multiple ways to the same solution and often the best way will vary depending on the individual site. Although the book will provide guidelines and best practices, the reality is that one template and template group structure might work great for a website with a small amount of content, but become unmanageable for a very large website. Likewise, the structure required for a very large website might be overkill if you only have a small amount of content. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. The aim of this book is to equip you with the basic training you need to venture out into the documentation or the forums and feel confident asking for help and experimenting with different ideas.

This book uses the example of building a website for a small business. The website starts out as a static HTML website. Over the course of the book, you will step through how to convert the website into ExpressionEngine and enhance it — re-writing the FAQs section to be more dynamic, allowing comments, setting up members-only content, adding a calendar, a photo gallery, a mailing list, and a search form. By the time you are done, the website will be barely recognizable from where you started.