Book Image

Building Websites with ExpressionEngine 2

By : Leonard Murphy
Book Image

Building Websites with ExpressionEngine 2

By: Leonard Murphy

Overview of this book

<p>ExpressionEngine is a flexible, feature-rich content management system used by top designers and web professionals across the world to build and manage their websites. It is written in the world's most popular web scripting language, PHP, and built on the MySQL database server. Are you eager to start creating websites with ExpressionEngine?<br /><br />Written for ExpressionEngine version 2.1 and later, this book will give you clear, concise, and practical guidance to take you from the basics of setting up ExpressionEngine to developing the skills you need to create ExpressionEngine websites to be reckoned with.<br /><br />You will begin with setting up a basic installation of ExpressionEngine. You will then learn how it works, before learning how to create and manage your website in ExpressionEngine. As you progress further into the book you will learn how to build an events calendar and how to build a photo gallery and before you know it, visitors to your website will be able to post comments, search your content, sign-up for a mailing list, and even send their friends an e-mail. As you consider the benefits of buying this book, you will learn how to manage members and member groups, how to optimize your website and avoid repetition, how to remove the index.php file for cleaner URLs, and how to take backups. At the end of the book, you will learn how to update ExpressionEngine to its latest version.</p>
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Building Websites with ExpressionEngine 2
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Solutions to Exercises

Summary


In this chapter, you learned about the routine maintenance tasks that come with running a powerful database-driven website (such as database backups and software upgrades). You learned about the different types of add-ons that ExpressionEngine accommodates, and about specific add-ons and add-on developers that are worth being aware of. Finally, you learned about optimizing ExpressionEngine to fight spam and improve page-load times.

The key points to remember after working through this chapter (and the book) are:

  • Back up your website, including the database.

  • Upgrade ExpressionEngine when new versions are released (or at least every few versions). If you continue to use an older version, you will not have all the latest features and bug-fixes, and newer add-ons may not be compatible.

  • ExpressionEngine is highly extensible, and many of the add-ons are high-quality commercial grade pieces of software. If there is something you wish ExpressionEngine could do, research the add-on library first...