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

Inside the control panel


Every ExpressionEngine website has a frontend website (such as the Agile Records website you can see at http://localhost/) and a backend control panel (http://localhost/admin.php or http://localhost/system/index.php). The control panel is only accessed by you and others who may be responsible for managing the website and creating the content — no one else even needs to know it exists.

Since most of the work that goes into building an ExpressionEngine-powered website will take place in the control panel, it is worth first becoming familiar with how it is organized.

Note, there is also a member control panel, which can be accessed by members of the public (if you so choose). This pared-down control panel allows the member to customize settings specific to him (such as what their member profile page says). Unlike the administrative control panel, the member control panel provides no settings to manage the overall website. You will learn more about the member control...