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

Creating templates


To start with, build two templates: one for the CSS stylesheet and one that contains the HTML that defines the page structure and brings in your channel content. Since the CSS template will be used all over your website, it makes sense to put this in a separate template group called includes (which you will create).

For the page itself, use the index template in the site template group (created in Chapter 3).

  1. 1. In the control panel, click on Design | Templates | Template Manager from the top menu (or if you created a custom tab for the Template Manager as part of Chapter 3, click that instead). Then select the New Group button, located above the list of existing template groups.

  2. 2. Call the new template group includes. Do not duplicate a group and do not make the index template your site's home page. Click Submit.

  3. 3. Back on the Template Management screen, make sure the includes template group is selected, and then click on New Template.

  4. 4. Call the new template site_css...