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

Templates as files


While working with templates within the web-based control panel interface works well, it does have limitations. If you are used to coding HTML files using your favorite text editor, you may wish to continue using that text editor and FTP the files to your website instead. In ExpressionEngine, this is entirely doable.

  1. 1. If you are following along on an actual website, you will need to ensure that the directory permissions for /system/expressionengine/ templates are set to 777. If you are using a localhost environment, this is not necessary. This directory is where your template files will be saved.

  2. 2. In the control panel, select Design | Templates | Global Preferences from the top menu.

  3. 3. Set Allow Templates to be Saved as Files to Yes. The likelihood is that the Basepath to Template File Directory is already set to the full server path for /system/expressionengine/templates, but if it is not, you will need to set it.

  4. 4. Click Update to save your changes.

  5. 5. Although this...