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

Designing your channel


One of the biggest benefits to using ExpressionEngine is the ability to customize your channel fields. This allows you to really tailor the fields to the content that will be in the channel.

In this case, you are creating a channel for Ed & Eg's Frequently Asked Questions. You will need two text fields — one for the question and one for the answer. By splitting up the question and answer fields in this way, you gain the ability to display the question separately from the answer — a design you will take full advantage of. You will create a multiple-entry page where visitors can see the various questions that have been asked and (hopefully) be tempted to click to find out the answers. When they click on a given question, the visitor will be taken to a single-entry page where the question and the answer will be displayed, along with comments from other visitors, with the ability to add their own comments.

This design of single and multiple-entry pages is actually fundamental...