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

The FAQ snippet


The final step in getting visitors into the Frequently Asked Questions section of the website is to display Frequently Asked Questions in the widebar at the bottom of each page. Currently, there are two, static FAQs that are displayed in the widebar. In this section, you will update the widebar to display three random entries from the FAQs channel. To do this, it makes sense to use a snippet. Why a snippet? If you recall from Chapter 4, a snippet is used when you want to reduce repetition. In this case, since the widebar will be used on lots of templates, it is a great candidate for becoming a snippet. Why not a global variable? Remember that global variables do not support ExpressionEngine tags. Since you are planning to show data from an ExpressionEngine channel, a snippet is required.

Note

In this section, you are choosing to display three random entries in your widebar. If you wanted more control over which FAQs were displayed at the bottom of every page, you could manually...