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

Setting up your channels


To set up an event and an event sponsors channel, you will first create the custom fields, then create the channels, then populate the channels with example data, before finally creating the templates that you will use to display the channel data.

When creating two channels that are to be related, it's best to start with the channel whose data will be included in the other channel — therefore, start with the event sponsors channel.

Creating custom fields for event sponsors

  1. 1. Select Admin | Channel Administration | Custom Fields.

  2. 2. Select Create a New Channel Field Group and call the field group event_sponsors. Click Submit.

  3. 3. Now select Add/Edit Custom Fields for the event_sponsors field group.

  4. 4. For now, keep things simple and create only one field — a generic about field. (You could, of course, create as many fields as you want). Select Create a New Custom Field.

  5. 5. The field type will be Textarea. The field label will be About and the field name will be event_sponsors_about...