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 photo gallery


There are many different ways you can approach creating a photo gallery in ExpressionEngine. At the most basic level, you have a choice between each channel entry containing only one photo (and a description) or each channel entry containing a set of photos. If you allow only one photo per entry, you can use categories to organize the photos into galleries (and you can even include the same photo in more than one gallery). If you allow multiple photos per channel entry, each entry represents a photo gallery by itself.

One way to accommodate multiple photos per entry is to create as many custom fields as the photos you think you will have in a gallery. For example, if you know each gallery will have a maximum of 20 photos, then you could create 20 custom fields for the photos and 20 custom fields for the descriptions. This solution works, but is not the most flexible (that is, to add 21 photos to a gallery, you would have to modify your custom fields and your...