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 Search module


ExpressionEngine comes with a pre-built search tool to allow visitors to search your site. Although technically a module, the search functionality comes pre-installed and does not have any special setup. This means that you can start using the search tags right away.

There are two parts to enabling search on your website, namely:

  • Creating a form that allows visitors to type in and submit search terms (this could be as simple as a search box that appears in your sidebar or it could be an entire template dedicated to an advanced search).

  • Creating templates to display the search results (or that there are no results).

Note

The Search functionality only searches channels. The Discussion Forum module and the Wiki module both have separate search functions.

When you design your search forms, you can use parameters to control what is searched. By doing this, you can limit searches to particular channels, status groups, or categories. You can also determine whether you want the search...