There’s come a time in a web designer’s life when he/she must accept that hand-coding every single page of their own site is no longer a practical solution. A decision must be made – for those that can, it’s very tempting to believe that a hand-crafted content management solution is the way forward. And so they begin, working evenings and weekends - because client work must take priority - to write the best CMS ever known to mankind. Its going to be easy-to-use but be adaptable to cover all the different types of content and design templates that make up the designer’s site. Its going to be so brillant that people will be knocking down his/her doors to get their own copy of ‘CMS Utopia’.

Fast-forward six months later. The designer’s other half is threatening divorce on the ground of abandonment and the designer themselves feels like crying every time they look at the length of their to-do list before the CMS even reaches a workable copy. There must be a better way ....

Well indeed there is. Not that the story above holds any truth for me I hasten to add, I never even got to the starting point! After hearing much talk from various respected bloggers about using a CMS called Expression Engine, I decided it was time to see what all the fuss was about. I set myself a task of seeing if I could recreate my existing site, plus adding in a blog with the ability for readers to add comments, within an afternoon.

So off I trotted to the Expression Engine website and purchased myself a commercial licence for the princely sum of £132.20 ($249.95). This had better be good, I though to myself, for that price. The most I’ve ever paid for software before was £56 for Parallels Desktop for Mac, and that was only when I realised there was no other solution if I wanted to work on a Mac (although now I don’t know how I ever survived without it). I should point out that there is a free Core version available for personal use for those that prefer to try before you buy. For my purposes I wanted to test it on my live system so the Commercial licence was the way to go.

Download and installation was a cinch. I downloaded the files, changed a few file permissions in accordance with the instruction manual and created my database. Then it was a simple matter of pointing my browser to the install.php script in my root directory.

EE comes installed with sample templates so its worth backing these up to use later as a reference. EE works on a system of templates and ‘weblogs’. Weblogs is the term used by default but essentially these are sections of your site. If, like me, different sections of your site use different design layouts then this is a powerful and easy way of implementing this.

I’m not going to go into the details of EE tags in this article as it would complicate issues at this stage. The test here is to see if I could pick up enough knowledge of the structure of EE to convert my site in an afternoon.

After playing around with the existing sample content for a while I began to understand that I needed to create a weblog for each section of my site: Home, About, Contact, Portfolio and finally Articles. Each weblog had its own template group with a template for each different page design within that section. I could set up the CSS file as a css template which would save me from editing in a text editor and uploading via FTP.

I discovered that EE can embed templates into others, a concept that PHP developers will understand well as we frequently use the include (foo.php) code to include header/footer files in a site. So with this in mind I created a new template group with a separate template file for each of the recurring parts of the design: header, footer, sidebar.

I could set up custom entry fields for each weblog which meant that for the Portfolio section I could add an image field for the image of each website and a field to enter the website’s address with appropriate link text.

My mind began spinning with possibilites – if I could create a weblog for my Portfolio page then surely I could do the same for the ‘General Interest’ links that appear in the sidebar. Sure enough, five minutes and one more weblog with custom entry fields later, it was done.

Adding content couldn’t be simpler. By clicking on Publish and picking the appropriate weblog, I filled out the entry form, clicked submit and voila!

After spending another hour adding all the content to the site I was running out of time. My deadline of 5.30 was approaching and I hadn’t even begun to tackle the Articles templates or the Comments function.

I decided to quit while the going was good and reviewed what I had already achieved. I had indeed recreating my existing site (the Articles was a new section) in an unbelievable FOUR hours! Overall the concept of how to structure a site in EE was very easy to understand and quick to achieve. My first impressions after working with the CMS for an afternoon is that it is software which looks to show promise for its hefty price tag (by my standards at least). I’ll be spending the next few weeks exploring it further and trying to get to grips with some of its advanced features.

Friday, March 16, 2007   Filed in: Expression Engine

Comments

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