Anne Kowalski

Friday, November 02, 2007

Ask for PHP 5, and You Shall Receive

After reading this post on the ExpressionEngine newsfeed, I was sold on PHP 5. (And also the fact that support for PHP 4 will be discontinued at the end of the year also had something to do with it.) I decided to ask my hosting provider InMotion Hosting when they were planning to move to PHP 5. Turns out they already had another server which was PHP 5 ready, so they moved my account overnight to the new server. Awesome.

I’ve been working with InMotion Hosting for almost a year now, and have zero complaints. I’ve always gotten quick responses and had every issue resolved, no matter how silly or mundane. All I have to do is ask.

Thursday, November 01, 2007

The Move is Almost Done

I’ve got most of what I want done on this site. In about a week I was able to go from a plain XHTML/CSS design to a complete EE site. I have a few more things I need to fix, such as the individual entry breadcrumb for my portfolio page and styling the login and search pages. (And there’s still some design elements I’m not sure about...but that’s easy to fix later.)

Overall it wasn’t too painful, just very, very involved because I was learning the system as I went along. I logged in a considerable amount of time searching the forums and RTFM. The good thing was that every problem I encountered, every question I had, was resolved by using these two resources. I definitely feel smarter than I did last week.

Since people do the same things in ExpressionEngine so many different ways, I thought I’d list out what I’ve done so far for this project. This site uses the personal version of EE.

Overview

Setup the blog entry section

This was pretty easy to do. I used most of the default EE settings, which work great for the typical blog. At this point I was hardly familiar with the template tags, variables, and parameters of EE so

“Chunk" the design

At first I kept everything in one template to get the hang of how things linked together in EE, and to focus on debugging the XHTML/CSS integration. But this became very overwhelming once I started working with more than one template. I ended up with way too many typos and broken links. Once I put the header, footer, top navigation, and sidebar into their own Web Page template files (which were referenced from within the other template files via {embed="template_group/template_name"} (and in some instances {embed="{my_template_group}/template_name"}), I was able to work faster, with fewer mistakes.

After I dug into the documentation a little more I discovered dynamically assigned global variables. This saved me a significant amount of time.

This is another thing I like about EE. You don’t need to jump in 100% in the beginning. You can start out manual, then as you get more comfortable with the system start automating things.

Setup a weblog for pages

It took a little while for me to wrap my head around the idea of using a weblog for something besides the traditional dynamic blog posts. I’m pretty comfortable now with the whole concept of weblogs now. Once I thought of it less as a blog post and more as dynamically generated content and sections, I started to get the hang of how to use them. I guess it is like how people trip up over the idea of nodes in Drupal.

Create the contact form

The email form capabilities included with EE are not very powerful. I used the Freeform module from Solspace instead. It gives many more options, such as input validation for any field(s) of your choosing. I put my contact form in a separate template.

Configure the portfolio gallery

This was one of the more involved parts of the site. I ended up setting up a weblog for this section. I’ll be writing more about that in a later entry.

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

The Move to Expression Engine

After some consideration I decided to move this website from WordPress to Expression Engine.

I have been using Expression Engine on one of my other websites, and once I spent some time with it I just liked it better than WordPress. The key to really appreciating Expression Engine is to throw out your old ideas of how a CMS is “supposed to work” and just tinker with it for a while. You can do almost anything with it.

I have a personal license for this domain, but there is also a free core version that should cover most basic blogs. I consider EE well worth the cost; while it does take a bit to getting used to (especially if you are used to the no-brainer WordPress), it is professional and support is excellent.

Importing WordPress Entries into EE

Converting to MT Format

I used the WordPress to Movable Type Export Script to convert all of my WordPress entries, comments, etc into the MT format for importation into EE. I first tried the WP Export WordPress plugin, but encountered a fatal error within my control panel when I tried to run it.

The export script worked very well, but not perfectly. Some of the text in a few entries was a little “off”. I often use the WYSIWYG editor in WordPress. I wonder if that had something to do with it.

Category Import Problems

The major problem I had with importation was my categories. I could view them in the control panel, but they would not show up on the actual page. The articles would show only one category, and the category list on my sidebar was blank. I have a fresh install of the full personal version of 1.6.0; supposedly this was a bug in earlier versions that has been fixed, but it wasn’t the case for me. Fortunately EE’s wiki article helped me fix this problem.

Templating EE

Templating Expression Engine was not a bad experience at all. It is a bit challenging and slightly overwhelming to convert an XHTML/CSS static theme to EE the first time, but it can be done with a minimal amount of pain. I set up a local test server, installed EE, and started tearing apart the default templates. Within a couple of hours I went from not knowing anything about Expression Engine’s tag and templating system to having the homepage 90% finished.

I decided to use the photo gallery module for my portfolio page. While getting the hang of the photo gallery took a bit of getting used to, I had a customized portfolio gallery almost finished in less than a day.

I have to admit I wasn’t extremely impressed by EE when I first started using it, but given some time I’ve realized how good the system is. It finds that happy medium between being easy to customize and easy to use. It is one of those things you just have to work with for a while.

Monday, October 08, 2007

Integrate Drupal with WordPress

There's module available to integrate Drupal with WordPress. I remember seeing a request for this several times on the Drupal forums, but the whole idea didn't seem very popular with the Drupal crowd. I don't see why not...while Drupal has a blog module it doesn't feel as polished to me as WordPress.

Thursday, October 04, 2007

Full Screen Flash Videos

Monkey Flash has a very well written tutorial on how to enable full screen mode for flash videos. Note: I'm not 100% certain, but I believe it requires Flash CS3.