Anne Kowalski

Sunday, May 11, 2008

Moving from ExpressionEngine to WordPress

Want to move your blog from the ExpressionEngine platform to WordPress? This is a great tutorial on how to accomplish this. I used this technique to convert my other ExpressionEngine website back to WordPress, and it worked amazingly well. 

Sunday, March 23, 2008

ExpressionEngine 1.6.3 Title Issue

I noticed after installing the latest version of ExpressionEngine that I had some very strange issues going on with my title tag. It seemed to be reading an extra tag not as a tag, but as part of the entry title in the browser. As advised in this post, putting in rdf="off" within the exp:weblog:entries tag fixed the problem.

Strange.

Friday, November 30, 2007

Fixed: ExpressionEngine index.php Include Method Pagination Error

I did a lot of cleaning up today on this website, such as removing the little bugs and making it conform the the XHTML 1.0 Strict Doctype. (It appears that most pages work, with the exception of the Amazon affiliate links for my individual book review pages. But I’m not too concerned about that.) The Firefox Web Developer toolbar was invaluable for this process.

One of the things I discovered was two of my pagination links on the bottom of my homepage did not work. These are dynamically generated, and I suspected it had something to do with how I have EE configured to remove index.php from the URL. When I typed in http://annekowalski.com/P5/ I would get a 404 error. But when I typed in http://annekowalski.com/P10/ I wouldn’t.  If I wrote it as http://annekowalski.com/index.php/P5/ I would get the correct page, no errors.

It turns out that there’s a little bug, at least for my situation, with how the code for the .htaccess is written. I am using the include method, and the wiki for this section has the last conditionals written as P[0-9]{2,8}. It worked when I changed it to P[0-9]{1,8} , as described in an EE forums post.

I wonder why it is written that way in the wiki, when other people seem to be having the same problem with the first two page links not working.

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Exploring EE Custom Weblog Fields and Pagination

I’ve done a bit more work on my Library and Portfolio sections today. This time I focused on custom weblog fields and explored different ways of handling pagination.

Custom weblog fields

For the library section I decided to change the look of the thumbnail page slightly, and add a review page for each book. This is the first time I experimented with the custom weblog field option, which is really neat. I think I finally understand the whole “EE is whatever you want it to be” now. Out of the box it is suited best for a blog site, which is why I guess it gets sometimes gets stuck in this category.

Just think of custom weblog fields as separate storage areas for your content.

Out of the box EE comes with three default weblog fields: summary, body, and extended text. An example of the way this would be set up on a blog site would be that there would be two templates: a homepage template, and an article template. The teaser (summary) for an entry appears on the homepage. This entry has a link on the bottom, such as “Read More” or “Complete Article”, which when clicked takes you to the full article. The full article page, in the article template, would have the body text, and perhaps the extended text. (The extended text could contain something like photos for the article.) Again, any content you somehow want sectioned off can be assigned a custom field.

Setting up a library with custom weblog fields

For my particular situation, I organized the library section with five custom fields: Book Cover, Buy Link, Author, Review, and ISBN. I also had two main templates for my library section: the index page (thumbnails of my books) and the individual review page. On my index page, I arranged my books as thumbnails with the only the book cover weblog field displayed. When either a title or book cover is clicked, it brings the reader to the review page for that particular title (which uses the review template). In my review template, I call all of my custom weblog fields: the book cover, author, ISBN, buy link, and review text. Each has their own CSS style(s) for formatting.

I would definitely recommend that anyone read more about custom fields before they start building a site with EE. It makes organizing the data on your site much easier. I found the EE documentation for this section wasn’t very helpful in showing practical application, but searching the forums reveals some very creative ways people have used custom fields.

Creating Gallery Pagination

The major renovations on my portfolio section were adding pagination links and fixing the category lookup. (Now, when a category link is clicked, thumbnails of the section are shown instead of the category page listing.)

With pagination, there’s two methods to consider: using the paginate tag, and Next/Previous entry linking.

Here’s the difference: the paginate tag is for when you have a bunch of entries generated, and only want to display a certain number at any given time. It defines a cutoff point for the amount of entries. Next/Previous entry linking is for linking to the previous and next entries relative to one specific entry. (This is applicable to comments as well.)

I made the mistake of trying to use the paginate tag as the navigation for my portfolio, and then wondered why I had such weird results. I needed to use Next/Previous entry linking instead.

Since Next/Previous entry linking is independent, you should define the weblog you want to link to. (In my case I added the weblog="portfolio" parameter to the tag so that only entries from my portfolio weblog would be linked.)

Reading the two user documents I have linked to above should answer most questions about how to use the pagination and Next/Previous entry linking methods.

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.