Anne Kowalski

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.

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Solved: EE Archive Image Problem

I noted in my earlier entry about the archive post images not showing up in Expression Engine.

Turns out that I needed to change the path to the image. I replaced the absolute URL to the image with http://annekowalski.com/images/uploads/.

For example, if the location of the image was: http://clothingengineer.com/images/uploads/2007/08/burda-2-07-108-sleevecap.jpg

I changed it to read as: http://annekowalski.com/images/uploads/2007/08/burda-2-07-108-sleevecap.jpg within my image tag.

Notice how there is no slash between the http://annekowalski.com/images/uploads/ and 2007.

Now the only issue is that lightbox does not work on the archived posts. But it really isn't that important...so it is being pushed on the back burner for now. First I have to get a theme up and running