Comment » 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.
