This is a follow up on my previous posts:
Start your ExpressionEngines! and ExpressionEngine Day 1.

Day 2 working with ExpressionEngine is coming to a close. My thoughts have done a 180 from Day 1. On my first day working with it I was feeling like I would way rather be working with ModX or WordPress but I am starting to see how ExpressionEngine could be very powerful.

Building your template

I started off by taking an actual HTML layout for a client site and building out templates. I started by splitting the page into sections similar to how I would use server side includes like header, footer, navigation for information that is included on multiple pages. Like ModX, ExpressionEngine stores all of the template data in the database. So I worked from local files building the templates and implementing the various template tags. I found these easier to work with then ModX and WordPress.

In a matter of minutes you will have your HTML page sliced and diced having a number of blocks of code being replaced by items like:

{embed=embeds/header}
 {embed=embeds/main_nav}
 {embed=embeds/footer}

Adding content with Channels and Content fields

Once you have completed your templates you will begin working creating pages. Now the concept is quite simple. You create a form then create a page to build content off of it. Then Channels are like a group of similar content. So say we have a news section. We will have a Title, body, and excerpt. We proceed and create a Content Field Group for “news” and add the fields we just named. We can then add a “News” channel that uses the “news” Content Field Group and when you go to publish a page you will see those fields! (this is kind of handy so clients only see the fields they need to fill out). You can publish unlimited number of items in a Channel. So you can go and add a tonne of news posts. Then this is how you add it to your template file:

{exp:channel:entries channel="news" limit="10" orderby="date" sort="desc"}
 {title}
 {body}
 {/exp:channel:entries}

This is a very rough example just for the record! But you open a block and specify the Channel to pull data from. Then the items within the curly braces {body} are the names of the content fields that we added.

It was a little difficult for me to wrap my head around the:

{exp:channel ….. }

I won’t lie, I am still taking it all in but I see the power of the system and am still learning.

Sweet Google Analytics Integration

One awesome feature I found was a third-party Google Analytics Addon. It integrates write in the user interface so would be an awesome feature for clients and developers alike.

But that is enough for now, writing this post is drawing from my R&D.