Nice article! You can simplify your rewriterule a little if you wanted to…

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond $1 !^(global|archive|images|expressionengine|index\.php).*
RewriteRule ^(.*) index.php/$1 [NC,L]

I’d say the learning curve is reasonably steep simply because of the sheer amount of functionality available. Initially I had speed issues and had to stop using it (10 second page build times) but it turned out to be my host fault. Switching to a different host and all those issues went away. It’s almost as fast as Textpattern with judicious use of the caching system.

anybody considering cms should look at drupal.org which is for free

neon- I’ve spent quite a lot of time with Drupal.  It’s a wonderful system, and superior to EE in a few respects (eg. threaded comments, post/comment editing links, plugins for wysiwyg article editors, user avatar uploads, already has polling and forums modules). 

But from a site design perspective, which I believe to be the focus of Mark’s article here, Drupal is nowhere close to ExpressionEngine. Changing the look of your site in Drupal, especially if you’re a “non-techie”, is a major pain in the rear. (In fact, that’s why I eventually dumped it, despite all the awesome features) In ExpressionEngine, tweaking your layout or completely redesigning your site is amazingly simple.

First let me say I really like the design of this site.  Nice and clean.  Let the content be the main feature.  I like it a lot.

Second, dave frey commented that there aren’t edit post/comment links in EE, which isn’t true.  There may not be a specific tag for it (like exp:entry:editlink), but you can have these tags.  I do on my site, but only I can see them.  If you do a search on the EE support forums, you’ll find how it’s doable.

Also, user avatars are also doable since you can create custom member fields.  I believe there are a couple people who have enabled user avatars on their sites (not counting the Gravatar system).

Where he’s correct is there are no threaded comments, no forum module (yet) and no WYSIWYG editor in the control panel.

dave frey commented that there aren?t edit post/comment links in EE, which isn?t true.  There may not be a specific tag for it (like exp:entry:editlink), but you can have these tags.  I do on my site, but only I can see them.  If you do a search on the EE support forums, you?ll find how it?s doable.
My point was that in Drupal,it’s already there; in EE, it’s not native functionality; you have to do a workaround to get it. In my view, that’s an area where Drupal has EE beat.

Also, user avatars are also doable since you can create custom member fields. 
If you read what I wrote more carefully, I said Drupal has avatar UPLOADS.  In EE, there’s no way for users to UPLOAD an avatar.

I guess I misunderstood your point.  The functionality is there in EE, there’s just not a simple tag for it.  You’re saying that Drupal has a tag (or the equivalent) for it, right?  I guess a plugin could be made that would enable the use of a simple tag in EE templates.

And I didn’t see “upload”.  In that respect, you are also correct.

I just wanted to say that I really like your design.  I love clean designs and yours looks great!  If you ever wanted to contribute a free template to http://www.eedesign.org I would be honored to host it!  :)

I’d like to hear your take on how to handle navigation and general “section-based” site design - say, a small commercial site with typical sections. There’s several schools of thought on how to do this best in EE, but this is something I struggle with immensely when looking at implementing an EE solution.

For example, how would you approach navigation design? EE is amazingly powerful (I came up from pMachine, which runs my site), but hard to learn if the goal is anything but a blog. It can move beyond the blog, but it seems difficult to mold it in that direction. Thoughts? Resources?

Excellent overview considering you are so new to EE, Mark. I have to say that EE is as flexible for large content management sites as it is for blogs, it’s just that they sell it and prepare the install as a blog tool. Dip into the user guide and the ways of using it for corporate sites, fanzines and magazine sites become more obvious.

Incidentally, the install (latest version 1.2.1 - released 16th jan 05) now comes with a template by my good self, which was designed to be a truly simple guide to marrying the system with some smart, easily editable CSS. Try the ‘Logical Blocks’ template and see how you get on if you’re doing a frsh install.

As for larger sites, it soon becomes easy to define a logical system of building using multiple weblogs that takes EE well away from merely a blog tool.

Good tips, folks. I was happy indeed to find that one could set the terminology (blog/section/site et. a.)Two questions on sections/weblogs:

1. How do you handle search results? At least as of 1.1, the “search result URL path” was set on a per-blog basis. This means that search results that cross sections (i.e. blogs) can have incorrect paths. This was something I ran into - have you guys?

2. How would you handle “global” includes, such as headers or navigation? From what I could tell, templates could be global - but only for a given section. I suppose they could be global variables, but then EE tags can’t be parsed.

I hope this isn’t off-topic - but I am curious how you might solve these problems, which were the two big obstacles for non-blog use of EE in my experience.

BTW - this is probably the nicest EE-driven site I’ve seen to date! Well done.

Allan, in version 1.2 onwards you set your URL paths for search results in the Preferences of each weblog - an essential addition.

And if I understand you right, templates are global. Use {embed="setname/template"} to include a template anywhere. I always have a template set of vital includes which I then include in any relevant templates in any set.

Best way of doing global nav is to use URL segments (see User Guide) to test for which section you are visiting, then performa function based on that.

Hi Mark, thanks for the interesting article. I am also gonna move my blog over to ExpressionEngine in the future. Hope you don’t mind that I’ve linked to this article in today’s post about pMachine Pro being no longer developed.

Sorry to post twice but a question just popped up. As you know I’ve built my first commercial site using EE. Just like you I’ve used 1 ‘weblog’ for each section and I’ve changed the word “weblog” to “section” so my client gets a better understanding when he needs to make an update. For the subsections I’ve used ‘categories’ and so they are called this way in the admin. Do you know if this can also be changed in ‘subsections’? Hope this make sense to you. Thanks in advance.

Well, one thing is for sure pMachine is totally different from EE. It doesn’t have the flexibility like EE. On the other hand it is even more simple to set up. Although I haven’t got any experience with setting up a photoblog, I think it is pretty doable. Did a bit of a search on this and found this url. It’s from Chris Curtis, one of the developers and he explains how he did his gallery.

I’m an EE fan, and I do love the idea of having my albums integrated with my site, but I’ve actually found EE’s gallery module to be rather limited and lacking very basic features found in most popular gallery programs (such as Menalto’s Gallery and Coppermine, plus the gallery that comes with Typepad) I’m hoping they’ll improve on it, but based on some things I’ve seen in the forums, the EE dev team doesn’t seem very interested in enhancing it much beyond what’s there already.  For now, I’m forced to stay with Coppermine so I don’t lose features I like.

I have downloaded and installed just about every CMS out there. I have been looking for the perfect solution for my portfolio, but I think I may have found it in Expression Engine. I will first download the trial and then go from there. I have also been working with Drupal...let me tell you off the bat...Drupal makes it tough for Code-sensitive designers like myself. I had lots of trouble ( still do ) with making the site look like something I designed and not just a template that has been modified. So...expression engine will be my next step...$149 to try though it pretty tough to swallow...so we shall see.

To everyone nervous about dropping $150, keep in mind that there are two trial options to get you feet wet with.

Also, in case anyone is curious about using EE for a larger site, the key is to familarize yourself with its caching.  Even if just for a minute or two at a time if you’re running a high traffic site can be a big help.

Finally, while I’m not a developer, they have very clear developer documentation for writing modules.

~cc

Oops, also meant to throw up an example for multiple content types: ACT’s Truth Center.

There are 7 different content types on that page, each with slightly different fields.

Here is another with a wider variety: http://ohio.actforvictory.org/

Notice content types like field office, and volunteer of the week.

EE is also great about reusing components.  For example, when we created a group of fields for a state press release, we were able to create weblogs for each state’s press shop using the master set of fields.  Add one new field and everything is auto-updated.

~cc

Hi Mark, thanks for taking the time to writethis up. Especially helpful is the rewriterules in the .htaccess file. :-) I knew that had something to do with it… I got myself a copy of EE and all I have to do now is get my site to work with it. I can’t wait.

I hope you continue writing about your EE implementations and experiences (on top of your other design-related posts).

I don’t have my main design site up yet, but I am using pMachinePro for other sites. One thing I do like about pMP is its flexibility. I can build my page(s) using normal HTML and CSS, add pMachine tags where appropriate, then upload them. In fact, I’ve had *no* trouble building pages and sites using just pMP.

But now, I’m looking at EE hard, since I get an upgrade price which is very attractive. I understand EE has features pMP doesn’t have, but I’m wondering if the design is as easy. I *don’t* want to have to do everything from a web page in a control panel! I’m a visual person and that just doesn’t work for me.

Julie, EE has an option to load templates from flat files allowing you to work with templates in Dreamweaver/Go Live over FTP so you don’t have to use the control panel. The control panel is essential for configuring everything else though. I haven’t yet tried it so I don’t know how it affects perfomance. See here:

http://www.pmachine.com/expressionengine/docs/templates/flat_file_templates.html

Marc, first off love the redesign, nice and clean!
However, and this plagues a lot CMS’s not just EE, running this very page through the WC’s validator gices 52 errors against the XHTMLStrict Doctype you’ve declared. What are your experiences with EE as far as valid code goes?

Chris,thanks for the pointer to that doc; that’s very good to know. A bit less intuitive than my present method with pMachine, but I understand EE uses templates differently, all contained within one page. At least I can use BBEdit/GoLive/LayoutMaster to do the HTML and CSS offline and test it!

(Yeah, I’m an application junkie!)

Ok...so I am sold on EE...I purchased PmPro a while ago...never installed it...The question I have for you all is this...can I have flash within a post? The plan is to upload a standalone flash SWF for each portfolio entry. Kind of like a flash image gallery all encapsulated in one. Anyway...thanks a lot for all of your help everyone.

Mark, interesting about how EE treats auto-xhtml. I guess that’s the only way they CAN do it, because to EE a double return means a p tag. (Same thing with the newest version of pMachinePro.)

I like to validate, so I’ll just writein BBEdit and cut and paste.  Unless,of course, EE’s posting form is much, much better than pMP’s. (You can’t select a paragraph,and click a tag button and have it enclose the selection.) I guess I’ll find out soon; I’ll download EE’s trial as soon as I finish designing my site.

Julie, you can also choose to use Textile or Markdown to process text entered through EE’s forms. You can do it in the template or configure it as checkbox in the post form in the same way you can choose from br’s, auto-xhtml or plain text/hand coding. EE has the clever buttons too. This make EE the most flexible user input system I’ve used (I’m not a big fan of wysiwyg forms though).

Messy URLS? I seem to have a problem with my .HTACCESS file...does anyone know how to have it default back to “Messy URLS” ?

I downloaded the trial version and attempted to install it on Dreamhost, but when I reached the point where it wanted me to choose a theme, it stopped - no ‘next’ link, no submit button, and no themes in the drop-down list it had generated. No nothing.

Shame, it looked like it was pretty good.

Scott: there’s a thread in the forums on pmachine.com that discusses .htaccess for this purpose.

Paul: I haven’t heard of that issue before. I would at least check the bug forums; their software quality is in general very high, and they are very responsive to fixing valid bugs. If you can get it to work (it’s never failed for me to this point), I think it’s worth checking out.

I seem to remember some threads in the EE support forums specifically relating to the trial version and Dreamhost. I would recommend going to http://pmachine.com/forum and searching for “dreamhost” and see what comes up.  If you don’t find what you need, maybe start a new thread asking for help.  The folks in the forums are very helpful *IF* the title of your thread is very descriptive of the problem.  If your title is vague, the thread sometimes gets ignored.

Good luck.

Ah, seems that Dreamhost doesn’t have the Zend thing that’s a requirement.

Great thread as I’m new to EE and loving it but having a time wrapping my ahead around it’s paradigm.

One question for either Mark or Colly, I’m setting up my site the way Mark is describing with different “weblogs” for different sections, and I love Colly’s idea of using the url segment to display different content but how exactly would one do that? Since EE’s “if” condinals don’t allow an else or default like a switch, I’m confused how you’d display the default index content for a given template.

Anyway, sorry if that question is too off topic, but kudos on the new site and it reassures me in my choice of EE.