CMS archive

Yesterday I was working on the planning of a new site to be built with ExpressionEngine and was wondering about the best way to let editors link to other entries from within the body of an entry they’re creating or editing. ExpressionEngine doesn’t have this sort of functionality built into it by default so I asked on Twitter to find out if anyone knew of any add-ons that had been created that might do this.

More on Adding a link list to TinyMCE with ExpressionEngine

With ExpressionEngine you give your clients a lot of power and flexibility to update the content of their own site, but at some point in a site’s life there’s going to come a time when changes will be required that the site owner or his/her staff can’t do themselves via the control panel. Changes to a logo or other graphical elements of the site, adding new sections or functionality, giving the site a new ‘skin’ or theme, or completely rebuilding from the ground up will require a designer of developer to get involved.

More on Redesigning ExpressionEngine sites

Recently I came across a sitution whereby I wanted to call a list of Wordpress posts from inside the body of another post, i.e., not coding it into a template, but embedding into the body of the post itself. Not a big drama, I thought to myself: I already have the exec-php plugin installed to enable the execution of PHP from within Wordpress posts, so all I needed to do was call the Wordpress loop from the point inside the post where I wanted my list of links to appear, e.g.:

<ul>
<php $my_query = new WP_Query('cat=XX');
  while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); ?>
	<li><a href="<php the_permalink(); ?>"><php the_title(); ?></php></a></li>
</php><php endwhile; ?>
</php></ul>

More on Calling a Wordpress loop from inside a Wordpress loop

If you use TinyMCE in your Content Management System (CMS) projects, you no doubt also give clients the ability to add images and links to their content with TinyMCE’s Link and Image buttons. But by default, these popup windows come with a variety of fields into which unsuspecting clients can input values which will translate into unwanted code when delivered to the page.

More on Removing unwanted fields from TinyMCE’s image and link popup windows

Recently I was asked by a client to do some customisation of a Wordpress site to enable a site visitor to load posts from a certain category into the same part of the page via AJAX. This could have been done in a couple of different ways – using AJAX as requested; or all the posts could’ve been printed to the page, with javascript then used to hide all but one and also used to navigate between them in some sort of hide/show, fading/sliding effect. I’ve done similar things like this before using jQuery, but there were two reasons why I didn’t go that route on this occasion:

1. With javascript turned off, all the posts from the selected category would’ve been displayed on the page and as the design called for three short columns of text on the page, having one column much, much longer than the other two would really have looked wrong.
2. The client specifically asked for AJAX to be used.

More on Fetching posts in Wordpress and ExpressionEngine with jQuery and AJAX

I’ve come across a few little solutions/fixes recently to various problems I’ve encountered when building sites with ExpressionEngine (EE) that I thought it would be worth sharing. A couple of these were tips I picked up from other posters on the EE forums and the third was one I came up with myself to solve a particular problem I had. More on Custom ExpressionEngine template solutions

If you’re using ExpressionEngine (EE) with a WYSIWYG editor, chances are you’re using either TinyMCE or FCKEditor. I myself use TinyMCE and it seems like a lot of people prefer it to FCKEditor, but for one thing – it doesn’t have good image and file management capabilties built in by default.

More on File and image management plugins for TinyMCE

For the article I wrote recently on web design galleries, I compiled a table of the galleries in a MySQL database. To be able to display the table and the associated charts and other statistics that went with it, I needed to be able to connect to this external database from within Wordpress.

More on Connecting to an external database from within a Wordpress post

Recently I had to add basic shopping cart functionality to a site that had been built with ExpressionEngine (my CMS of choice). “No problem,” I thought; I can use the Simple Commerce Module (SCM), which as the names suggests, is ideally suited to simple ecommerce requirements, and which I had used before on other EE sites.

More on PayPal options and Expression Engine’s Simple Commerce Module

I just encountered a problem installing the TinyMCE editor on an install of ExpressionEngine – all the files were uploaded correctly and the extension to get it working in ExpressionEngine was uploaded and properly activated, but the editor wouldn’t appear in Firefox 2 (other browsers were fine).

I found the solution to the problem at Tis How I Code. There’s also some further discussion of the issue on the Moxiecode forum.