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.
ExpressionEngine archive
Articles on the ExpressionEngine Content Management System.
Redesigning ExpressionEngine sites
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.
Fetching posts in Wordpress and ExpressionEngine with jQuery and AJAX
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:
- 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.
- The client specifically asked for AJAX to be used.
More on Fetching posts in Wordpress and ExpressionEngine with jQuery and AJAX
Custom ExpressionEngine template solutions
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
File and image management plugins for TinyMCE
PayPal options and Expression Engine’s Simple Commerce Module
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
TinyMCE problem with Expression Engine in Firefox
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.
‘No input file specified’ problem
If you’ve installed ExpressionEngine but find you get a ‘No input file specified’ error message on anything but the home page of the site, chances are it’s because your server doesn’t support the path_info server variable.
