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Behind the Curtain Part IV

Part IV in the Behind the Curtain series was delayed for longer than I anticipated.  So without further ado, let’s dive right in, shall we?  The topic of Part IV is relationships.  Relationships can be a very powerful tool when designing the data structure of your site.  For some, relationships are clouded in mystery, and not having seen them used in a practical sense, they either avoid relationships, or use them poorly.  So we’ll look at a real world example that I used when...

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Behind the Curtain Part III

I promised more meat in the next installment of entries peeking behind the curtain of the ExpressionEngine.com redesign, and I shall deliver.  Meatier, but still lean: this design decision was low fat.  If you subscribe to our feeds, you’ll notice that the URLs all begin as http://expressionengine.com/feeds/atom/ and http://expressionengine.com/feeds/rss/.  The reason quite simply is that we have only two templates for feeds, which saved us quite a bit of template creation and cut and...

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Behind the Curtain Part II

I have intimated before that from my time doing support for ExpressionEngine that I regularly noticed users not taking advantage of some of the simplest of features of ExpressionEngine.  In the Jambor-ee interview for example, I said that my “favorite” feature is the oft-unused custom status feature.  I find them to be simple and straightforward ways of adding metadata to an entry either for establishing a workflow, or as another efficient way for the weblog entries tag to control...

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Behind the Curtain - Part I

Here is my first contribution to what will be a short series of entries revealing some of the inner workings of how we are using ExpressionEngine on the EllisLab family of sites.  Today’s example wasn’t possible prior to 1.5 without the use of PHP or a plugin, and now in addition to being a standard feature, is also extremely efficient.  If you haven’t guessed, I’m talking about embed variables.

The ExpressionEngine site has multiple navigation menus on a given page: the main tabs and...

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