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Dissecting the Default Templates

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Lisa Wess
Lisa Wess
Director of Community Services

Dissecting the Default Templates: Assigned Variables

Sep 07, 2007      Permalink     Discuss

Back in May, 2004, I discovered ExpressionEngine.  Why?  I found out that EllisLab (then pMachine, Inc) was giving away 1000 licenses (and then added another 250 later!).  I got mine.

ExpressionEngine was different than what I was used to: had different ideas on templates and storage and was wonderfully new.  I didn’t even know where to set a limit for number of posts shown ...

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Lisa Wess
Lisa Wess
Director of Community Services

Dissecting the Default Templates: Variables, Paths, and weblog=

Sep 13, 2007      Permalink     Discuss

As we head down the road of dissecting the default templates, we’re going to learn some of the important facets of ExpressionEngine’s infrastructure.

Today, we’re going to focus on the area between the <head> and </head> section of the index template.

In doing that, we’re going to come across three vital elements that you need to understand, and it will be easier to do so ...

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Lisa Wess
Lisa Wess
Director of Community Services

Dissecting the Default Templates: Category Headings and Parameters

Sep 20, 2007      Permalink     Discuss

It’s time to move further down our default index template, don’t you think?  So far, we’ve covered assigned variables and paths,  variables, and weblog=.

In this article we’re going to start digging a bit deeper into the innards of ExpressionEngine; and we needn’t be too careful, she’s not fragile, I promise!

We’ve already worked with those major building blocks: paths and ...

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Lisa Wess
Lisa Wess
Director of Community Services

Dissecting the Default Templates: The Weblog Entries Tag

Sep 27, 2007      Permalink     Discuss

Welcome back to Dissection Thursday, folks!  Today’s article is going to focus on the weblog entries tag, arguably one of the most important tag pairs in ExpressionEngine.  If this is your first time reading this series, then I recommend reviewing the first three articles: assigned variables, variables, paths, and weblog=, and the category heading tag pair.

We’ve often heard ...

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Lisa Wess
Lisa Wess
Director of Community Services

Dissecting the Default Templates: Date Headings, Dates, and Titles

Oct 04, 2007      Permalink     Discuss

Last week we started to dig into the main content area of our default template.  We did this by opening up the weblog entries tag, and dissecting what the parameters did.

For our default template, the main content in the index page is delivered between the {exp:weblog:entries} opening tag and the {/exp:weblog:entries} closing tag.  Everything between is some form of variable ...

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Lisa Wess
Lisa Wess
Director of Community Services

Dissecting the Default Templates: Custom Weblog Fields

Oct 11, 2007      Permalink     Discuss

Last week I promised that we would soon be getting into custom fields.  Well, the time has come.

Remember, we’re currently in the middle of the weblog entries tag, in our index template of the default templates.  The next 3 lines of the template we know contain variables, and we know this because they are surrounded by curly brackets.  But what are these variables and where ...

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Lisa Wess
Lisa Wess
Director of Community Services

Dissecting the Default Templates: Categories Variable Pair

Oct 18, 2007      Permalink     Discuss

Welcome to the Thursday installation of Dissecting the Default Templates.  Last week, we discussed custom weblog fields.

This week, we’re going to skip down a bit. The next few lines in our template include the simple use of some date variables and other variables which we have already discussed.

After that, however, we want to display what categories an entry belongs to, ...

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Lisa Wess
Lisa Wess
Director of Community Services

Dissecting the Default Templates: Conditional Variable Pairs

Nov 02, 2007      Permalink     Discuss

So, we’ve now been introduced to many of the core concepts in ExpressionEngine, including parameters, variables, paths, assigned variables, and variable pairs.  Now it’s time to begin our adventures into conditionals.

Conditionals are a powerful concept that allow you to show data based on the existence of some other value stored in the system.  You can create conditionals ...

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Lisa Wess
Lisa Wess
Director of Community Services

Dissecting the Default Templates: Paginate Variable Pair

Nov 08, 2007      Permalink     Discuss

As we move down the template, we can see the light at the end of the {exp:weblog:entries} tag: the Pagination code. In a case where you have many entries in a weblog, and want to give people the ability to go through all of those entries, you probably will not want them all on one page.  But we need some access to those, so how about being able to go to the second page of the ...

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Lisa Wess
Lisa Wess
Director of Community Services

Dissecting the Default Templates: Member Links and Conditionals

Nov 15, 2007      Permalink     Discuss

Now that we’ve completed our investigation into the basic use of the weblog entries tag, it’s time to move on to new and exciting features in our default template.  The next few lines give us yet another chance to look at conditionals, as well as the front-facing membership system. Remember, the membership module is not included with EECore, so these links will really only ...

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Lisa Wess
Lisa Wess
Director of Community Services

Dissecting the Default Templates: Recent Entries List

Nov 29, 2007      Permalink     Discuss

Well, here we are again, moving on down the default index template.  However, before we begin, I would like to draw everyone’s attention to the new navigation that we implemented to peruse the “series” types of articles on our blog.  If you head over to our blog and look in the right column, you’ll see all of the series.  If you click on one, such as Dissecting the Default ...

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Lisa Wess
Lisa Wess
Director of Community Services

Dissecting the Default Templates: Category List

Dec 06, 2007      Permalink     Discuss

Nearly all of the Sites that I have seen under ExpressionEngine make some use of Categories; either for labeling, or grouping, or navigation.  ExpressionEngine has an extremely robust category implementation, including the ability to use category URL titles, category custom fields, and conditionals based on categories.

The next few lines in our default index template are ...

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Lisa Wess
Lisa Wess
Director of Community Services

Dissecting the Default Templates: Month Links

Dec 14, 2007      Permalink     Discuss

Last week we discussed one way of viewing older entries, and that was by category.  Another popular method to browse archives is by date.  While you can use parameters to limit the weblog entries tag by date, ExpressionEngine will also look at the URL and recognize a date string.  You can read more about this magic in The Importance of Semantics: Dates

It is common to want to ...

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Lisa Wess
Lisa Wess
Director of Community Services

Dissecting the Default Templates: RSS, Referrers, Mailing Lists

Dec 20, 2007      Permalink     Discuss

I had a dream that I would be done with the index template by Christmas, so that the New Year could bring something new and exciting to Thursdays.

Guess what?  We’ve got syndicate links, a referrer link, and the mailing list.  Guess what else - that’s it for the default index template. 

Shall we just head on in? Exciting times ahead!

The next few lines link to our RSS ...

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