Ok, I created some new templates, based on info from the video tutorial, but now my home page has disappeared and there’s just a blank page. The new pages I created are unstyled, since there isn’t any info on how I apply styles to them (though they do show some blog posts), and I’ve no idea how to get my home page back. For a while when I clicked the ‘my site’ link in the control panel a page of css code would open up in Dreamweaver instead.

Confused? You betcha. I’ve obviously done something wrong, but as the information availble is so vague and dispersed I’ve no idea what.

I really, really need a nice, easy to understand tutorial on creating a basic website - say a 5 page website with a contact form, which can be styled using my own css. The project I have in is much more complex - but I need to start somewhere.

Instead all I can find are fragments of information dotted around in FAQ’s, User Guides, Knowledge Bases, Wiki’s, Forums, third party please pay me websites….

Wordpress works in a similar way to EE, it has it’s quirks and so does EE, yet I was able to get the bare bones of a website up and running within a couple of hours, thanks to their extensive documentation. I’ve been playing with EE for a couple of days and all I’ve got to show for it are some broken pages and I’m just about to uninstall it and start from scratch, as I have absolutely no idea what is wrong.

I’ve got to buy EE today, but I’ve almost reached the conclusion that it’s actually going to be better to take my chances with Wordpress and a gaggle of third party plugins to do the job than it is to use EE as the ‘learning curve’ is more of an assault course.

I cannot believe how difficult this is turning out to be. I am so very disappointed.

Hi familychoice, I’ve split this comment to a new topic in the Tech Support forum to see if we can’t help you over this speed bump.

Before I begin, I’d like to get a baseline of your level of experience with building sites, so I can tailor my instructions.  I’m going to walk you through a few steps that should let you hit a light bulb pretty quickly.  If my assistance in this regard doesn’t get you to that destination, then ExpressionEngine might not be right for you.  First, I’d like you to drop any assumptions you have about how ExpressionEngine works.  It’s really not comparable to WP in terms of how it works, so that may be artificially holding you back.  Do you know how to build a site with static HTML and CSS files?

Hi,

thanks for the reply.

I’ve built hundreds of websites - I’ve worked as a designer/developer for 15 years and can do some basic things with php (I’ve built my own simple CMS system before), but my skills are really in the HTML/CSS side of things.

I’ve just uninstalled my core demo as it was a mess, so I’ll have a clean install shortly.

Ok, sounds great.  After your clean install is complete, please do the following:

1) Click the Templates tab
2) Select the “site” template group and then click “Delete Group” in the box just to the right of it.  Confirm and perform the action.
3) Repeat step 2 with the “search” template group.
4) Click the Create a New Template Group button (top right), name it ‘test’ and check the box labelled “Make the index template in this group your site’s home page”
5) Click the ‘index’ template in the template listing to open that template for editing.
6) Cut and paste the following into the template:

7) Click “Update” and then click “View Rendered Template”.  You’ll notice too that since we selected this to be the site’s default index template that visiting your site without a template group or template in the URL will display this page.
8) If possible, provide a public link to this test template.

Hi,

you’ll have to bear with me…I’m having problems re-installing as EE seems convinced there’s a version already installed, despite the fact that I’ve removed all the tables and files. I’ll delete the database and create a new one.

Ho hum.

Ok, additionally make sure that your config.php file is empty and that it has full write permissions (on most servers, that translates to 666).

Ok, with you so far Derek.

The new install worked after I replaced the old database with a new one (no idea why, I’d removed all the old tables, but it’s working now), and I’ve created my ‘hello world page’.

Cool, now we will add a stylesheet.

1) Back to the Template manager, click “New Template” to the right of the “Choose Group” group selection box.
2) Name this template “my.css” and select “CSS Stylesheet” from the Template Type drop-down, and click submit.
3) Click the newly created “my.css” template (note that it has a different icon from the index template, indicating that it is a stylesheet)
4) Paste this into the new template, clicking “Update and Finished” to submit the template:

5) Click the “index” template again to edit it.  We’re going to change this:

to this:

6) After making the change, click Update, and again “View Rendered Template” to see the results.

The key here is:
a) making a CSS Stylesheet template
b) linking to it with the the <link> tag in the <head> section of the HTML document.

Thank you Derek - that is perfect - exactly what I needed to know.

I don’t understand why this isn’t explained anywhere else though, as it seems exactly the sort of thing most people would need to do.

We’ll certainly take your feedback into consideration as to how we introduce new users to the template system.  Let us know if you need any additional help.

fixed

Great. I’m closing that one out, if you have additional issue, plese simply start a new thread. Thank you.