Hi,

I downloaded the free version of EE, and installed it. I have read over the documentation, but since I am coming from a Wordpress environment, I know that you will guess that I am confused - and I am.

I downloaded the Winter Template from EE Design and unzipped it into the theme folder and named it winter. From the Knowledgebase: “You simply need to bring the design in and then replace the “dynamic” parts of the design with ExpressionEngine tags.” O.K. How do you do it? I think the documentation really needs to be revamped.
Thanks.

Rich

richrf, welcome to the forums!

Sorry, coming from WP you must be especially confused, but EE does not actually support one-click themeing the way WP does. In reality, you only need the template on your first install, after that you have to change them manually in the “TEMPLATES” part of your control panel.

Since EE makes basically no assumptions about your setup, the structure of your site, what templat(group)s you use, etc it is not possible to let people change themes (well, templates, at this point) automatically. Most EE users develop their own layout anyway, though.

Thanks Igmar. I sort of figured that out. But I am still confused. Is there a tutorial that goes through the steps involved in changing an existing template style? There are so many moving parts: weblogs, template groups, templates, etc. Is there a step by step tutorial on how to change a template style that already exists?

Thanks for your help.

Rich

Apart from the user guide? The Getting Started section is worth checking out, and of course the video tutorials.

Hi Igmar,

Giant headache setting in. I think I am beginning to understand why users gravitate to other CMSs. I only hope that the chaotic state of your user documentation is not a reflection of the EE technical architecture and coding. I’m going to give it a go, only because Joomla and Drupal are in even worse condition.

Thanks for your help.

Rich

Rich,

There is a tutorial series that dissects the default template. 

Constructive criticism is welcomed but this post and others border on being outright insulting. If you don’t like EE and the docs you can help us improve by giving us useful, constructive feedback. We’re a company known for improving based on feedback and adapting as the community grows.

You can also find a solution better suited to your tastes.

What you can’t do is post on these forums in a negative manner and expect to get very far.

I’ve been exploring EE for a month, after living in a WP/Drupal world myself.

I found these articles very helpful.

There is, indeed, a learning curve. However, nearly every one of my requirements has been met by EE.

seajay - 05 May 2008 03:10 PM

I’ve been exploring EE for a month, after living in a WP/Drupal world myself.

I found these http://www.boyink.com/splaat/weblog/category/building-an-expressionengine-site/]articles very helpful.

There is, indeed, a learning curve. However, nearly every one of my requirements has been met by EE.

Hi seajay.

Thanks for the article links. Yes, it is one of those that I am already reviewing. It doesn’t answer many of the questions that I have, but I found this article, that was published on a web hosting site, no less, that pretty much explains what I am looking for.

http://www.surmunity.com/web-hosting-tutorials/25469-tutorial-expression-engine-customize-template.html

Thanks again for your help.

Rich

richrf - 05 May 2008 04:54 PM

Thanks for the article links. Yes, it is one of those that I am already reviewing. It doesn’t answer many of the questions that I have, but I found this article, that was published on a web hosting site, no less, that pretty much explains what I am looking for.

http://www.surmunity.com/web-hosting-tutorials/25469-tutorial-expression-engine-customize-template.html

That’s a good link, thanks for that - it’s got all the bits of stuff that I was looking for a few weeks ago. Could have saved me a lot of hair that one.

Leslie Camacho - 05 May 2008 03:06 PM

  If you don’t like EE and the docs you can help us improve by giving us useful, constructive feedback. We’re a company known for improving based on feedback and adapting as the community grows.

I found the same problem when I started using EE, and had to resort to asking questions on here to find the answer:

Need help applying styles to my site

I said at the time

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.

My personal opinion is that until you sort out the confusing help sections (now where was that information…was it in the blog…the wiki…no, maybe it was in the knowledge base? No…the documentation? Or did some kindly soul tell me how to do that on the forum?) then you’re going to have to answer these sort of questions repeatedly, which doesn’t seem (to me, anyway) to be a good use of your time which should be spent being the boss, making loads of loot and eating biscuits (cookies).

Please don’t take this as an insult - I really think it would be beneficial to new users if you had just two sections of help files - full documentation and a section of helpful tutorials that took us through the basics. Bish bang wallop - sorted.

EE is an excellent CMS system (there look, praise not insults), but it seems to be hiding it’s light under a rather unwieldy bushel of documentation sources. A maze of fact.

There is a lengthy discussion about the various resources which I’ve briefly addressed.

building-an-expressionengine-site

I’m working through this tutorial and it’s brilliant. I’ve no idea why there isn’t anything like this on the EE site or in the official documentation, but many thanks to boyink.com for explaining things so clearly.

familychoice - 06 May 2008 01:53 AM

EE is an excellent CMS system (there look, praise not insults), but it seems to be hiding it’s light under a rather unwieldy bushel of documentation sources. A maze of fact.

Hi there,

Glad that the link was of some help to you. I am a system architect by nature and by profession, so I always try to understand the architecture first, before moving ahead. There were a couple of things that were encouraging about ExpressionEngine:

1) Good architecture to build on
2) Backward compatibility, which is missing from almost all open source CMSs, except for Wordpress (which has a decidedly inflexible architecture)

However, someone has to bite the bullet on getting up to speed on ExpressionEngine. I am right now moving ahead very rapidly with Drupal, since their documentation is very well organized (much better than Joomla), and it has a relatively clear and clean architecture, for building websites. ExpressionEngine, is a do-it-yourself situation, and I simply do not have the time or energy to begin plowing through the maze of information, as you described, awaiting for the ah-ha moment, which may, or may not ever come. And who knows what realization I may come to at the ah-ha moment. Maybe, after several months, I will finally realize that EE is not for me. Yikes!

Every company has the same problem of defining their business model, target users, and how to service those targeted users the best. If EE is targeted to the whole universe of potential developers and users, then the task of documentation is daunting. However, that is a business problem, which I cannot solve. Taking a more reasonable approach, can yield some very serviceable documentation such as that available on the Drupal site.

Rich

Hi Rich,

Glad you found a solution you were looking for, even if its not EE. Some people come to us because they prefer our docs over Drupal’s, others not. Its a fair decision either way. Best to you on the web and you’re welcome back any time.