As happens most of the time when the internet is all abuzz with some new tool, the release of Panic software’s new web development IDE, Coda prompted most of us here at EllisLab to download it and try it out. Allow me to share with you a nifty gem that makes Coda and other applications like it (Dreamweaver, Freeway Pro, etc.) have a leg up on other workflows when working on ExpressionEngine based sites.
Wow, what a fantastic idea, I’ll try it right now. Coda seems like a very nice application. I’ve been using BBEdit for years but I sense that applications like Coda are starting to make it irrelevant.
Cool…
There was a full review/pics out yesterday kind of blowing the surprise but had to wait for Panic to officially announce today and make it available. Downloaded Coda very early this am but am having one of those meeting, meeting, meeting days. Can’t wait to try this out later.
Heh. Very nice, thank you. Funny, I was just in the process of prepping an email to both you guys and Panic about how much I’d like to see some integration. I’d still love to be able to build and manage templates directly from within Coda.
Nice tip, Les and Derek. Makes Coda a little more interesting now. The editor needs help in a big way for me to consider switching though. If the next few updates fix it, I may give Coda another serious look.
When you are working with templates as files, you are always editing the site “live”—no different than editing templates in the template editor. Whether you are doing that in a local environment, staging area, or live site is a completely different matter.
When you are working with templates as files, you are always editing the site “live”—no different than editing templates in the template editor. Whether you are doing that in a local environment, staging area, or live site is a completely different matter.
True
If you have things set up the way you describe, you can still use the built-in FTP features of Coda to get your templates to the live site?
Man I wish I could plug TextMate in as the editor. When I used SubEthaEdit (albeit a long time ago) it seems so lacking - really the big thing about it was the collaboration side.
If you have things set up the way you describe, you can still use the built-in FTP features of Coda to get your templates to the live site?
That’s really the entire point of the described workflow. When you use the Save Templates as Files feature of ExpressionEngine, your pages are served not from the database, but from the contents of those template files. So editing via FTP instantly makes changes occur on your site.
Is there any performance hit (or improvement) in using text file templates versus pulling them from the database?
The extra file access would only be noticeable on hosts with strained hardware. And by noticeable, I mean that you would be able to see a numeric difference in script execution time, not really that it would be noticeable from a usage perspective.
Great, it took me a while to get this working as I wanted it.
I ended up setting the Remote URL and Remote Root in Coda to both point at my template files directory and the following .htaccess (already rewriting out index.php elsewhere).
WOW!! two new things to learn about in one week. First it was MAMP and now CODA…. I am into them both now.
re: templates.
As I recall from my past experience savng the Templates as Files is a “preference” that I had to always remember to check .... is there a way to make this as my DEFAULT preference? i.e i don’t want to worry that if i use the web-browser to update a template that it fails to save to the file, ...
is there a way to make this as my DEFAULT preference?
No, but if a template is already saved to a file, that checkbox will remain checked if you edit the template via the Template Manager in the control panel, so it will save to the existing file unless you uncheck it.
