Instead of having a contact email address be contained in your index page and header, there should be a php page for a contact form. The way it is the email address will be stripped by web spiders and will be sold to every spammer in existence…

I have no idea what you’re talking about. When I use the contact form I see a bunch of hidden fields for recipient:

<div>
<input type=“hidden” name=“XID” value=“571b95e1b8fcace71b19a5733048fef6844821c0” />
<input type=“hidden” name=“ACT” value=“16” />
<input type=“hidden” name=“RET” value=“http://www.lisa-jill.com/index.php/info/contact/” />
<input type=“hidden” name=“URI” value=”/info/contact/” />

<input type=“hidden” name=“recipients” value=“bGlzYUBjcmVhdGl2ZWx5ZGV2aW91cy5jb20=” />
<input type=“hidden” name=“user_recipients” value=“n” />
<input type=“hidden” name=“charset” value=“utf-8” />
</div>

my contact form.  But no email address.  It is all automatically encoded by EE if you’re using the contact form. 

You can also pMencode email address in entries or use the email encoding when using email addresses in templates.

Yep, the Contact Form (and Tell-a-Friend) automatically encrypts the recipients.  Early versions of the tag did not, but that’s been fixed for quite a while.

I installed template 7 and it does not have this feature included. I appreciate your informing me about this.

What is so very confusing (and this is a suggestion) is why many of these features are not implemented right in the templates so that one can use ExpressionEngine right out of the box without having to come to the forums to figure out how to get things done the way one would have expected for a long time…

Am I guessing that the templates haven’t been updated?

The default themes are just basic examples.  There’s no conceivable way that a sample theme could possibly include every feature that EE has; you’d just get an unwieldy site that made no sense at all.

It’s just a starting point and it’s up to the user to expand and change things how they want it for their own particular website.  Everyone’s site is different, so only they know what they need/want.

Actually it makes plenty of sense to include many of the basics and take them out—at least you know what’s in there. As they say, it’s easier to run in from the outfield than it is to backpedal. While I hate the nuke-based packages, what they do well is include all the features that are most used. For example:

1) Not having a “more” link for your front page new stories is odd, IMHO, since otherwise you have ridiculously long texts on the front page. If you put in “extended” text then there is no way of getting there unless you are aware that you have to manually put in the more tag.

2) Everyone has a contact portion. You wouldn’t have included it in the sample templates if that wasn’t the case either! At least one or the other should have been included, preferably both the (a) contact form via php/sendmail and/or (b) the mailto code that encrypts the email address of the recipient so that spiders don’t grab it for email harvesting.

3) Here is what I think was omitted from the basic EE package:
(a) Polls - A site favorite everywhere and should have been in.
(b)  Guestbooks are usually an extra but may be found most frequently found in private blogs and should have been in. After all, people visit personal sites and leave their impressions!
(c) Send to friend—an extra and a judgment call whether to include.
(c) Forums should be integrated and think that reinventing the wheel is not a good idea. Having at least either vbulletin, invisionboard or phpbb2 integration is important.
(d) Some type of photo gallery is very popular. It is an extra and could be an addon/integration of other product although might not be as seamless.
(e) FAQ module—an extra and could be worked around by using a category in the blog if need be.
(f) I didn’t see any good statistics module. Perhaps I missed this but should be in the admin section.
(g) Needs much better templates that one can use out of the box. other than maybe 1 and 7 and maybe two others, almost everything else is horrific and not as flexible as one would hope.
(h) Rating posts/articles is popular but not required..
(i) File manager is nice but can be included via other php packages. Optional.

3) Note: You have RSS feeds and other stuff in there. If anything and especially for blogs, that is completely secondary to basic functionality. That is an add on more than the others.

4) Do note also that in the basic news posts on the front page, all that stuff about permalinks and trackbacks are much more confusing.

I bought EE because I thought I’d give it a whirl and see what I can do with it. It’s a very good piece of software but it’s somewhat difficult to get moving quickly right out of the box. Movable Type seems to have you beat here, especially with the numerous themes that are offered both by the company and it’s member base.

That is not to say that I prefer MT—I came here. I do mention it because I think that EE should take a good look at what MT is currently doing well to improve its client base. If you have a blog that comes fully set up easily you’ll have a much easier time to attract customers, even more than pricing discounts. People won’t use that which they find a little difficult and that threshhold is getting lower every day!!!

Some of the things you mention there are already built into EE:

(c) Send to friend
(f) Statistics Module

Hope that’s of some help!

Slinky, thanks for taking the time to write that out.  As an EE user I agree with many of your observations. I’ve had to hunt long hours for how to do things where an example in the original template would have been ample starting place for me to get hacking.

I must, however, emphatically praise the staff and community for EE.  This may sound exaggerated, but this is the most responsive, least attituded, and most mature user community I’ve found yet.  For users like me, it balances out the slightness of the documentation and the necessary hunt for examples.

(Not that documentation isn’t improving… there is so much to cover… and it would be great to get a documentation professional in there to sift through user input and spit out the good stuff).

After reading Slinky’s post I have one thing to add: If you’re going to do RSS, and use “Summary” content for the feed, shouldn’t there be an option to have the content automatically gleaned from the body, if there isn’t something added to the “Summary” field on the Edit or Publish pages?

But that’s not directly related to the purpose of this thread…

Neondeon wrote: I must, however, emphatically praise the staff and community for EE. This may sound exaggerated, but this is the most responsive, least attituded, and most mature user community I’ve found yet.

On that I wholeheartedly agree. Everyone here has been just great, even when I’ve been whiny and petulant at them. And it’s especially nice to know that some features I’ve requested have been incorporated. That’s the best re-feedback.

You can use the word or character limit plugin to do something similar, McGehee - but it wouldn’t populate the summary field.

LisaJill wrote: You can use the word or character limit plugin to do something similar, McGehee - but it wouldn’t populate the summary field.

By this do you mean the plugin will take content from the body of the post and use it for an RSS feed? If so, I don’t particular care whether it does anything with EE’s summary field. I’d just like the feed excerpts to include content.

Right now my entries on one site that subscribes to and compiles several blogs including mine, only show the title of each entry.

If the plugin you’re talking about will fix this, I need to know how to use it for that purpose. Since it came with my EE installation, can I expect to find information about it in the User Guide?

No, but if you go to plugins -> and click the name of the plugin, then it will tell you how to use it. =)  You may need to fiddle with the parse order, a search on the user guide for parse will bring up details on that. =)

Thanks!

Hmmm. Okay, I don’t see how I can use this plugin to get the RSS feed to use body content for the summary. Maybe I’m just not using my imagination well enough. 

Go in to edit your feed Template.  You’ll see a line similar to this:

Basically, you want to replace “{summary}” with the {body} tag surrounded by the word limiter Plugin.  For instance:

Excellent! Now I just need to come up with something to post so I can see the results.

Thanks, Chris.

Chris wrote: <content:encoded><![CDATA[{exp:word_limit total=“50”}{body}{/exp:word_limit}]]></content:encoded>

And Rogi said out loud: “Aaaahhh, that’s a good way of doing it!”

Thanks.