Rebuilding / Caching

You’ll find that tinkering is a lot more fun and less frustrating on EE than on MT due to the instant-view (no rebuilds). But make sure you haven’t set any of your templates to cache, or you’ll bang your head wondering why your changes aren’t showing up! With that said, though, do definitely consider caching your not-often-changing templates so they’ll come up quicker for your visitors.

Create test templates

Keep an “alternate universe” set of templates to play with. This way, your live visitors won’t see wonky pages-in-progress. For instance, I created an “entry-test” template as my testing ground for the Entry template.

On-the-fly rendering is awesome, but don’t go overboard

EE offers an enormous wealth of awesome conditional (if/then) “goodies” you can add to your templates, plus easy embeds into templates and so on. But remember that these aren’t “free”; everything uses resources, and it all adds up. Make sure you take into account your server resources and page-drawing time for your visitors (e.g., don’t add 87 conditionals to one page and then wonder why it takes a while for your page to come up!)

The EE “Index” template is a powerhouse

Unlike with MT, EE’s “Index” template is used by default to show your primary view (your latest blog entries) AND your by-date and by-category views (e.g., Feb 2004, “Dance” category, etc.).

Understanding URLs

It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to create EE URLs that look JUST like your MT URLs. But using templates on both sides, you *can* pretty easily forward all your old MT URLs to your new EE URLs smile.

Comment and Permalink templates

Unlike MT, EE has separate Comments and Permalink templates. This is very easy to change; just update the appropriate sections in your admin to point EE exclusively to one or the other, if you prefer, and make sure that links within your templates point to your desired template.

Category:Tips Category:Migration