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I’m new to Expression Engine but not especially new to (mainly open source) content management systems. I suspect the latter may have led me down a less-than-straightforward path with my first basic install ... but I’d like to check. As is traditional in these situations, I’m more than a little bit embarrassed about the very basic nature of my first question.

At the point of installing EE, due to all the warnings in the introductory documentation about what would be blank if I didn’t, I selected that the installation included the example Agile Records theme. When attempting to progress through this introductory documentation, I find it assumes you didn’t chose this theme. What I’m therefore keen to establish is whether/where I can “turn it off”.

In WordPress, for example, I would simply go to the “Appearance” section of the Administration screens and change themes but I’m yet to find something similar, or an alternative in EE.

Thanks, in advance, for any guidance that anyone with a bit more experience of Expression Engine can provide.

Matthew, first, I would like to say that I think you chose for the best—it can be handy to have Agile Records as a reference and for testing, albeit that it’s a bit more than a simple set of site code, and thus may be more useful as you progress.

Now, to ‘turn it off’, you simply need to create a new Template Group, and mark this new one as default.

To do this, go to Design>Template Manager in the Control Panel, the press New Group (in the upper left) and fill out a suitable name. Leave the setting alone that defaults to Do Not Duplicate a Group, and tick the checkbox to ‘make the index template in this group your home page.

Submit, and you’ll have this new group with an automatically created index template. Addressing your site URL will now bring up that page, which will be blank at first.

You can put some text in it to verify things are working, and from that point forward, begin learning how to use your preferred HTML and EE tags to build up a page.

Other pages you want for this experience will go in differently named templates in that same group. The Agile demo will remain present in its own template groups, news and about, and can be viewed from appropriate yoursite.com/templategroup/template urls.

Hope that gets you on your way, and now Support will work with you on any further needs—it’s quite late here.

Welcome to ExpressionEngine, and I think you’ll find the journey enjoyable.

Regards,
Clive

Hi Matthew, and WELCOME to the forums!!

As narration said, Agile Records is a great resource for learning ExpressionEngine. As he mentions, you can still keep the templates for reference, and make another “template group” to be your default. This way you can always go back to the well commented code while working on your site.

What specifically in the docs are you referring to that is making you feel it excludes Agile Records?

Here’s a roundup of some great resources for learning ExpressionEngine:
- Mijingo - Learning ExpressionEngine 2
- EE Insider
- Train-ee
- EE Hash
- EE Spotlight
- Creat//ee

And a great article on Switching from WordPress to ExpressionEngine. (Although it was written during EE1, many points are still valuable)

Hope this helps in getting you started!

(Moving this to the Community Help section, so other members can lend a hand)

Thanks Matthew and Narration!

Thanks very very much, both Kyle and narration. 

Your replies look incredibly helpful, at a first glance.  I’ll give them a second glance as soon as I can and will post a fuller reply then. ‘Just wanted to say “Thanks”, as soon as possible.

Matthew.

Many thanks for both Kyle and narration, the answer works for me as a new user in EE 😊