Thread

Hi Dave,

Sorry, I don’t understand what you mean when you say use a plugin to send them back to the header? I have a template for the header. I could just use tags to echo those values in my .header template, right? Thanks.

You could use another channel entries loop (unless your entire page, header & footer included, is inside a channel entries loop, which it shouldn’t be). But the best way to do this is via a plugin, so you dont need to repeat any loops & do more queries than you have to. Plus you’ll need to manually type the meta data into the template on some pages, eg the blog list page.

I’d rather stay away from any plugin as you know. I like the idea of working with the core software only. So I guess if I do just one more query to the DB this should not slow everything down too much? Cheers!

Yes but you’ll most likely run into problems doing it that way, for example if you’re on a blog list page that has to have the meta data hardcoded. Of course you can stil do it with a few conditionals, but a plugin is much easier. We’re working on building a whole lot of string functions into a single plugin, a kind of ‘swiss army knife’ of EE plugins

Conditionals like if this the blog list use this title and description otherwhise just use the values of the custom fields? Just to figure out if I understand this right. 😊

Yeah basically. Remember to use the disable=”” parameter on all channel entries tags for efficiency. WOuld be something like {if meta_title}{meta_title}{if:else}standard title{/if}

Also remember to use dynamic=“no”  on all channel entries tags that you dont want to automatically detect the url (eg for pulling latest blog posts in sidebar).

Thanks. To be honest the role of dynamic=“no” is still unclear to me, but I’ll have read in the documentation to see if I can figure it out better. 😊

Hi,

I have been working on the blog section of the website today and I got everything done basically. After this, I’ll try to tackle the portfolio section which may be a bit more tricky of course because it involves the use of images. I have also managed to deal with the meta tags without using addons. I had to hard code them into the blog listing page yes, and I had to also create two separate .header templates for the single blog posts and the static pages (because I could not call the custom fields with the same names in the content and blog channels). In other words I could not have meta_title and meta_description fields in both channels, EE was complaining. So I created the meta_title and meta_description fields for the main website pages (content channel)and the fields meta_title_blog and meta_description_blog for the blog entries (blog channel). As for the main blog page, as I said, I hard coded the meta tags and I used the index template of the blog channel. As for the contact page, since it uses a form with my php code, I created a different template from the page one (inside the content channel) and I called it contact_page. In there I allowed (and only there, have read the warnings) PHP. For the home page I used the index template of the content channel. All works fine and the speed is very good.

There are two things I’d like to ask:
• Should I need to rename the folder where the website is installed, to make it go live, it it enough to rename it and change the path to the website in the general admin? Or is there more to it?
• How comes if I use the same exact code (below) in the index and single templates of the blog channel I get different results? I.E. in the index template I get a list of all blog entries while in the single template I only get the title and body text of that single entry? I kind of take it for granted but it would be nice to understand why it happens if you see what I mean?

{exp:channel:entries}

{if post_title != ""}
<h3>{post_title}</h3>
<p>{/if}</p>

<p>{post_text}</p>

<p>{/exp:channel:entries}

Thanks a lot!

A tip, when you create custom fields, prefix them with the channel name, eg blog_meta_title, content_meta_title etc. Still sounds like your life will be a whole lot easier with a few add-ons 😊

Changing the domain or install folder in EE is a pain, since paths are stored in so many places… We made an addon called reelocate to help with this.

Regarding that code you posted, this is an example of how EE automatically detects certain things based on the url. Hard to explain exactly, but for example if you had blog/category/category_url_title in the url, it would automatically know to display that category. Note that if you have a channel:entries loop that you DONT want to do this (such as a sidebar recent posts list), use dynamic=“no” (this is one of the most common questions on the forums). So if you have a blog/detail template, and the url is blog/detail/my_post_title, it will use the blog/detail template, and feed ‘my_post_title’ in to it as a url_title, therefore only displaying a single entry. Make sense?

Good tip. I used a different method, but prefix sounds better. I’ll go ahead and change the structure.

As for the addons, I understand your smiley, hehe! But trust me, it’s not just a neurotic thing. It’s that I am learning something and I want to grasp the basics first and properly understand what the product is good for out of the box. That will give me a clear feel of how something really works. Also this pushes me to learn further because simple things I may be able to hack my way through them. After that I may open to the idea of using extensions. Also, on top of this, I have to admit that the fact that the team is not answering is quite pissing me. I think it’s wrong that they don’t answer to ‘how to’ questions. Actually Dan said something like I’d be very happy to show you this and that and then disappeared. If it wasn’t for you I’d still be staring at the first page about channels of their poor documentation trying to understand what they are trying to say. And this really shouldn’t happen if you ask people 300 bucks for each installation. Really bad customer service. I want to say this publicly. You know… I used to work for Apple Inc. for years and we were paranoid about the customer. You can imagine how annoying this is to me.

As for the URLs, I’ll make sure I read your paragraph 20 times because it sounds simple, but it’s not. In fact you say difficult to explain exactly, but I imagine not because you don’t know how it works, but just because it’s too complex right? In that case can you please point me in the direction of a document that contains all the rules about how this works? I’m starting to understand that I need to learn this part of the URLs like Gospel if I want to really figure this out.

Thanks a lot again.

Just look in the docs or search the forums, thats how I learned it all - http://ellislab.com/expressionengine/user-guide/general/urls.html

I’ll definitely have a look, even though I’m afraid stuff like why by using the same code on the index page I get all the entries spitted out and on another template (like page or single) I just get the contents of that entry alone is not explained in the docs. Maybe the forums are better. Shouldn’t be like this. It really shouldn’t.

Anyway I’m not the only one complaining about it, so I guess it’s just the way they manage this. Not much I can do about it apart from saying it. 😊

Thanks a lot. At least thanks to you I got as far as building the blog. Portfolio next step 😊

Ok well the portfolio works basically the same as the blog, with a list and detail template. You can have multiple images per entry with the channel images addon. Otherwise you can just add lots of file fields, or have one entry per image.

Yeah but its not the support thats the problem. No company like this could cost-effectively provide support to all the ‘how do i do this’ questions, it could potentially take hours per person. So you can’t really get frustrated about this. The real problem is that EE isn’t very user-friendly, and the pace of development is so slow that it takes months to get anything dealt with. The learning curve could be much lower if they just designed the interface/processes better. But everything seems to take so long, if they don’t open-source it they are going to need to hire lots more developers to keep up with open-source alternatives.

Hi Dave, thanks! I’ll dive into the portfolio development as soon as I get away from some client work.

To add to what you said about EllisLab, hmmm…to be frank with you I don’t completely agree. I’ve dealt with many companies in my professional life (and I also worked for few big ones). What I think is that it they don’t want to answer ‘how to’ questions they are at liberty to do so, but this would make sense only if they had a uber friendly piece of software (as you said) or a killer documentation with plenty of extensive and simple to understand tutorials. Since they don’t have a friendly interface and it would take several thousand dollars to hire a serious copywriter (possibly specialized in documentation writing) to write a proper manual, here we are. Also, dedicating few hours to someone that spends 300 dollars per installation should be absolutely part of the deal. When I had people coming in after buying an 900 dollars computer because they didn’t get how it worked, I didn’t send them away? I spent whatever it took to make them understand what they were missing. Again…Killer documentation? fantastic. Great interface? fantastic. Good after sales service? also fantastic. If you miss all of them you’re not managing it properly.

For example, I wrote another post about the roadmap and the future of the software, to decide if I want to buy several licenses for some websites that we’re going to do after the summer. No one answered there as well. I asked them about it also via email in private. No answer. Nothing. I’m in the dark. 😊

If it was Open Source, I could understand, but it’s commercial for Pete’s sake.

Hi Dave,

I haven’t started the portoflio yet, but I have been watching some video tutorials to try to get better at this. I have a question related to the pages module, or maybe it’s unrelated, I don’t know yet. It’s not yet completely clear as you see. 😊

It’s about the team page. At the moment I have a team entry in the content channel that uses the standard page template inside my content template group. Pretty basic (domain.com/team/). Since each team member is in it’s own <div> and the structure is quite repetitive, I am thinking of creating a team channel where I could create an entry for each team meber and use a loop to display them? Sounds more ‘best’ practices’ to me, don’t you think?

How would I go about this? According to my understanding so far I would create the team channel and all the entries for the team members, I’d then still use the team entry I have to hold banner and intro text. I’d then modify the team template to display banner and intro copy at the top and all team people following that by using a exp:channel:entries loop with channel=“team” and no limit so they all get spitted out? Of course I’d want this to still be a page, URL wise: i.e. domain.com/team/ as I have it now.

Would that work just fine? Am I learning this right or my reasoning is wrong and I need to go back to study? 😛

Thanks a lot!