Thread

As many of you know, I’ve been obsessively refreshing and answering questions on these forums since May, 2004.  Over the course of 3 years one is bound to identify patterns of questions.  Now that I have the keys to the kingdom I can try to impart some of those tidbits of wisdom that I have accumulated.

If someone were to ask me: “what is the hardest thing to learn about EE?” I would have to say that the biggest hurdle is having that “light-bulb moment” about how ExpressionEngine knows when to deliver information, and what information to deliver. 

I have seen this question in thousands of forms, and some of the ways people overcome this are mind-boggling.  I’ve seen it all, from a template made per article (can we say “painful”?!) to those of you who have had that light-bulb moment and go whole hog with it, creating a single monster template that “does it all.” 

Human beings: we love extremes!

Onwards . . .

Excellent Lisa, this should do wonders for those ‘weblog entries what?’ beginners out there!

disable"trackbacks"

Huh?  That is wrong isn’t it?  Catching out the EE techies on a Friday after a hard week.  Doesn’t get much better than that.

disable"trackbacks"

Huh?  That is wrong isn’t it?  Catching out the EE techies on a Friday after a hard week.  Doesn’t get much better than that.

*peers around* I don’t know what you could possibly be talking about. *winks*

(thank you!)

Lisa - A question.

Say that we wish to see, instead of all 10 articles, only 1 article, by URL title.  This is what we refer to as a ”single-entry page”.  Say we have an entry with the URL title of “raining cats and dogs”  ...

It would help to know what is the example code that you would use to have the 20 entries (limited to the last 10) be outputed as list of entires wih full URLs (or a permalink). That is,  your single-entry template page would contain title one and then there would be a “Page 1 0f 10” notation at the bottom of the template page. And the URLs in the browser would show: http://example.com/Pets/raining_cats_and_dogs/ then when the user goes to page 2 the above URL would show http://example.com/Pets/my_ducks_in_a_row/  etc…. In other words the output would always show the FULL URL of entries.

has this made sense? doable?

giovanni, I am not quite following.  There may be future articles on items like pagination, linking entries, etc.  But for your specific question I am not quite following what you want.  If you want to paginate a single entry, then you would span the entry.

If you wanted to use next/previous links, then that is covered here.

Lisa, that is a *terrific* post! I’m currently training some of my coworkers in building and maintaining our EE installation, and this is precisely the information that’s most important to get across. I’m looking forward to more in this series.

Best,
Ben

Lisa, that is a *terrific* post! I’m currently training some of my coworkers in building and maintaining our EE installation, and this is precisely the information that’s most important to get across. I’m looking forward to more in this series.

I second and third that sentiment!  :coolsmile:

giovanni, I am not quite following.  There may be future articles on items like pagination, linking entries, etc.  But for your specific question I am not quite following what you want.  If you want to paginate a single entry, then you would span the entry.

No it’s not about pagination, but outputting articles with full url titles.

I may be barking up the wrong tree
But what i am trying to convey is can you output weblog entries with fully formed URLs entry titles automatically via an exp weblog tag?  that is : Write Me out My entries Ten at a Time as Full URLs such as “http://example.com/Pets/raining_cats_dogs/” rather than writing out that entry to http://example.com/Pets/ which you would have also exported with it’s permalink of “http://example.com/Pets/raining_cats_dogs”  in other words export entries as permalinks. (And yes future entries would indeed be entered and exported as full url. )

its like building each page as if its a single article but using the EE tags to build the pages….
like i said maybe i am barking up the wrong tree. 😉 

Lisa, many thanks for the article!  I really appreciate it and others when they come along as the light has not quite been fully lit for me…. but it’s close!

Yes, of course. You can find examples of that in the default templates or in the docs. I may put together an article regarding that at some point in the future as well.  I’m not quite sure what you mean by “export entries as permalinks”.  If you simply want a list of the last 10 entries with their URLs, you can use the {comment_url_title_auto_path} variable or {url_title_path=}.  There are a few other options you can use, just glance through the variables list.

Hi Lisa,

Good article to help out the people who may not have had that light bulb moment.

Have you considered building a site with the code you are imparting so people can follow along and see exactly what happens with dynamic=“off” for example?

Perhaps you can provide some sample HTML for people to cut and paste into a template then go from there?

I didn’t do that here because that is really what the Getting Started tutorials do, taking one step by step through a template.  But honestly, there is nothing stopping anyone from copying and pasting the code snippets above into a template, I do it all the time for testing purposes. It won’t be pretty but it will render exactly what it should.

Great article to read. It’s definitely an article that focuses on explaining the technique of EE to get to that lightbulb-moment. But whenever I try to explain to friends/colleagues/clients how EE works I always use a different approach. And it seems to work just fine, so here’s my 2 cents for those people that just start with EE:

Step 1;
Buy EE, but don’t do anything with it. Yet.

Step 2;
Create a basic version of your frontpage with plain HTML and “Lorum Ipsum..”-text.

Step 3;
Install EE, and copy-paste your HTML-page to a template.

Step 4;
Now go check your template for “Lorum Ipsum..” text and remove it.

Step 5: here come the magic;
Check in your template where there’s a beginning and an end of an article and put in a basic {exp:weblog:entries} code in these places. Add a {summary} et voilá: lightbulb-moments.

I know this is a pretty rough version where I skip details like relative URL’s for images, but if you start out with a basic HTML-page, this will show people exactly how the connection between HTML and the EE database is being made. And I guess that’s the click they need to turn on those environmentally-friendly-lightbulbs. Once they get this you can show them the parameters for the weblog:entries and soon they will limit posts, order them and so on..

Thanks a lot Lisa for this series of articles.
Even for me as a little advanced user it is always necessary to get back to the basics.
...

Hi Lisa:
Thank you for this nice intro.  Looking forward to more such articles to help us understand what we are doing.  “We” as in the non-developers who would like to use this platform a lot more, but are struggling with the “light bulb.”

Also, I think seeing such an enthusiastic response to this post from your community should raise some concerns in your mind that perhaps there are significant gaps in your documentations?  (“your” is used broadly to represent the development and support teams at EE).

Don’t get me wrong,  I like EE and am still here.  But the long hours to figure out each problem is taking its toll. 

For eg:  I just noticed the “disable=trackbacks” in your sample code;  I wondered if that was the reason why the are no trackbacks on my entries? I have personally cited the entries here on several of my other blogs on WordPress and Livejournal.  I looked up the documentation on ‘trackbacks’ and the resulting list of parameters and variables only made my head spin.  In my younger days (a few months ago) I’d head over and pose the question on the Tech support forum.  The folks are tremendously helpful and you have personally walked me through several jams.  But it all takes time and I want to invest it in generating content.

Now I just shrug and convince myself,  “trackbacks, whatever” and just move on.  Notice my complete absence on the Forum Boards over the last couple of months.

Sorry, this was not meant to be a rant;
Just that you are filling an important gap in the available support;  and we need more of it ... and fast.  I will work on the ‘cloning’ program here!
😊)