Back in May, 2004, I discovered ExpressionEngine. Why? I found out that, then pMachine, Inc, was giving away 1000 licenses (and then added another 250 later!). I got mine.
I had to dig in and learn this system; it was different than what I was used to, had different ideas on templates and storage, and was, well, new. I didn’t even know where to set a limit for number of posts shown on the index! What to do, what to do?
What else was there to do? The installation came with a default template that worked. I surely didn’t want to read the documentation as I had no context for that information; so, instead, I began to dissect those templates. Of course, I did have the docs open to look up what those templates were doing and we’ll do some of that during the dissection, as well.
So, how about we do just that, together? A new series of articles on dissecting the default templates. We’ll see how it works and from there we can apply that to our own templates, yes?
It is important that, prior to reading these articles, you review the Getting Started section of the documentation and gone through the Quick Start Tutorial, as well as our Video Tutorials. All of these articles will build on what is in the documentation, focusing on its actual use in a real scenario as shipped with ExpressionEngine. Hopefully, this will enable you to go out and use these tricks on your own sites.