Thread

Is there a tutorial somewhere like the “Building a site with expression engine” series that covers replacing Word Press blog with Expression Engine.

Specifically, building the index page, the single article page, the the categories list, archive pages (by month), tags, member lists for comments, and so on?

I think no. The architectures of these systems are different. So, I do that in such a way:

1) To install a WP skin locally or on a website
2) To create a couple of entries and comments, to create menu items
3) To save as an HTML website
4) To open the saved HTML file in a text editor and edit the HTML code

So, no specific operations.

P.S. As an example, you can see this Subdreamer skin
http://www.sddepot.com/plugins/p13_download_manager/images/78.jpg

and the same skin operating in ExpressionEngine
http://tulks.valsts.lv/blog/

or compare this Subdreamer skin
http://www.sddepot.com/plugins/p13_download_manager/images/68.jpg

with
http://tulks.valsts.lv/site/

I don’t think that WP skins are nice. So I use skins from other systems.

P.P.S. I hope I can reply in ‘Pre-Sales Questions’ because I do such modifications for myself often. (a hobby, I’m not a web designer)

I think no. The architectures of these systems are different. So, I do that in such a way:

1) To install a WP skin locally or on a website
2) To create a couple of entries and comments, to create menu items
3) To save as an HTML website
4) To open the saved HTML file in a text editor and edit the HTML code

So, no specific operations.

P.S. As an example, you can see this Subdreamer skin
http://www.sddepot.com/plugins/p13_download_manager/images/78.jpg

and the same skin operating in ExpressionEngine
http://tulks.valsts.lv/blog/

or compare this Subdreamer skin
http://www.sddepot.com/plugins/p13_download_manager/images/68.jpg

with
http://tulks.valsts.lv/site/

I don’t think that WP skins are nice. So I use skins from other systems.

P.P.S. I hope I can reply in ‘Pre-Sales Questions’ because I do such modifications for myself often. (a hobby, I’m not a web designer)

I wasn’t referring to “skins” I was referring to designing the actual blog pages, as specified in my original posts.  But what you say is interesting, I didn’t think of using skins from WP, although I wasn’t looking for skinning.

I don’t recall a write-up exactly like you’re looking for- though the EE Getting Started tutorial and Boyink’s tutorial are good starts to understanding how EE works.  And- the wiki has an entry on using WP skins.  I think between the two, you’ll have a good start on it.

I am looking for how to build a blog, not skin.

For example:

How to use EE to build the main index page of a blog and the single article pages. 
How to create the archive links and pages commonly found on blogs. 
How to integrate commenting to the main index page and individual article pages.

I’m basically looking for a tutorial that covers implementing the features commonly found in blogs on an EE site.

I’m actually up to the point of doing the weblog in my series.  I can’t promise a schedule but should get started on it later this week.

Ah- sorry, got confused on what you were after.  I don’t know of anything that uses WP as a reference, but the best way to get up on things is to read the Getting started docs and run through the Quickstart tutorial.  The video tutorials are also a quick way to get a feel for the basics.  At that point- Boyink’s tutorials would still provide good info, as will the Dissecting templates and Semantics series by Lisa.

I’ve read both, but they don’t cover the areas I was looking for.  Like comments, categories, trackbacks, archives, rss feed, and other things commonly found in Word Press and other full fledge blog platforms.

Ideally, it would be nice to have a walk-through on how to build a word press clone in EE.

It strikes me that EE installs with all those items by default - have you looked at those templates?

I’ll have to have a look, I deleted all the default template groups.  I went through the examples, tutorials, and even your series but there was still a lot of gaps.  I am finding it hard to find things in the manual as there is no complete list of tags easily accessible.

well - for a quick one page list of the tags there is always the quick reference guide

The quick reference guide is good, but it seems to be missing a lot of tags.

You really need to reinstall some default templates - since those were blog templates with everything you’ve mentioned wanting to see they are going to be your best reference.

You can grab another set from the template library.

Thanks, I will give that a try.  That will be a big help.