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Hiya,

If you can afford the time to not delve into a CMS first then I would heartily recommend that route yes. Doing this will get you up to scratch with coding proficiently by hand and used to all the bugs that IE throws into the pot as well. Once you have that all sorted and down to a really good standard then you can think about bringing in a CMS.

The great thing about EE is that you can code something that is valid XHTML 1.0 Strict outside of the CMS and when you plug it into the templates it will still be totally valid strict code. EE stays totally out of your way in that respect which is a designers dream 😉

So to re-iterate I would say yes it is great if you can afford the time to learn coding the actual site templates before you try and bring in the CMS part but having said that EE won’t get in your way on that one.

Hope that helps.

Best wishes,

Mark

before CMS it was like that right? you had to build the web, upload the htm file, then every time you wanted to update you had to re-edit and re-upload…

before CMS it was like that right? you had to build the web, upload the htm file, then every time you wanted to update you had to re-edit and re-upload…

That process is still alive and well, I think.  CMS or not.  Sure, a CMS limits the amount of manual editing one has to do in inserting content.  But there are intrinsic parts of a website’s construction and presentation that can’t be (or I guess, shouldn’t be is more apropos) automatically generated.

That whole process of adjusting things minutely in your markup and witnessing the changes that occur is an invaluable one to learning (X)HTML/CSS.  It really allows you to understand the nuisances of web design.

now Im learning xhtml and css, its fun, but now I think if I should make a web by hand before going CMS, I mean isnt that the real way to learn, making the web by hand?

That’s how I did. I don’t think I would have been able to get anywhere near as much out of EE if I hadn’t already had years under my belt of writing HTML code in a text editor.

witch html text editor do you use?

Any text editor you feel comfortable with, preferrably with syntax highlighting. It really is a matter of personal preference, just try a few.

On Mac, I would go with Textmate ($$) or if you need free, Textwrangler. I don’t remember if Textwrangler does syntax highlighting though

On Windows, I would suggest Homesite ($$) or notepad++ (free). Total Edit (free) and pspad (free) are also good.

I use a little app called EditPad Lite. It’s just slightly more robust than Notepad but it isn’t bogged down with a million extra features I wouldn’t use anyway. It has probably only about a dozen or so of those so I can ignore them safely.

When there are too many extra features and I never even try to learn how to use them, they’re likely to get together at night and plot to murder me in my sleep.

Added: I’m really not sure the version I use can still be had from the creator (JGSoft); they started in with the feature creep and I find the older, cleaner version I have to be perfect for my needs, so…

EditPad is a good choice for Windows, actually, although I recommend the Pro version if possible. It has configurable syntax highlighting, amoing other things, and works with regular expressions. There is a free Trial version.

Komodo Edit is free, and does quite a bit for being free, I think. I like the Find, which will search all files in your site. It even highlights jQuery.

http://www.activestate.com/Products/komodo_ide/komodo_edit.mhtml

We have to use WebDAV at work, though, so I can’t use the FTP part. Never had to use it, either, so can’t comment on that part.

TextMate for the Mac is good for working up XHTML; you can get an EE plug-in that recognises the tags

<a href="http://www.chrisruzin.net/entry/textmate_expressionengine_bundle/">http://www.chrisruzin.net/entry/textmate_expressionengine_bundle/</a>

For CSS styling, I don’t think you can beat CSSEdit by MacRabbit

<a href="http://macrabbit.com/cssedit/">http://macrabbit.com/cssedit/</a>

You can live preview your changes and it feels really like a design app such as Illustrator as opposed to programming.

Don’t forget Coda. A fantastic tool for working with XHTML and CSS. Even though I totally hand-code everything and don’t rely on any auto-fill type functions in these programs I just love being able to have the split-panes where I can type in one and instantly preview the live changes in the other.

Best wishes,

Mark

I’ll throw another vote in for Coda. It has all the tools you need built right in for as they say “One Window Web Development”. There is also the Expression Engine mode for Coda that highlights EE code (although I don’t think it’s still being developed any further).

So, I thought I’d give Coda a go.

But where do I find my template files locally????

See Saving templates as text files.