Thread

Hello,
I’ve been using Firebug/Web Developer to look at the underlying HTML and CSS of numerous EE sites in the showcase.

This has been quite instructive, but of course does not reveal the EE tags. 

For someone like me, who learns a great deal by looking under the hood and seeing what that produces on the front end, viewing EE tags in HTML files would make for fast learning about what happens in an EE site.

Maybe this is not possible (security issue?) but is there a tool for viewing tags in EE active sites?

Thanks,
Matthew

MatthewSchenker,

I don’t believe you can do what you are asking. Once the template has been parsed by the server the output is only going to be the final output of the EE tag and not the EE tag itself. I would recommend going to a site like eetemplates.com and grabbing one of Marcus’s free templates and take a look at the template coded provided.

The only way you could do it is with an add-on (possibly a plugin) which could pop up a new window and show the current templates code. You would only want this to happen upon clicking a link and also only for certain member groups but it could definitely be possible.

Best wishes,

Mark

Mark is right. I’m sure you could code a custom add-on to view the currently viewed template’s code, but without any custom add-on work I don’t know of anything that will allow you to do what you’re asking.

Matthew,

To confirm. When an EE template is parsed by a browser then these tags are rendered into the appropriate mark-up. You can of course view the source of a webpage and with some experience you can even guess where tags have been used. But what you ask is not possible for third-party sites.

If you are looking to learn by example then Ryan has a complete series of screencasts available that use an example site

Good Morning,
Thanks Mark, Vim and John for responding.  I had my doubts that this was possible.  I’ve been cruising a gamut of EE sites, bookmarking them for particular elements.  It’s all very impressive really.  Many times, I want to know what the designer used to achieve a certain function.

Perhaps as I learn more about the system I’ll get better at deciphering this.  Of course, by then I won’t need a tool for doing it!

John, I’ll take a look at Ryan’s videos.

Thanks again,
Matthew

PS: VIM, as it happens, your portfolio contains several of the sites I’ve been looking at.  Wow, you do excellent work!

Hi, Matthew.

As everyone in this thread mentioned, you won’t be able to tell which tags are used.

You can also look over at Train-EE for additional resources. I also have EEBeginners

If anything else comes up, please do let us know in a new thread..