May 09
Expression Engine updates
2006 at 04.08 am posted by Veerle Pieters
Work has been using up most of my time lately but I finally created some time to do a little work on this blog. Sometimes there are moments that you would like to drop everything work related and just play in the sandbox that this little blog is. When this blog launched in this design on March 1st I told you that I still needed to do some work. Well the first thing that I took to the drawing board are the search results and advanced search page. Before today these pages we’re still in the default look that you get when you install ExpressionEngine.
Search
The first thing I did was removing some unnecessary things like "Author" and the date of the most recent comment since I personally think that those weren't needed. My thinking also was that if people search for something that It would be handy if they still can read a little excerpt of that post so they can better decide if it was what they were looking for. On the advanced search page there is one thing that doesn't seem to work as it should though. If you choose a weblog, it will automatically show the categories of that weblog to the right. This only seems to work in Safari (as far as I can tell). There seem to be something wrong in the JavaScript. I need to have another look at it so this is fixed. What I basically did was pasting my XHTML code around the EE search form. You can set a parameter to narrow the search area, so you can define which weblogs can be searched in:
{exp:search:simple_form search_in="everywhere" weblog="veerle_blog|art|artv"}
For the results page I pasted my entire XHTML code into the template and pasted the EE tags back in, so these parts are dynamic. After checking in IE 6, I needed to fix a problem with the alternating background color. The color didn't fill the entire area, it didn't go all the way under the titles to fill up that area. Setting the height to 1 pixel did solve this.
404 page
It's amazing how many sites exist out there that don't have a 404 page. For those that don't know what a 404 page is, it is the message that you get when you requested a page either by typing a URL directly into the address bar or clicking on an out-of-date link. The most common reasons for this are:
- a mistyped URL (or an out-of-date bookmark/favourite)
- a search-engine link that is out-of-date
- an internal broken link
It all sounds very techie and daunting for a designer but luckily for me Expression Engine makes it very easy to fix this. You can determine which template should be displayed when someone tries to access an invalid URL. I thought it was a good idea to direct people to my archive if they mis-typed a URL since that page contains all information and you also can perform a search there too. The only thing I added was a little alert box that people see that something went haywire.
Using blockquote in comments
Another outstanding issue was usage of blockquote in the comments. To get your site validated as XHTML Strict you need to use:
<blockquote><p>content</p></blockquote>
The problem was as soon as I hit the post button EE striped out the "p" tags and only the "blockquote" remained. So a few days ago I finally had some time to bring up the issue at the pMachine forum and love and behold within 17 min I already had somebody responding and get the conversation going. But wait it only gets better, at a certain time Paul Burdick stepped in and after some exchange of information he send me a new file that I could replace and everything was fixed. But on little further investigation we found a little bug so I had to remove the fix again until we get that sorted out. One day later, everything is honky-dory again and my comments validate now too when blockquotes are used :) The interaction is what I love about the Expression Engine team, they always make time to help you out.
What is pMachine up to lately?
And the future looks even more bright since a little bird told me that they are hard at work at version 1.5. I'm not exactly sure if this version will feature the all new XHTML Typography parser or that we will have to wait till version 2.0 later this year. Also coming is an EE Wiki module and a major EE forum module update. The eCommerce system is also progressing nicely and will feature shipping, taxes, discounts, coupons, specials, paid content, support for all the payment gateways, etc.
Can't say it enough EE rocks and it is such a great system to work with as a designer. No need to learn any PHP if you don't want too. In this blog there is only one little piece of custom PHP to drive my comments numbering that's all. All the rest is done by the standard features of EE. Like I told before the third installment of the postings about my blog will be about EE. It has a bit of learning curve but once you go beyond that EE will never limit your creativity in any way.
24served
1
Hi Veerle,
For some of them that is because their provider does not allow a site’s own 404 page. This is the case e.g. with Telenet, which is not a small provider in this country…
2
404 pages in ExpressionEngine work poorly. A 404 page will display only if a web log does not exist, but not if an entry does not exist. For example, if you go to an entry that doesn’t exist on your site you’ll see the latest blog entry with no 404 message.
3
Custom error pages are great. On my server I have custom error pages that can be accessed in different ways. You could type an incorrect URI and get a 404 sent by the server, or something could mess up in my code and the code itself (and not the server) could spit out a 500 error. A friend of mine and I created a class in PHP called
httpStatusthat anywhere in any code if you want to spit out an error you can easily spit out any error by doing$err=new httpStatus(500,“You goofed!”);where the “You goofed!” is a custom error message. If that’s not provided it uses the default one. We programmed it and never realized just how useful that class was.What surprises me more about many sites is that the people developing them do not utilize the other error codes such as 503, 410, etc. If you’re working on your site and have to take it down for a short while to fix it then you could make a page that sends a 503 error and if you want to be really geeky you could establish a Retry-After header telling when to come back. A 410 error would be used where some content on your site was eliminated and you do not wish to send them somewhere else. Many use a 404 for this, but it’s not correct because a 404 error is for content that has never existed. If you took down content and wanted to redirect people to a different location you could use a 301 error to show that the content was moved permanently. Say you broke that page up into multiple pages for increased readibility you could send a 300 error that shows a list of links to the pages in which you split it up.
4
Veerle,
I’m a real blog newbie but just bought the FoE Blog Design Solutions which compared WP, TP, MT and EE. I’m still a little stumped about which direction to go. Do you have any suggestions? I’d rather start off slow with a kick ass app than get my feet wet with something nice and easy which I’ll end up wanting to switch from. All that I’ve read about EE from your posts sound very impressive!
5
@kevin:
Yes there are limitations to what EE does with a 404. It may be poorly to you but for a simple designer this is already something, not everybody is technically skilled and has the knowledge to program this custom server messages. If you read the manual of EE they aren’t trying to hide that it is cleary stated that it comes with limitations.
It is important to note that there are limitations when it comes to what will trigger this “404” type Template to display. ExpressionEngine will only display the 404 Template if the requested Template Group in the URL does not exist. Due to the dynamic nature of EE’s URL structure, there is no guarantee about exactly what any particular URL segment represents beyond the first segment. Thus, the error can only be triggered by a Template Group name that doesn’t exist.
This should mean something and besides it still displays the latest post so people can navigate and are not lost. This is only a version 1, so which app is perfect from the start? There is always room for improvement.
6
@Kevin
As Geert points out in the documentation, there are limitations in what we can assume for 404 pages in the system. There are developers and designers that are using the URL segments in amazing ways and we cannot assume that we know how a site is set up.
However, there is a conditional that works in many of ExpressionEngine tags that allows you to check if there are any results for that tag. It is called {if no_results} and in that conditionals is a variable called {redirect=”“} where one can redirect a tag with no results to a different template. Not exactly a 404 page, but we are thinking of expanding its abilities.
7
I was going to point out what Paul has already explained, that within EE the {if no_results} tag can adequately redirect a user that happens to reach an unavailable entry on a single-entry template. Otherwise I would say the 404 page system works just fine. Plus the URL segment support in EE is incredible ...
I’m just completing a site designed entirely using static pages called based on URL segments. I have setup a series of conditionals that test the URL and redirect the user to the appropriate page ... The bottom line is that while the site may have dozens and dozens of page templates, I only need two or three actual templates within EE (the rest are all static pages on the server, somewhere else).
I’m happy you’re taking the time to write about EE and it’s versitility, Veerle. It deserves more attention, I think.
8
I can vouch for the amazing support from pMachine. I have had a couple of weird issues that they have been great in helping me solve within a day of my posting to the forum. I have been truly impressed.
9
Spent time on EE forums in the last couple of days getting my head round why a 404 page was’nt coming up beyond a non-existant template group. It’s a bit messy at the moment in EE for this feature and I need to look at the no_results variable. This is just about my only ‘complaint’ about EE really and this comment should’nt really read like a rant because it is outstanding.
10
Kevin is right about getting something strange in the case that the post does not exists.
if you try to access something like http://veerle.duoh.com/index.asp you get a standard 404:
“The requested URL /index.asp was not found on this server.
—
Apache/1.3.33 Server at veerle.duoh.com Port 80”
11
I own Expression Engine too, it seems to be the perfect CMS for my needs, and for my clients’s needs, but it need a lot of reading before you can get started. I mean the tags and their attributes… there are so many !
12
Veerle: One thing that I have found helps for XHTML 1.0 Strict and EE’s native blockquote handling is to set things up like this, so that everytime there’s a blockquote, it also includes the enclosed paragraph tags. I’m no EE expert, but it seems to work just fine:
http://host.sonspring.com/files/ee_blockquote.png
13
Completely agree with this, there seems to be a solution for every kind of functionality I’ve wanted to add to mine (or other sites), it really is so intuitive to use.
14
I have to agree that EE is a great cms tool, but one thing I think could be better is the implementation of groups / group permissions.
We’re using it to run our company weblog, Stream, and I’m interested in creating team weblogs to support projects, as well as on a company-wide level. It seems a little clunky to do this…
15
I have to say I agree with Stephen on the fact that I miss group permissions in EE.
Other than that you just got to love it.
16
hey, thanks for the article! id love to read more on EE like this.
I recently launched my blog, Its no where as near good as yours or anything like that but I searched around for some software, I tried MT but I just didnt like it then I downloaded a free copy of EE and its fantastic!
If I update my own blog a bit more and learn some neat tricks with it I will definatly purchase a personal copy, but like you work dominates my lifestyle. oh well.
17
Hi Veerle,
This is exactly the issue I’m encountering with EE. Mind telling me how you implemented this?
Cheers.
18
Scratch that - I found it here.
;)
19
mistyping an url in the adress bar doesn’t lead me a 404 but to a very scrambled page that contains the latest article, 14 (!) related sections and loads and loads of empty comments.
20
Hi Veerle,
You’ll be pleased to know that EE 1.4.2 is now available. My favourite additions are: “Added four new variables to Comment Entries tag: {count}, {absolute_count}, {total_results}, {total_comments}”. Plus it fixes invalid blockquote use.
There are a bunch of gallery updates too - praise the Lord!
21
Amazing blog.. I use Expression engine on my site as well. Right now I am in the process of re-designing the site so it validates to XHTML 1.0 Strict… also not to happy with the current design, so figured might as well start with a clean slate.
Question: how do I strip out all tags from my posts? Currently I am using the EE Tag {exp:word_limit total=“120”} and that causes all validators to complaint - saying I forgot to add an ending .
22
Ranjeet Sodhi said:
EE wraps your entries into a paragraph element by default, unless you say not to, by selecting ‘none’ instead of ‘XHTML’ in the dropdown below the field. Maybe selecting ‘none’ will help?
23
Hi Veerle,
I heard about EE here on your site, right now I’m using the trial version and I’m amazed.
There’s only one problem I haven’t been able to figure out, I have spent hours looking into the forum but ( there hasn’t been a solution
I need simple image uploads using stand alone entry forms, that’s all. I don’t want my users having to choose an upload destination, I don’t want them viewing existing files from upload directories and choosing an entry field from the whole list of entry fields.
This is the only thing keeping me from buying EE. I feel a bit frustrated because I think this is a very simple/basic feature.
Any help will be appreciated…
24
Enrique Sanchez said:
To be honest I wouldn’t have a clue if this is possible. I’m sure you can expand EE to whatever you like but then you need to be a programmer and I am just a designer/css coder. You could check out this plugin. I’m not sure how it works or anything but it was mentioned in this thread. And they talked about the things you would like to use. Hope this helps you out a little bit more.
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