Is It A Post… Or A Commercial?

When I was attempting to create the guest account to invite people to post here last night (which attracted zero interest so far, but we’ll leave the option open for the next week or so if it doesn’t get abused or out of hand), Deb heard me commenting from the other room “Expression Engine is soooo secure!”

It took on the order of ten minutes for me to find all the right settings to allow the guest account I had created to not only log on, but also publish.  You can control things to a pretty fine level of detail.

I’m totally impressed with Expression Engine so far.

My big feature request would be for it to add a table that maps each imported pMachine post URL to the new, EE-style URL that gets assigned.  Someone clicks an old link, it hits the site, doesn’t immediately see the page, says hold it, this was a pMachine import, does a lookup and redirects.  Currently it goes to the main page for any link to a post made with pMachine.  Which is better than generating an error, but not all the way to perfect functional grace.

We do manual blogrolls.  That is harder in EE, at least given that we have made sure all sidebar content shows up in all views, as is necessary if we get around to having ads or sponsored links.  But it’s not a big deal, really.  Copy and paste is our friend.  There will be major changes soon.  I guess if we aren’t linking you and you think we ought to be, you could let me know.  We’ll probably do some categorizing, but nothing like my original planetary scheme.  More like a segregation of business/CotC blogs from the rest, and perhaps a separate New England Bloggahs list.

Anyway, if you consider the hobby of blogging worth the money, Expression Engine is just amazing.

Update:

Hmmm… I just checked referrers, went to one from Google, clicked the link to us, and it 404’d instead of going to the main page as I described.  That’s not what it had been doing with the pMachine-style links before today.

1. The more I hear from EE folks, the more enthused I get about getting it. Just one more week, maybe two. Woo!

   The funny thing is that I had that epiphany about this being my hobby about a month ago and realized that it’s pretty cheap as far as hobbies go. That changed my thinking about ponying up the dough to upgrade to EE and change my hosting.

   Posted by jen  on  12/23  at  02:16 PM

2. The blogroll and sidebar areas are places where embedded templates come in handy.  I created a template file called “links” that contains just my blogroll.  Whenever I need to add it to another template I just pull it in.  I did the same thing for the link header that shows up on all my pages.  That’s a template called “navlist”.  That way if I need to change it, I just change the one template and it magically changes in all the ones that embed it.

   Take a look at the “Sub-Templates” section of the documentation. 

   Of course, with your blogroll consisting of sections on both sides of the page, you’ll probably have to create several embedded templates.

   Posted by Aubrey Turner  on  12/23  at  04:03 PM

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