Thursday, June 30, 2005
Cool Expression Engine Trick
Expression Engine allows you to make as many different templates as you want, to be embedded on the page as a shortcut. We use them for the various blogrolls, one each.
Manually adding the links to the existing templates would mean updating in six places. Six!
By using a template for each blogroll, every change need only be done once to appear in each of the six places. We’re much better about doing updates since generating the blogroll templates.
So recently I have been posting tons about the Kelo case; meatier stuff than I’ve tended to write lately. In order to give it all more exposure and tie it all together, I started adding something like what I have seen at other blogs; a list of related links at the bottom of each post. Then I retrofitted it to each of the posts, so each of them would link the others. Yikes! That’s a lot of work, however good it may be for turning site hits into extra page views.
I was thinking… how does this work on other sites? Some have it built in, apparently. Well, if it can be automated, or semi-automated, could I at least make it easier? Would the template features of Expression Engine work?
Yes!
All I had to do was create a new template, put my accumulated links in there, and at the end of each Kelo post use and “embed” tag referencing the template. Each time there’s a new post I want to cross-link between Kelo posts, I can add it. This doesn’t address the fact that eventually it’d get out of hand, but I could easily start a new version of the template for newer material, or rotate older links out of it.
It’s a cool trick, in any event, and extremely easy.