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Jonathan Longnecker - From Design To Dynamic: Rapid Development with ExpressionEngine

Categories:

ExpressionEngine

Tags:

development, expressionengine, fieldframe, jonathan longnecker, structure

Published:

12:30pm on Monday 26th October, 2009

Jonathan Longnecker is a developer with fortyseven media. He discussed the tips and tricks they use to quickly build new ExpressionEngine sites.

Slides and code examples from the talk are on Jonathan’s site.

Introduction

• The problem is that EE developers are too awesome. Add-on development has exploded, and functionality and usefulness is really amazing. Structure is a great example of this.
• We typically use 15+ addons for every site, with the same kind of templates and global variables
• The solution is to set up a sandbox site where the core and all add-ons are kept up-to-date. Add some default templates and global variables, a weblog for content, and some sweet tricks and you have the ability to rapidly build out new sites
• We will be adding new things to it as we find great add-ons

Add-Ons

• LG Addon Updater
• LG htaccess Generator: Generates your .htaccess file, removes index.php and much, much more
• LG Add Sitename: Enables Control Panel admin page title replacements, client logo
• LG TinyMCE: Not convinced it’s the best choice, and it’s not good with pasted text. Turn off source formatting, spans and brs, take out the image upload, add blockquote
• SL Developer Info: Lists all weblogs, templates, and other useful developer shortcuts. Give it it’s own custom tab in your nav bar
• ImgSizer: Resizes and crops intelligently and creates thumbnails; make sure you create a “sized” directory in your images folder
• Solspace’s Freeform
• FieldFrame: Changes the way you can put together certain types of content
• nGen File Field
• Structure: Radically changes the way you handle content pages and navigation. Scared of using it initially as I thought it would lock me into certain way of developing templates, but it really has potential to speed up certain parts of your site; secondary static pages are a lot faster to set up

Tips and tricks

• In your Template Preferences, turn on save template revisions (I use five) for added protection from mistakes, and always save templates as files
• Create a “content” weblog with custom fields - meta keywords, meta description, a body (TinyMCE field type), and images (an FF Matrix). A sweet trick invented by AJ Penninga is to set up your images as a FF Matrix with a File field, title, radio group of sizes, radio group for crop height (optional), and dropdown for alignment. Then to insert the image add {image_1}, {image_2}, etc. in the body content. Your content template then uses LG_Replace to loop through the matrix images and replace those tags with the images inside the {images} tag
• Create a client member group with access to file uploads, Structure and weblogs
• Create global variables: I use html_head (containing doctype, static meta tags, favicon link, etc.), html_closing, jquery, javascript, rss (just your RSS links), and stylesheets
• Create templates in site and _global groups: footer, header, nav (containing Structure’s nav_main tag), sidebar (using Structure’s nav_sub tag) and content (using Structure’s title_trail tag to build the