Publishing in Expression Engine

Creating a new article in expression engine is as easy as using your favorite text editor. Below are screenshots which popup to full size images when clicked on. In this tutorial we cover the basics, see Custom Fields in the menu for additional publishing options.

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To begin click on Publish at the top left. If you have more than one weblog a list will appear to select the one wanted, after selection or clicking on publish in the case of one weblog, the screen below will appear. Enter a title (the “url title” will auto fill as you type), make a brief summary if used, enter the text in the main body, and also use the extended entry. The extended entry can/will create a read more link so often seen, taking you to a page for the full article. Formatting is automated, carriage return (enter) makes a new line, and a space between lines makes a paragraph.

The buttons across the top are self explanatory. Change the date if wanted, categories will have a list of categories to choose if you have them. Options give “Make entry Sicky” which keeps it at the top of the page or be first if page is limited to one article, also here you can select to not publish it by setting status to closed, date is below.

Here is the date tag where you can change the date if wanted and/or set it to publish in the future. You can also set the article and comments expiry date here. You don’t have to set the date as it has the time of publishing preset.

That’s about it, after completing your article simply click on submit and its published!
It can be seen in the above screenshots a green arrow below Quicksave. This is to add photos and files to your entry by uploading them, photos are easily resized and can be made into thumbs with popup full size nicely formatted images. This is covered in Photos and ExpressionEngine tutorial.

Formatting Text

Thankfully, EE does not use a text editor wysiwyg as they cause more problems than they solve. Some cannot take the time to learn a lot of html thought. The solution is the ability to add any number of shortcuts to the formatting buttons in the control panel.

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Here is the area where this can be done. Note the button text which can be anything, and the opening/closing tags that bracket our text to add formatting. The open /close tags are added automatically when the text is highlighted (selected} by clicking, holding down the mouse button and dragging to select the text.

Making a List

Here I go through the simple steps in making a list showing how to use the EE formatting buttons. Here is my list.

In any formatting you highlight the text first, then click on the ul button which starts the list. Or ol for a numbered list). Clear the tags so that your list is on separate lines to add each list item.

Then go through the lists hilighting each item and clicling on the li (list item).

And here we are all done. Not difficult at all.

Other formatting options

In the above screenshot of adding formatting buttons it can be seen that any inline css can be used. This can also be used for adding color to, and resizing text. (why resize text?) For headings we have h1 through h6 which can also be added. For other formatting:

In this example I have added a color to a block of text simply by highlighting it and clicking on the color wanted. The formatting and colors are added to the css file for easy adjustments in one place sitewide if changes are wanted later on.

This principle can be used for any css formatting.

And if one uses Acronym’s there are several options. One is the formatting buttons where something like MCSEMicrosoft Certified Systems Engineer can be made using the formatting buttons with css, or also ToolTipsThis is a custom CSS tooltip.

Don’t abuse them as it then becomes annoying, but used sparingly they are very good. can be created.

Then if more is needed there is also an Acronym module that has amazing potential to not only do as previous, but we are trying to get it devloped to also do auto linking to elsewhere. More on that as soon as possible.

WYSIWYG

This is becomming a frequest request. Personally I detest them. They cause more problems than they solve, are difficult to configure, usually destroy the best of custom fields and image uploading and resizing, and are a pain to install and configure.

A operfect solution is to use EctoA desktop editor that integrates with ExpressionEngine to publish to your site from EE, see the article from Your Desktop to EE for screenshots and more info.

 

Business Switches to EE

We are the leading cooling tower manufacturer in the world with over $1 billion in sales and offices in 20 countries. Our parent company, SPX Corporation, is a Fortune 500 company and still produce their website with Dreamweaver - yikes. We built our site exclusively in Expression Engine and launched it in December, 2006. It’s been three months now and we’ve had a chance to shake out all of the quirks.

We abandoned our $50,000 Vignette installation as our CMS after it took too long to develop pages, was too complex, and didn’t allow for flexibility. Thanks for making Expression Engine!

Templates and Weblogs

The below tutorials are compliments of Ellis Labs Expression Engine Tutorials.

I thank Ellis labs, the maker of Expression Engine, for granting permission to reformat their tutorials as a convenience of our visitors. In the past several years I have in all cases found them gracious and always helpful.

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