Toast for Sale!

To demonstrate the power of ExpressionEngine, we are going to use a fictitious business as an example throughout this article. Our website is in the business of selling toast (heated bread with melted butter) online.

With this example, we will be able to explore many of the nuances of building a complete website with ExpressionEngine. Though unlikely that we would really want to sell toast over the internet, the concepts of our example should be transferable to any website.

In this article, we want to introduce the world to our business, so we are going to create a ‘News from the President’ webpage. This will allow the President of our company to communicate to customers and investors the latest goings-on in his business.

Inside the Control Panel

When you first log into the control panel, there are lots of options. Let us take a quick tour of the control panel.

First, we will need to log into ExpressionEngine. If you are using XAMPP to follow along with this article, go to http://localhost/admin.php or http://localhost/system/index.php to log in.

It is assumed that you are using XAMPP with http://localhost/ addresses. If you are following along on an actual website, substitute http://localhost/ for your website domain (for example, http://www.example.com/).

It is required to move the login page to the root of our website to mask the location of our system directory

• The first page we see is the CP Home. We can return to this page anytime by selecting CP Home from the menu at the top-right of the screen, above the main menu. In the left column, we have EllisLab News Feed. Below, we have Most Recent Weblog Entries as well as any Recent Comments or trackbacks visitors may have left. In our case, our site is brand new, so there will be no recent comments or trackbacks, and only 1 recent weblog entry (Getting Started with ExpressionEngine). Clicking on the link will take you directly to that entry.
• On the right, there is a Bulletin Board (a way for you to pass messages to other members of your control panel), the Site Statistics and a Notepad (we can write anything here, and it will be available every time we log-in).



• Across the top is the main menu bar, and at the top-right are links to your website (My Site), this page (CP Home), the ExpressionEngine user-guide (User Guide), and to log-out (Log-out). The Publish and Edit links in the main menu bar are where you can create new entries and edit existing entries. The Templates link is where we can create new templates and edit existing templates. We will spend most of our time in these sections.
• The Communicate tab is where we can manage bulk-emails to our website members. At this time we do not have any members to email (other than ourselves), but as our site grows larger, this feature can be a useful communication/marketing tool.

  Be careful to avoid sending unsolicited bulk emails (or spam) using this feature. In many countries, there are laws governing what can or cannot be done. In the United States, commercial emails must meet very specific guidelines set by the Federal Trade Commission (http://www.ftc.gov/spam/).

• The Modules tab is where we can manage all the modules that come with ExpressionEngine, as well as optional third-party modules that we may wish to install. We can download additional modules from http://expressionengine.com/downloads/addons/category/modules/.
• The My Account tab is where we can edit our login preferences, including our username and password. We can also edit the look and feel of the control panel home page from this screen, as well as send private messages to other members. Much of this page is irrelevant when we are the only member of the site (as we are right now).
• The Admin tab is where most of the configuration of ExpressionEngine takes place, and we will spend a lot of time here. By default, most of the ExpressionEngine settings are already properly set, but feel free to browse and explore all the options that are available. Full documentation on each of the options is available at http://expressionengine.com/docs/cp/admin/index.html.

This concludes our brief tour of ExpressionEngine. Now we are going to delve into one of the most important parts of the control panel—templates.

Templates and URLs

The basic concept in ExpressionEngine is that of a template. Go to any ExpressionEngine-powered website and you will undoubtedly be looking at a template. Templates are what the outside world sees.

At its most basic, a template in ExpressionEngine is a HTML (or CSS or JavaScript) file. If we wanted to, we could use a template exactly like a HTML file, without any problems. We could create an entire website without ever using any other part of ExpressionEngine.

However, we can take templates a lot further than that. By using ExpressionEngine tags inside our templates, we can take advantage of all the features of ExpressionEngine and combine it with all the flexibility that HTML and CSS offers in terms of layout and design. We are not limited to pre-defined ‘cookie-cutter’ templates that have been carefully adapted to work with ExpressionEngine. This is why ExpressionEngine is very popular with website designers.

On the flip side, this is also why there is such a learning curve with ExpressionEngine. There is no point-and-click interface to change the look and feel of your website; you have to have some experience with HTML to get the most out of it.

Let us take a closer look at templates and how they relate to URLs:

1. If you are not already logged in, log into ExpressionEngine at either http://localhost/admin.php or http://www.example.com/admin.php.
2. Click on the Templates button on the top of the screen.



3. Templates are stored in groups. There is no ‘right’ way to group templates—some sites have all their templates in a single group and other sites have lots of template groups. We are going to create a new template group for each section of our website.

ExpressionEngine does come pre-installed with two template groups: the site template group and the search template group. As a new user, it is best not to delete these template groups in case you want to refer to them later.



4. In the next screen we can give our template group a name; let us use toast. There is an option to Duplicate an Existing Template Group which copies all the templates from one template group into our new template group. This can be useful if we are creating one template group that will work very similarly to the one that we already created, but as this is our first template group, we are going to start from scratch. Checking the box Make the index template in this group your site’s home page? means that visitors will see the toast website in place of the ExpressionEngine example site. If you are using the XAMPP test server, go ahead and check this box.



5. Hit Submit to create the template group. We will be returned to the Template Management screen. A message will appear saying Template Group Created, and the new template will appear in the box of groups on the left-hand side.



6. Left-click on the New Template group in the Choose Group box on the left-hand side. Each template group comes with an initial template, called index. Remembering that a template is like an HTML file, a template group is like a directory on our server. The index template is the equivalent of the index.html file—when a visitor visits our template group, the index template is displayed first. For that reason, the index template cannot be renamed or deleted. Let us edit the index template to see what it does. Click on the word index.



7. A template is essentially just text (although it usually contains HTML, CSS, or ExpressionEngine code). When we first create a template, there is no text, and therefore all we see is an empty white box. Let us write something in the box to demonstrate how templates are seen by visitors. Type in a sentence and click Update and Finished.



8. Just like HTML files and directories, templates and template groups relate directly to the URL that visitors see. In the URL http://www.example.com/index.php/toast/index, the index.php is what distinguishes this as an ExpressionEngine page. Then comes the template group name, in our case called toast. Finally, we have the template name, in this case index.
9. Go to the previous URL (with or without the index.php as appropriate, for example, http://www.example.com/toast/index or http://localhost/toast/index) and the template we just edited should appear.



10. Now try typing the template group without specifying which template to load. The index template is always returned.



11. What happens if we do not specify the template group, and just go to our base domain (http://localhost/ or http://www.example.com/)? In this case, the toast template of the default template group is returned. The default template group is indicated on the templates screen with an * before the template group name and underneath the list of template groups.