Articles: Best Practices

In keeping with Ellis Lab’s development philosophy, ExpressionEngine 2 is pretty bare bones. Fortunately, there are lots of great add-ons to make it easier to use.

ExpressionEngine is a powerful CMS, with a lot of options for configuration. Here are some best practices to streamline your development and make your installation more flexible.

ExpressionEngine 2 has been out since July.  Here’s a quick review of what’s going on.

Some web development firms built their sites in their own proprietary CMS. Why this is a bad idea.

If you find yourself repeating information in your ExpressionEngine code, global variables will save you time and headache.

With thousands of web hosts to choose from, who should you rely on to host your Expression Engine sites?

If your server is happy with it, replacing index.php in your Expression Engine site URLs is quick and easy, and will make your URLs much prettier.

One of the best things about Expression Engine is the pieces you can add on do it.  If this CMS doesn’t do everthing you like, you can add specific functionality quite easily.  Let’s look at five must-have extensions.

Copying an Expression Engine installing is straightforward.  If you have an installation working the way you like it, why not copy it instead of going through all the steps to install a new one? By copying an existing installation, you’ll preserve all the settings, extensions, modules and plugins that you use. You can even login to the new installation with the same username and password!