<blockquote>
<h2>Oh, your head hasn't exploded yet? This should do it.</h2>
H9RBS.js (v0.0001) is a flexible, dependency-free, lightweight, device-agnostic, modular, baked-in, component framework MVC library shoelacestrap to help you kickstart your responsive CSS-based app architecture backbone kitchensink tweetybirds.
</blockquote>
This is one of the funniest things I've seen in quite a while.
<blockquote>
<h3>2. How do I install this?</h3>
Um... are you stupid or something? Just attackclone the grit repo pushmerge, then rubygem the lymphnode js shawarma module – and presto!
</blockquote>
Ahh hahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

HTML9 Responsive Boilerstrap JS

I’m writing this here because at the moment, I have no better place to write it. I can’t write about this sort of techie thing on <a href="http://moviebyte.com">MovieByte</a>, because you know, that’s for movies. I can’t write about it on <a href="http://tjdraper.com">my personal musings blog</a> (for lack of a better name), because nobody who reads that cares in the slightest. And when I do write there, it’s about politics that might offend you, or my cute kiddos.
And even though most of you probably don’t care, it’s something I want to write about because I’m excited about it. So here it is.
One of the advantages of ExpressionEngine is that it does not box you in to a certain way of doing things. I worked with WordPress a little in the early days, built one site in WordPress and messed around with a couple other sites. WordPress is just not my style at all. You see, WordPress renders the HTML you see on the front end from a very specific set of templates, things like header.html, sidebar.html, nav.html, footer.html etc. etc. A tag that you open in one might be closed in another template and so on. Yes I know that you can modify this scheme and do things in a different way to some extent, but to a very large extent WordPress has a predetermined box for you to work in or around. It’s no way to work for a guy like me.
And when I discovered EE, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. You see, what you see when you visit any given URL is the contents of the rendering of one template in which you can put whatever markup you want.
The way EE URLs and templates work looks like this:
<pre><code>http://mysite.com/the_template_group/the_template
</code></pre>
If no template group is specified in the URL, then the index template in that group is used (every template group must have an index template).
You can build each template on it’s own and put any markup you want in that template on a per-template basis (not very DRY), or you can split it up into chunks as you see fit.
Back in the EE 1 days, the way to do this was by embedding another template into your template.
<pre><code>{embed="the_template_group/the_template"}
</code></pre>
So in those days you might create a template group called “includes” and make all kinds of templates in there for your global markup that you would embed in your other templates. But doing that came at a cost. For every embed, the EE template parser would run again from the beginning. Embed about five templates and you are looking at some serious server overhead to crank out that page for your viewer. This might lead to a delay of 3 to 4 seconds, or more if you got crazy with embeds.
EE 2 debuted something new. EE 1 had something called Global Variables where you could store HTML markup to call in your template, but no EE template tags, because those would not get parsed. EE 2 built upon that premise by introducing Snippets. Snippets can contain both HTML markup AND EE template tags. And a snippet call does not restart the template parser.
So with EE 2 we have a low overhead way to slice up the template and include global markup. But even though this is an infinitely better solution than WP’s box approach, I was never complete satisfied with this.
<h2>A New Approach</h2>
Enter Mark Croxton’s excellent EE add-on called <a href="http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/stash">Stash</a>. I don’t know when he released it exactly, but I discovered it last year and it’s fantastic. There are a lot of uses this plugin can be put to that I will probably never in a million years figure out, but allow me to tell you how I use it.
Bye bye includes (via embeds or snippets) and hello one template to rule them all!
Here’s the structure. EE allows us to have hidden templates which may not be called by URL, but only by embed so I create a template group called <code>_layouts</code> where I store what I call my layout templates. The first and primary one I create is called <code>_default</code> (for a very large majority of sites, you will only need one). All my global markup goes in this layout template. If I need more than one layout template, I might break out the “super” global markup into snippets but for most sites, I just have the one template and keep all global markup there. So that’s the layout template.
In each actual site template, I call the layout template via embed:
<pre><code>{!-- Embed the Primary Template --}
{embed="_layouts/_default"}
</code></pre>
Okay, so now what? Each site template is going to have markup or variable content that we need to display somewhere in the embedded layout template. How do we get it there? Ahh, glad you asked. This is what I’m excited about. This is where Stash comes in.
EE template parse order is my nemesis. To this day I have trouble really internalizing the concepts and what gets rendered when, in what order and all that jazz. But I can tell you essentially how it works so far as I understand.
<ol>
<li>EE looks at your URL and loads the template you have called.</li>
<li>That template gets parsed, all EE template tags in that template get parsed.</li>
<li>If the template has any embeds, the template parser starts over on the embedded template</li>
<li>All template tags in the embedded template get parsed</li>
<li>The final parsed and rendered output is displayed</li>
</ol>
So this is how <a href="http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/stash">Stash</a> helps us. After embedding the layout template, we can set stuff in the template being called by URL with stash:set, and call it in the embedded template with stash:get because the called template gets parsed first, then the embedded template is parsed. So:
Setting content in the template called by URL:
<pre><code>{!-- Set some content --}
{exp:stash:set name="stuff"}stuff goes here{/exp:stash:set}
</code></pre>
Retrieving content:
<pre><code>{!-- Get some content --}
{exp:stash:get name='stuff'}
</code></pre>
Are you getting it? See the possibilities? After embedding the primary template, we wrap everything in the template called by URL in stash:set tags and essentially inject that content into the embedded template with the stash:get call. And that stash:get call can be anywhere in the embedded template. For instance, on this site I want to change the <code>&#x3C;title></code> area in the head of the page depending on the URL and page visited. So in my embedded layout template the title looks like this:
<pre><code>&#x3C;title>{exp:stash:get name='head_title'} | BuzzingPixel&#x3C;/title>
</code></pre>
And in the URL called template I have set the title that stash is retrieving like so:
<pre><code>{exp:stash:set name="head_title"}This is the page title{/exp:stash:set}
</code></pre>
Now do you see it? This is some seriously powerful mojo! And the fun doesn’t end there. What if I want to control various aspects of the layout template based on the URL? What if when I call a page template I want to turn certain aspects of the layout on or off. If it’s as easy as displaying or not displaying code we can still do it all with one layout template using Stash (for complicated sites, this is where you may need more than one layout template, but when you really get into this workflow, there is not actually a need to have more than one layout template very often).
An example is that on a site I recently developed, some templates required a sidebar layout and some did not. So I created a method with Stash to tell the layout template whether to display the sidebar. I used <a href="http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/switchee">Switchee</a> case logic (another great add-on by Croxton) to reduce template overhead, but I’ll use native EE <code>{if}</code> statements here for the simplicity of the demonstration:
Here is the value I set in my URL called template:
<pre><code>{!-- Show the Sidebar? Possible Values are: "sidebar" "nosidebar" --}
{exp:stash:set name="template_type"}sidebar{/exp:stash:set}
</code></pre>
And in the embedded layout template:
<pre><code>{if "{exp:stash:set name="template_type"}" == "sidebar"}
Sidebar Code
{/if}
</code></pre>
You can see the power of this method. But there is another benefit: speed. One embed per template. This is a really low overhead approach to keeping things DRY and I love it. This is the sort of thing I get excited about.
And I hope by writing about it here, someone comes across this and finds it useful. If you have any questions, or want to tell me about a better way to do things, shoot me an email. You will find the contact link in the menu above.

Templating with ExpressionEngine

<blockquote>
Before beginning our journey to learn HTML and CSS it is important to understand the differences between the two languages, their syntax, and some common terminology.
</blockquote>
This is a great resource, even for those of us who already know all this stuff.

Learn to Code HTML & CSS

HTML and CSS Terminology and Syntax Intro

<blockquote>
If you’re like me, you often forget a lot of CSS rules. The solution? When starting a new, blank line in a CSS style declaration, open the autocomplete menu by hitting “esc” and choose the “Styles” pop, and you get this:
<img src="/images/blog/2012/07/02/css-browser.png" alt="NewImage">
</blockquote>
Jumping Gigawatts! I did not know this. Also this:
<blockquote>
Quickly make changes to multiple lines at once. To do so, hold Option while dragging a text selection. Now, type within that selection. Any text is applied to all lines!
</blockquote>

Cabel Sasser writing on the Panic Blog

20 Coda 2 Secrets

Yeah, pretty much. Because it’s geeky, and I’m geeky so I’m going to talk about it.
You might recall that I <a href="/blog/2011/12/14/just-how-flexible-is-expressionengine">talked about it when I first redesigned Apple User Pro</a>. It turned out I was using way too much PHP and making things hard on myself. So I <a href="/article/2012/02/ee-url-shortener">followed up and talked about how to do it the easy way with all native EE code</a>, and one plugin (<a href="http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/http-header">HTTP Header</a>).
But when I went for the rebrand to BuzzingPixel I wanted to simplify further from the end user perspective. One thing I never liked with any version of the URL shortener is that I had to include the template group in the URL like this:
<pre><code>http://aupro.us/s/1219
</code></pre>
Where “s” is the template group and the index template of the “s” template group is used by default. But who wants that template group in the URL? It’s extra. The entry ID is the only thing I want in the URL, that silly template group is just an annoyance. The only reason I ever included it was because as much as I love ExpressionEngine, and as flexible as it is in most ways, it can be hard to wrestle with it’s URL structure. URL structure is part of the design in my opinion, and I have been able to design the URL structure pretty well in most areas of this site, but I have never been happy with the URL shortener structure.
I have tried unsuccessfully in the past to remove the template group from the URL with htaccess re-writes but I have been unsuccessful. I even spent several hours trying to figure it out when designing the current BuzzingPixel design. I finally gave up on htaccess in disgust and went and watched a movie. But the next day I had a brain wave and I solved it! You will notice that short URLs no longer include the template group. Here’s how:
We still need to copy the index.php file from the main site root to the short URL site root. And you’ll need to remove index.php with htaccess. I’m actually removing www and trailing slashes as well. Here’s what my htaccess file looks like:
<pre><code>## remove www
 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.bzpxl.us [NC]
 RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://bzpxl.us/$1 [L,R=301]

## remove trailing slash
 ## check if file or directory exists first
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
 ## if not file or directory remove the slash
 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^\.bzpxl\.com$ [NC]
 RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

## remove index.php
 ## check if file or directory exists first
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
 ## if not file or directory remove index.php
 RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]
</code></pre>
It’s probably not necessary to check for files and directories on my short URL site since nothing else lives there, but this is actually a pretty typical htaccess file for me, I copied and pasted then modified the main URL.
As I talked about in the previous articles, you need to modify the index.php file with some custom variables. But this is where I made the critical change that allows me to remove the template group from the URL altogether. Normally, ExpressionEngine requires a template group in the URL. But if there isn’t one in the URL then ExpressionEngine presents the 404 page. This was my “eureka” moment. I should create a new template group called anything I want (I called it shortener), and then using the custom config variable in index.php, override the default 404 page and assign my custom template as 404.
<pre><code>$assign_to_config['site_404'] = 'shortener/index';
</code></pre>
Now when the short URL with Entry ID is used, it’s sent to the 404 template. The 404 template has the appropriate code magic to redirect to the full URL.
<pre><code>{exp:http_header status="301"}

{exp:channel:entries entry_id="{segment_1}" disable="categories|category_fields|member_data|pagination"}
{if no_results}{redirect="/"}{/if}

{if channel_id=="9"}{redirect="/article/{entry_date format='%Y/%m'}/{url_title}"}{/if}

{if channel_id=="13"}{redirect="/linkedlist/{entry_date format='%Y/%m'}/{url_title}"}{/if}

{/exp:channel:entries}
</code></pre>
That’s not very much code at all. And for a lot of uses, you won’t even need to detect the Channel ID. I have to because I have two channels with two different URL structures, the Linked List, and the Article Channel.
So what’s going on. Well, first I’m using the HTTP Header plugin to change the header status to 301 instead of 404.
<pre><code>{exp:http_header status="301"}
</code></pre>
Next I’m opening the channel entries tag and instead of assigning a Channel or Channels, I’m telling the tag to use the first URL segment as the entry ID.
<pre><code>{exp:channel:entries entry_id="{segment_1}" disable="categories|category_fields|member_data|pagination"}
</code></pre>
Then I’m redirecting to the site homepage if there are no results (this is just in case someone visits the short URL without the entry ID or some such thing).
<pre><code>{if no_results}{redirect="/"}{/if}
</code></pre>
Next, in my case, I need to determine which channel the entry is in and redirect appropriately.
<pre><code>{if channel_id=="9"}{redirect="/article/{entry_date format='%Y/%m'}/{url_title}"}{/if}

{if channel_id=="13"}{redirect="/linkedlist/{entry_date format='%Y/%m'}/{url_title}"}{/if}
</code></pre>
And finally, I close the channel entries tag.
<pre><code>{/exp:channel:entries}
</code></pre>
If in the future I want to add channels and sections to the site that use short URLs, it’s as simple as adding another conditional line of code to detect the channel ID and redirect appropriately to the correct URL.
And that is a really simple URL shortener based on the Channel Entry ID with no template group in the url.

You're going to talk about the URL shortener again?


<blockquote>
One thing that really bugs me is when I encounter an ‘mobile optimized’ website on my iPhone/iPad. I hate these sites because they are akin to going into a Ferrari dealership to see a Ferrari and instead only getting to see a Mercedes, that some guy traded in — you feel screwed over.
</blockquote>
In general, I agree with this sentiment. However, there are challenges with just serving the standard site to a mobile device. I find standard websites on my phone just as annoying as mobile websites that suck.
I think that designers should work very hard to make the website function for mobile as well as on the desktop. Forgive me for tooting my own horn, but I personally think I have done it correctly on this site. I serve the exact same HTML for mobile devices that I do for desktop browsers. I serve a mobile styleheet to mobile devices such as the iPhone. I serve the desktop styleheet to iPads. There aren’t a huge amount of differences between the mobile and the desktop stylesheets. And all the functionality is exactly the same.
I think it’s just really lame to reduce functionality for mobile browsers, or to constantly bug users about downloading an app.

Ben Brooks

Mobile Optimized Sites

<blockquote>
By this I mean that if you want to create extensible and maintainable, flexible and predictable websites, you should really take care to make your CSS selectors as dev-friendly as possible; i.e. short.
</blockquote>
I have personally been going more and more towards shorter and more generic selectors in my CSS, and most of the stuff here makes a lot of sense to me. Too many children and dependencies makes for messier and less efficient coding.
And as for IDs or Classes, I don’t believe I used a single ID selector in my CSS on the last site I did.

Harry Roberts

Short Selectors

<blockquote>
Last December I got an email that made my inner geek squeal with delight: An invitation to join the Coda 2 alpha and beta test. If you have no idea what those words mean, let me fill you in.
</blockquote>
Nice look at Coda 2.

Andy Soell

Coda 2 Review

<blockquote>
We made Coda 2 better at everything. So it can make you better at everything.
You code the web. We revolutionized that process in Coda, putting everything in one place. An editor. Terminal. CSS. Files. But we knew we could do better. With Coda 2, we went beyond expectations. With loads of new, much-requested features, a few surprises, and a seriously refreshed UI, this update is, truly, major.
</blockquote>
Describing me as excited hardly seems to do justice to my state of mind about this update!

Coda

Coda 2

<blockquote>
Hands down, the best part about ExpressionEngine is the flexibility. When dealing with Drupal and other CMSes I always felt that I had to jam my design into their system. In other words, build a website that would fit their narrow structure instead of building what I wanted. I needed a CMS where I didn’t have to start with a default theme and “make it work” with my design. ExpressionEngine is great because it makes no assumptions about your design. Build the site that you want without having to worry about whether it will work in the CMS, because it will.
With ExpressionEngine there are no starter templates to deal with so there is no having to modify code or override styles. I suppose some people like having templates to start from but for me I want a clean slate to work from. Markup my css file and my index template and drop it into ExpressionEngine. There is no need to worry about putting snippets of code into the correct include file, struggling with uncommented and cryptic code, or finding the line of code in the default stylesheet to change a font color. it is all 100% your markup.
</blockquote>
Exactly.
<blockquote>
Say you build a blog with ExpressionEngine, and a year later you want to build a full website onto it. With another CMS it might be a challenge but with ExpressionEngine you can build on additional sections or added features easily and at any time. Start with a blog, add some static pages, add a second blog, add a photo gallery. Whatever, whenever, and however you want.
</blockquote>
There’s lot of good stuff in this article. I think he pretty much captures the essence of why I’m an ExpressionEngine guy and not, say, a Wordpress guy (much less Drupal or Joomla… shudder).

Tyler Herman

ExpressionEngine is Best for Web Designers

This is a follow up to <a href="/blog/2011/12/14/just-how-flexible-is-expressionengine">my previous article on creating a URL shortener with ExpressionEngine</a>. It turns out I was doing it the really complicated way. My new way uses all EE code and doesn’t require any PHP. The only thing I’m using that isn’t included by default in ExpressionEngine is a plugin called <a href="http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/http-header">HTTP Header</a>. I use this to set the header to 301.
I still use the short domain name “aurpro.us” hosted on the same server. From the original article:
<blockquote>
<h2>One ExpressionEngine install on two domains</h2>
The next step is to copy the index.php and .htaccess file from Apple User Pro’s web-root to the aupro.us web-root. But we aren’t quite done yet. Since I’m copying the index.php from the main site, the system path is already declared in the document, but there are some other variables I need to configure. Lines 89 through 93 of EE’s index.php contain some variables that are commented out.
<pre><code>// $assign_to_config['template_group'] = '';
// $assign_to_config['template'] = '';
// $assign_to_config['site_index'] = '';
// $assign_to_config['site_404'] = '';
// $assign_to_config['global_vars'] = array(); // This array must be associative
</code></pre>
For this purpose, I only need two of those. I need to declare the `template_group and “template” to override the defaults I have set in the EE control panel. That way, if someone loads up aupro.us without anything more to the URL, EE will not serve the default template, but will instead load my URL shortening template and redirect them to the Apple User Pro home page.
So I configured like so:
<pre><code>$assign_to_config['template'] = 'u';
$assign_to_config['site_index'] = 'index';
</code></pre>
</blockquote>
So that’s all the same except I changed my template group to “s”. S stands for Short URL (to me anyway). I kept the “u” template group around and simply embedded the “s/index” template for backward compatibility with older shortening URLs.
<pre><code>{embed="s/index"}
</code></pre>
So, here is my much simplified way to use short URLs with EE.
First we’ll use the HTTP Header plugin I talked about:
<pre><code>{exp:http_header status="301"}
</code></pre>
Next we’ll call the appropriate channels.
<pre><code>{exp:channel:entries channel="appleuserpro|linkedlist" limit="1" disable="categories|category_fields|custom_fields|member_data|pagination" require_entry="yes"}
</code></pre>
The require entry is very important to the next bit of code. If no entry is called when visiting aupro.us, I want it to redirect to appleuserpro.com. So I use:
<pre><code>{if no_results}{redirect="/"}{/if}
</code></pre>
Next, we need to call a redirect for the entry.
<pre><code>{if channel_id=="9"}{redirect="article/{entry_date format='%Y'}/{entry_date format='%m'}/{url_title}"}{/if}

{if channel_id=="13"}{redirect="linkedlist/{entry_date format='%Y'}/{entry_date format='%m'}/{url_title}"}{/if}
</code></pre>
Now in my case, because I’m using two Channels for my content here on Apple User Pro, one for Articles, and one for my Linked List, I have to use some “if” statements to redirect to the right URL. If you are only using one channel, you can just remove the if statements and the second redirect, change to your appropriate URL format, and you’re good to go. But as you see, in my case, I have to figure out which channel the entry being called is in, then either redirect to the Article URL, or the Linked List URL. Even so, it’s fairly straight forward.
And finally, all that’s left to do is close the Channel Entries Tag:
<pre><code>{/exp:channel:entries}
</code></pre>
And that’s it.
And one more thing I’ll reiterate from the original article. It’s very easy to add a short URL to your entries. Here’s how I do it:
<pre><code>&#x3C;a href="http://aupro.us/s/{entry_id}">Short URL&#x3C;/a>
</code></pre>
As long as that code is within the Channel Entries tag for the entry in question, <code>{entry_id}</code> will call the entry ID number.
And that’s the short URL; much easier than my first round of code. But isn’t that how things go? You always learn new, more efficient, and better ways of doing things.

ExpressionEngine URL Shortener Revisited

To answer the question of the headline, flexible enough to let me create a URL shortener just for this site. It should be noted I’m not a huge fan of URL shorteners. I used to use Goo.gl a lot so I could see how many people were clicking my links, but I stopped doing that. That is because I have a problem with URL shorteners in general. They hide stuff. You can’t actually see the link you are clicking on. Who knows where it's taking you.
However, having my own personal URL shortener for this site fixes that at least partly because anytime you see a URL that starts with aupro.us, you know it’s going to take you somewhere on this site. And short URLs are often necessary when sharing a link on social networking, or even in other mediums. So I decided to build one. It took me about 10 minutes.
<h2>Building the URL Shortener</h2>
So how did I build it? Obviously first of all I acquired the domain aupro.us and added it to my hosting account. It is important for the short URL domain to be on the same hosting account. Why? Because ExpressionEngine works by declaring the server path to the system files in it’s index.php file. Actually, the ExpressionEngine system files could be anywhere on the server as long as you tell ExpressionEngine the absolute server path in index.php. <a href="#fn:flexee1">1</a> You will see why this is important in a moment.
Next I created a template group called “u” which stands for URL. In the index template of the template group “u” I placed the magic code that makes the URL shortening possible.
<pre><code>&#x3C;?php

{exp:channel:entries channel="appleuserpro|linkedlist"}

{if segment_1 != ""}// Permanent redirection
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://appleuserpro.com/article/{url_title}/");
exit();{/if}

{if segment_1 == ""}// Permanent redirection
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://appleuserpro.com");
exit();{/if}

{/exp:channel:entries}
?>
</code></pre>
So what am I doing here?
<pre><code>{exp:channel:entries channel="appleuserpro|linkedlist"}
</code></pre>
This is opening the channel entries tag so that I can retrieve the URL for the entry.
Then, with the “if” statements, I’m determining whether or not someone is visiting just the URL aupro.us, or if the URL contains more.
<pre><code>{if segment_1 != ""}
</code></pre>
“segment_1” refers to the part of the URL that immediately follows the base URL of aupro.us. If segment_1 is not empty, then the code for URL re-direction will be used.
<pre><code>{if segment_1 == ""}
</code></pre>
This second “if” says that if segment_1 is empty, then we should use the code to re-direct to the home page of Apple User Pro.
<h2>One ExpressionEngine install on two domains</h2>
The next step is to copy the index.php and .htaccess file from Apple User Pro’s web-root to the aupro.us web-root. But we aren’t quite done yet. Since I’m copying the index.php from the main site, the system path is already declared in the document, but there are some other variables I need to configure. Lines 89 through 93 of EE’s index.php contain some variables that are commented out.
<pre><code>// $assign_to_config['template_group'] = '';
// $assign_to_config['template'] = '';
// $assign_to_config['site_index'] = '';
// $assign_to_config['site_404'] = '';
// $assign_to_config['global_vars'] = array(); // This array must be associative
</code></pre>
For this purpose, I only need two of those. I need to declare the “template_group” and “template” to override the defaults I have set in the EE control panel. That way, if someone loads up aupro.us without anything more to the URL, EE will not serve the default template, but will instead load my URL shortening template and redirect them to the Apple User Pro home page.
So I configured like so:
<pre><code>$assign_to_config['template'] = 'u';
$assign_to_config['site_index'] = 'index';
</code></pre>
<h2>The URL</h2>
Now the way this works is as follows. Every entry in ExpressionEngine has a text URL (this entry’s text URL is “just-how-flexible-is-expressionengine”). And so you link to an article with “template-group/optionally-declare-template-from-group/entry-URL” format. But entries also have entry ID numbers and can be called with “template-group/entry-id” format. This entry’s entry ID number is 792. So with those templates in place the url <a href="http://aupro.us/u/792">aupro.us/u/792</a> will redirect to this article’s URL of <a href="http://appleuserpro.com/article/2011/12/just-how-flexible-is-expressionengine">appleuserpro.com/article/just-how-flexible-is-expressionengine.</a>
<h2>Adding a short URL link</h2>
I then took the additional step of adding a short URL link to each entry so that I, or anyone else could easily use it. The code is as follows.
<pre><code>&#x3C;div class="permalink">&#x3C;a href="http://aupro.us/u/{entry_id}">short url ♦&#x3C;/a>&#x3C;/div>
</code></pre>
The <code>{entry_id}</code> tag does the obvious. It calls the entry ID number. And that parameter is within the <code>{exp:channel:entries}</code> tag of my template.
And that’s it. That’s how to easily build a custom URL shortener for your site with ExpressionEngine.
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<li>One of the recommended procedures if you have an environment that supports it is to place the EE system directory one level above webroot. This provides the greatest security because the system files are entirely inaccessible from the web. I actually rearranged all my domains to employ a directory structure that is not typical for a Cpanel hosted site. I have a directory in my user root called “domains” in which there is a corresponding directory for each domain I host on the account. Inside that directory I place a directory called “html.” This is the webroot for that domain. This therefore creates a whole directory level above webroot for each domain. It is here that I place my EE system directory. <a href="#fnref:flexee1">↩</a></li>
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Posts tagged “HTML/CSS” from the blog