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Thursday, December 16, 2004

Travelling on the Expression Express!

This is now coming your way on the ExpressionEngine Expressway! Thanks to wonderul technical supprt from the the people at pMachine, I have managed to convert pagetoscreen.net to use the ExpressionEngine blogging/content management tool from pMachine Pro.

pMachine is terrific but there were several reasons why I wanted to make this conversion.

furthermore...

ExpressionEngine (EE) is much more flexible without needing to go down to the level of PHP. I have tweaked the pMachine code a few times to get special things to happen (giving lower level access to pBlocks etc) but it seems that the template system in EE will allow for greater control. Another reason is that my students are now using EE rather than pMachine here: http://emedia.brookes.ac.uk and, I need to know something about it myself!EEhas these specific features that I will be using: Thumbnail creation from a single image upload Image Gallery Moblog Custom entry fields I am interested in the idea that blogging tools are actually content management tools really and so any customization features that allow me to remove the reference to words such as 'weblog' or 'blog entries' will be a blessing if I use this for future projects. Still yet to confimed that I can do this! Syndication through RSS has been possible with pMachine but it is now possible to 'get RSS feeds' using EE and the 'magpie plug-in' from Paul Burdick (http://www.reedmaniac.com/). I am getting my personal stuff over from chrisjennings.net using this technique.

Posted by Chris Jennings on 16 Dec around 1pm •

Tags: ExpressionEngine •

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Further Information:

How to do’s for pmachine - mostly EE.
Robert Crow’s Tutorials
Michael Jackson’s web site is run with ExpressionEngine
blog postings by Rick Ellis, the chief developer behind ExpressionEngine

And even Further Information:

The thing about EE is that you don’t need anything more than a web browser to edit and upload your templates (including CSS). However, if you prefer to see the code, both HTML and CSS in a text editor (with pretty colours) and you use MAC OSX then I can recommend BBedit. The main advantage is that you can FTP directly into your templates folder from BBedit and so see immediately the results of your changes. On thing I would like to sort out though is making the EE code - typically {sometag} - appear in a different colour, but I havn’t figured this out yet.