ExpressionEngine Luuurve
29 May
A little drive-by entry again!
I’ve been working on my first ExpressionEngine site, and I am totally and utterly in love. As someone who is a designer first and foremost, the way you build sites with EE is amazingly easy, and the ease of use for the client is great. I also love their URL structure, which I had heard some criticism about. A designer I spoke to said it was a bad idea for the URL to reflect the template system as the back end should be hidden from the user - but I thought that it’s brilliant exactly because of that: you can name your template groups and templates to describe the content, making it extremely user-friendly and semantic.
I was originally apprehensive about the browser interface, being used to hand coding in Dreamweaver and uploading my files, but after a short period of getting used to it, I find it ok now. I would still prefer to be able to use keyboard shortcuts when editing my HTML and CSS, but writing the code in Dreamweaver before moving it to EE takes away a large amount of the hassle.
There is sooo much more I could say about ExpressionEngine, but I’ll have to get back to it when I’m not up to my eyeballs in work! Being busy is good, but I’m looking forward to getting some time to just catch up on my favourite blogs and write some more for my own as well
The EE site, which is aimed at families in the UK who have children with Autistic Spectrum Disorders, will be going live soon. And I’ll definitely be working with EE in the future as well!

Thanks for the kind comments! I just thought you’d also like to know that you can actually save your templates as text files and edit them in Dreamweaver, or the editor of your choice. Then you’ll have all of your shortcuts as well.
Just search the docs for “Saving Templates as Text Files” =)
-Lisa Wess, EllisLab, Inc.
May 29th, 2008 at 6:19 pmThanks for the tip, Lisa! I’m still a beginner with EE but it’s already making my job so much easier. When I get the chance I’ll spend a day or two just going through the docs and trying things out!
Jimmy
May 29th, 2008 at 6:52 pm