Write
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- Homemade 20” Tandem Bike
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or, “How To Make Two $5 Bikes Into One $10 Bike”.
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- Embedded Templates with Embedded Variables
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Behind URL Segments and Conditionals, I think my favorite ExpressionEngine capability is Embedded Templates, used in conjunction with Embedded Variables.
Simple embedded templates are great for centralizing elements that are common to a page - either from a coding view (think stylesheet links, meta tags, etc) or a visual/functional view (main navigation, footers, search boxes). Much like classic “Server-side Includes”, storing those elements in one place as discreet templates and embedding them in all other templates is a great way to create a quickly changeable/maintainable site.
Being able to pass variables to those embedded templates, however, moves them up a notch on the functionality scale. You can begin to view your embedded templates as more of a programmer’s “Function Call” - chunks of code you can call, pass a variable to, and get something back. In EE’s case, what you get back is larger chunks of HTML—which might be your weblog index page, your single entry page, a unordered list of related entries, or the comments for a given weblog entry (Boyink.com has embedded templates with embedded variables for each of these examples).
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- Beating Up Clients with a Usability Stick
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I used to be such a Jakob devotee. I really was. The whole notion of evaluating whether web sites and applications were “usable” seemed so fresh and logical. I read everything the guy wrote. I forwarded his articles on to my teammates (this was when I was still in the corporate web development world), along with comments/concerns about current projects we were developing that seemed to go against what Jakob was writing. I even looked into engaging with the Nielsen Norman Group to review the corporate site we were working on (the $10K/day price tag quickly put that notion to rest). I became known (affectionately, or at least that’s my story and I’m sticking with it) as the “usability curmudgeon” who would try to reign in starry-eyed contract Flash designers who wanted to make a name for themselves by using the corporate money cow to publish “cutting-edge” interfaces.
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- Search Installed
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I’ve turned on the Search function, powered by Google search. I still see some of the old Boyink.com results but overall most of the content seems to be indexed.
But why use Google search when ExpressionEngine has it’s own search engine?
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- Boyink Family Extranet
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I’ve added a project page for the Boyink Family Extranet to the Portfolio section here on Boyink.com.
While in our specific case the extranet has a very limited audience, the extranet nicely shows how one copy of ExpressionEngine can easily power both a public website and extranet (complete with different site designs) - be it for one geeky family or a business.