How We Work
A couple weeks ago I got an email from Paul of Digital Hand who is located in the UK. Paul had a couple questions to ask us on how we work so he could possibly get some insight from us to better help his client base. If there is only one thing that I have learned from the web community, it is that there are so many truly awesome things out there to help people with questions. So the tutorials on our site is kinda our way of trying to help to give back to the community and maybe us answering a couple questions might be able to help some people out there. Now there are tons and tons of ways to get the job done so our answers may not be someone else’s or even work for someone else. These answers are simply how we do things. And please, if you have any thoughts that you might be able to add please don’t hesitate to comment!
Removing index.php In EE
With using Expression Engine your pages default to using a index.php on all of your pages which is quite annoying. So rather than being able to tell people to visit your contact page by going to yoursite.com/contact you have to send them to yoursite.com/index.php/contact. Honestly, it’s not a huge deal breaker; however, it’s ideal to not have the index.php on every page. I tried a couple ways to eliminate the index.php. The first way was by using a plugin for Expression Engine that is supposed to write the necessary information on your .htaccess file. However, when I went to use the plugin it basically took my site offline. So I had to just delete the .htaccess file. I’m sure that the plugin does work but maybe something with my hosting wasn’t connecting properly. After trying that a few times I pretty much gave up.
Using WordPress Custom Fields
Using WordPress Custom Fields is actually much easier than one would think. I went to use it a while back for a project and didn’t really have time to work with it so I passed it by. But recently I needed it and was surprised at how easy it is to use it! With one little line of code in your template you can use Custom Fields in WordPress.
When you’re in WordPress and you want to add a Custom Field to a blog entry all you need to do is scroll down to where it shows the Custom Field options. We’ll use the standard Mood: Happy example as used on the WordPress website. In the ‘Name’ box we’ll type Mood and in the Key or Value option we type Happy. After you save your post and try and view the live version you will see that it has had no effect on your post! Hmm… referencing the little line of code that we mentioned above, that’s what we need!
Getting Twitter Badge Code to Validate
So I’ve just recently started using Twitter. I figured that I better hop on the train before it completely pulls away! Also, I figured that in the future that I would have clients that would want to integrate Twitter into their sites. So if you take a look at toward the bottom right of our site you’ll see our little Twitter feed. Well you should see our Twitter feed. I’ve been noticing on our site as well as other sites that Twitter doesn’t always show up due to their server. So many people are using Twitter now so sometimes it gets slow.
Anyway, so basically the easiest way to start putting up your feed onto your site is to go to www.twitter.com/badges and log in (if you don’t have a Twitter account you’ll want to set one up quick first, of course). Then it gives you the option to pick a MySpace, Blogger, etc. default image. Of course those are not the links that we want, so at the very bottom of that page you’ll see an ‘other’ option. Clicking that option it will bring you to another set of options and the one we want to pick is the last option which uses HTML/Javascript.
