Retired Documentation

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Hello, World!¶

Congratulations! You have installed ExpressionEngine… now what? Why not say “Hello”!

Visit Design ‣ Templates ‣ Edit ‣ Create Group

Fill in the field for Template Group Name, for this example use “site”. Ignore Duplicate an Existing Template Group? for now and check the box for Make the index template in this group your site’s home page?. Now, click Submit.

What you’ve done is created a template group and set that group’s index template as your site’s home page.

After creating the group, you’ll be taken to the Template Manager.

Template Group

Click Index in the Edit Template column. This will take you to the Template Editor.

Template Edit

You should see a completely blank slate. That’s rather uninteresting… let’s add some code!

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
      <head>
              <meta charset="UTF-8">
              <title>Hello, World!</title>
      </head>

      <body>
              <h1>Hello, World!</h1>
              <p>
              This is an excellent way to see our work.
              </p>
      </body>
</html>

To save your changes, click Update.

Ready to admire your work? Click View Rendered Template in the upper-right area above the Template Editor. You’ll be taken to your site to see what the world will see.

Have a look at the URL - example.com/index.php/site. ExpressionEngine uses URL Segments to do its magic, and here you can see site in Segment 1. That tells ExpressionEngine to look for a Template Group named “site” and the lack of Segment 2 (since there is nothing past site/) let’s ExpressionEngine know to use the group’s “index” template.

Try a couple of other URLs:

http://example.com/index.php/site/index

http://example.com/

You’ll see the same output as before. In the fist example, adding Segment 2 (index), alerts ExpressionEngine to precisely the template we want from the group “site”. In the second example, going straight to the root URL should bring up the home page. Remember, we set ExpressionEngine to use the “index” template from the group “site” as our site’s home page.

You can add more HTML to your template and have some fun. Create a few other templates in this group, or some new groups altogether. Spend some time playing with how ExpressionEngine uses the URL.

Now that you’re’ comfortable with static ExpressionEngine templates, how about Building a Simple Site?