Before You Begin¶

If you have not installed ExpressionEngine yet, please do so now.

The Control Panel¶

Upon completing the installation, you will land on your Control Panel login page. Login to the control panel (also known as the “back end”) using the same username and password you provided during installation. If you don’t remember your Control Panel link, it’s usually similar to: https://example.com/admin.php

After logging in, you’ll be greeted by the Control Panel Overview page:

There isn’t a lot to overview, as you have no entries, no comments and no content. Your site doesn’t even have a name yet. Let’s fix that. Click in the ‘Name your site’ field at the top left of your screen and let’s go add some general settings.

General Settings¶

On the General Settings page, give your site a descriptive name and double check your default timezone values. To access this page in the future, just click the Settings button in the top right corner.

Now it’s time to add some content. To do that, we first need to create a channel.

Click the Developer button in the top right corner and select Channels.

Channels¶

ExpressionEngine stores your information inside Channels. A Channel is simply a container that can be as simple or as complex as you need it to be, depending on your content. You can have as many Channels as you need, each with a different structure tailored to the content it holds.

For our new News site, we’ll want a channel to hold our news articles.

Channel Tab¶

The channel tab is where you name your channel and set whether there is a limit to the number of entries in the channel.

1. Name our new channel “News”.
2. ExpressionEngine will automatically provide a sensible Short Name for you, in this case, “news”.

3. Click the Fields tab so we can add some custom fields to hold our news data.

Field Tab¶

We need to create a structure to hold our news content. The field tab is where you can assign existing fields and/or groups of fields to your channel. Since we don’t have any existing fields, we’ll need to create some.

For our simple news section, let’s create a Rich Text field to hold the content of each news article.

Creating a Field¶

1. Click the Add New link to open up the Create Field modal.
2. For Type, choose Rich Text Editor. (Notice the other available types - exciting, no? Add-ons can even provide completely new types of fields.)
3. For Name, type “Main content”.
4. ExpressionEngine will automatically provide a sensible Short Name for you, in this case, “main_content”.
5. Let’s include the field in our searchable fields, set the field as a required field, and leave the rest of the settings at their defaults.
6. Save your new field. Since we’re only adding 1 field, click the Save button to create the field and return to the Field tab. If you needed to create multiple new fields, choosing Save & New* would save the current field and open a new field form.

Tip

A Channel’s Full Name should be a friendly, human-readable name. The Short Name, on

Category Tab¶

Categories are a nice way to better organize all of your content in each Channel. You can assign existing category groups to your channel on this tab. A category group is simply a collection of categories. If you need to create a new group, you can do it on the fly in by clicking the Add New link.

While we aren’t creating any Categories for the purposes of this guide, know that they are a very powerful feature with full hierarchy support and more. See the Categories section for more information.

Status Tab¶

Statuses are typically used to control whether or not (or to whom) a piece of content will appear on your site. In this guide we’ll stick with ExpressionEngine’s default Statuses, Open and Closed. By default, content with an “Open” status will be shown, while content that is “Closed” will not appear at all. There are other creative uses for Statuses, especially when it comes to editorial workflows. See the Statuses section for more information.

Settings Tab¶

There are a number of channel specific settings, all of which are detailed in the Channel settings section.

Publishing Entries¶

Now that we’ve set up a basic, solid structure, let’s add some content!

In ExpressionEngine, each time you add content to a Channel you are publishing to that Channel and creating a new Entry in it. You can think of Entries as being synonymous with posts, but the term Entry better encompasses all of the different types of data you can store in ExpressionEngine.

1. Click the Create button in the top left corner and select the News channel to publish in. This will open up your publish form, custom built based on the fields, statuses and categories you have assigned to your channel.
2. For the Title, type “What to do this Weekend?”. Notice that we did not have to create this field ourselves - all Entries automatically have a Title field. You can change the label of this field by editing your News channel.
3. ExpressionEngine provides a sensible URL Title for you. This is another automatic field that allows your entries to be easily linked to via a URL. See URL Structure for more information.
4. Enter some text in the Main content field. Make it good!

1. Click Save & Close to publish the entry and return to the Edit page.

Upon submitting, you’ll be taken to the Edit screen, which displays all of your entries in a filterable table:

For the purposes of this guide, publish a second Entry by following the same steps as before, but with a different Title and Main content. That will give us two entries to work with later.

Templates¶

You’ve probably noticed that even though we’ve entered some content in the Control Panel, our site’s actual homepage remains woefully blank! Fear not - we just haven’t told ExpressionEngine how to display our content. That’s where Templates come in.

Templates control what gets shown to the outside world (also known as the site’s “front end”) and are grouped together into (you guessed it!) Template Groups. As usual, you can have as many Templates and Groups as you need. Templates are very important because by default, they define the URL structure of your site. Here’s how Template Groups and Templates make up an ExpressionEngine URL:

https://example.com/template_group/template_name

Every Template Group has at least one Template named index, which acts as the default if no other Template is specified. For example, if we create a new Template Group named news, you can access its index template using just:

https://example.com/news

Creating a Template¶

Let’s create our first Template, which will be a simple news page that displays Entries from our News Channel.

1. Click on the Developer button in the top right and select Templates.
2. Click the NEW button by Template Groups in the left navigation.
3. For Template Group Name, type “news”.
4. Check the box next to Make the index template in this group your site’s home page?
5. Click Save Template Group.

As expected, this automatically creates an index Template in our new news Group:

Now let’s get some content in there!

Editing a Template¶

Click on the index Template to open it in the Template Editor. You’ll be greeted, unsurprisingly, with a blank slate. Let’s add some skeleton HTML:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
        <title>What's New</title>
        <meta charset="utf-8">
</head>
<body>
        <h1>All the news that's fit to pixelize.</h1>
</body>
</html>

Click Save to save our changes and stay on the page (Save & Close will return you to the Template Manager). Then click the View Rendered button in the upper-right, which should open the page in a new browser tab. It may not be very exciting, but it’s something:

Tip

You’re not confined to editing your markup inside ExpressionEngine’s Template Editor. By default templates are also saved as files you can edit using any editor you choose. See Saving Templates as Text Files for details.

“This is all well and good,” you might be saying. “ExpressionEngine is outputting my markup exactly as entered; no more or less, which is awesome. But it’s still not showing any of the content I entered into the News Channel!”

Strap yourself in, because we’re about to do just that, and we’re going to do it using the core of ExpressionEngine’s flexibility: Tags.

Tags¶

Tags fetch the content you’ve entered into ExpressionEngine and display it in your Templates just the way you want. Here’s how a typical Tag starts:

{exp:channel:entries}

This tag, like most, has three segments: exp, channel, and entries.

1. exp simply tells ExpressionEngine that this is a Tag. All Tags will begin with this.
2. channel refers to the Module we want to use to fetch our data. ExpressionEngine is made up of various Modules, and each provides its own Tags. The Channel is used to fetch data from your Channels, and is the most commonly used Module in ExpressionEngine.
3. entries refers to the type of data we want the Module to fetch, or in some cases, the action we want the Module to take. In this case, we’re telling the Channel Module that we want to retrieve our Entries.

{exp:channel:entries channel="news"}

{exp:channel:entries channel="news" limit="10"}

{main_content}

{title}

{author}

Putting it All Together¶

Switch back to the Template Editor tab in your browser and update the Template with the following code:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
        <title>What's New</title>
        <meta charset="utf-8">
</head>
<body>
        <h1>All the news that's fit to pixelize.</h1>

        {exp:channel:entries channel="news" limit="10"}
                <h2>{title}</h2>
                <p>By {author}</p>

                {main_content}
        {/exp:channel:entries}
</body>
</html>

After clicking Update, switch back over to the browser tab with the “Rendered Template” on it and hit Refresh. By default, the Channel Module sorts your Entries by newest to oldest, so you should now see your two previously-created Entries in all their glory:

The More You Know¶

You’ve seen how to show the content you want, and how wrap it in any HTML you’d like, and you’re well on your way to unleashing awesome across the (digital) land. But first, let’s go over a few points about what we just did.

<ul>
        {exp:channel:entries channel="news" limit="10"}
                <li>{title}</li>
        {/exp:channel:entries}
</ul>

Turning the Page¶

At this point, you might notice that our site’s homepage (https://example.com) is showing the same content as our News page (https://example.com/news). The reason for this is simple: remember checking the box next to Make the index template in this group your site’s home page? when you created the “news” template group? That made “news” your site’s default Template Group, the Template Group that is displayed as the homepage when no Template Group is specified in the URL.

Let’s change this by creating another Template Group and making it the new default.

1. From the Template Manager click NEW next to Template Groups again.
2. For Template Group Name, type “site”.
3. Tick the Make the index template in this group your site’s home page? checkbox.
4. Submit.

Now click the index Template of our new “site” Group to open the Template Editor. Let’s add this code:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
        <title>Home</title>
        <meta charset="utf-8">
</head>
<body>
        <h1>Home, Sweet Home.</h1>
        <p>Kick back and relax... you've made it home.</p>

        <h2>The Latest</h2>
        <p>Check out the <a href="{path='news'}">latest news</a>:</p>
        <ul>
                {exp:channel:entries channel="news" limit="10"}
                        <li><a href="{url_title_path='news'}">{title}</a></li>
                {/exp:channel:entries}
        </ul>
</body>
</html>

As usual, click Update and then View Rendered to see the results:

There’s a bit more going on in this Template, so let’s take a closer look.

<p>Check out the <a href="{path='news'}">latest news</a>:</p>

<li><a href="{url_title_path='news'}">{title}</a></li>

A Dynamic Duo¶

Now follow the link to our “Hello, World!” Entry, which will look like https://example.com/news/hello-world thanks to url_title_path. You’ll be taken to our News Template Group. But wait, only one Entry is shown now!

What you’re seeing here is the “dynamic” behavior of the Channel Entries Tag. By default the Tag will look for a valid URL Title in the current URL, and if one exists, show only that Entry in what’s known as “Single Entry” mode. This is very useful, since we didn’t have to create another template just to show our Entries all by themselves. In some cases, though, we may not want this to happen. A good example would be if we had a sidebar showing a list of recent Entries from various Channels, and we didn’t want that list influenced by what happens to be in the current URL. To disable this behavior, set the dynamic parameter to “no”:

{exp:channel:entries channel="news" limit="10" dynamic="no"}

Again, all of the Channel Entries’ available parameters and variables are detailed in its documentation page.

Go Forth and Conquer!¶

Congratulations! You’re ready to start bringing the awesome. Create Channels and Channel Fields to hold your content just the way you need. Then use Templates, Tags and your own markup, style and scripts to create flexible, dynamic websites quickly and easily on a platform that does exactly what you want it to do. Welcome to ExpressionEngine.

While you should read the User Guide in its entirety, here are some topics you might be interested in:

• Getting the Most Out of ExpressionEngine
• Add-Ons
• Removing index.php from URLs
• Site Manager
• Commenting Template Code