Thursday, February 03, 2005

Important EE Concepts

While not directly pertaining to template design, I found a post in the EE forums by Rick Ellis, pMachines founder, to be very, very helpful in understanding basic EE concepts, and one that I thought prospective and current EE users might appreciate. 

In a nutshell, EE splits HTML pages and content into two separate and distinct things:  the pages are “templates” and the content are “weblogs.” This may sound straightforward, but when you start to realize that EE allows you to mix and match the two, you realize how important these concepts are.  You can, in fact, have a single template that displays more than one weblog.  I do this on my own Rippleweb blog.  The main content is one weblog, and the “sideblog” in the right column is a totally separate weblog.  When I publish an entry, I choose whether to publish it in my main weblog or my sideblog.  The template has the tags to display my main weblog content in the left, wider column, and to display my sideblog content in the right, narrower sidebar.

While helping folks with the templates here on EE Design, I have found that many people find these concepts confusing.  Hopefully, Rick’s post in this thread will help.

Speaking of great EE resources, I will be adding some links soon to other sites that EE users should find very helpful.

Friday, January 28, 2005

Shaded Grey

This is a superb addition to the EE Design family:  GnomeGrrl has ported the very, very nice Wordpress template “Shaded Grey” by Sadish Balasubramanian to EE.  All the necessary templates and images are included in the zip file.  She has also included a PHP file for the new EE “themes” feature if you want to use it with a new weblog.  A live preview of this port can be seen here, with a more customised version available for viewing at GnomeGrrl’s home site.

Thank you, Sadish for creating this great template, and thank you GnomeGrrl for porting it over to EE.

This template can be downloaded here.  Enjoy!

Monday, January 17, 2005

Photoblog Template

This is really cool.  LissaKay has submitted a great photoblog template.  LissaKay has included all the needed templates and excellent instructions.  You can check out a running test site on LissaKay’s site here and you can download the zip file here.

Thanks, LissaKay!!

Saturday, January 08, 2005

MT Gold

This is a port of the Movable Type template “Titanium Gold” found on the Movable Style website.  Caveat:  the Movable Style site only has the CSS and the HTML for the index page—not the comments (i.e. “permalink”) page or archive page.  So, I had to sort of guess at what those other pages might have looked like using the Titanium Gold CSS.  If you are familiar with this MT template (and this is a MT version 2.xx template, not a template for the current version of MT), then those secondary pages may not look exactly right.  However, I imagine it’s pretty close to how the original template looked.

You can download the template zip file (it includes the background image) here.

Saturday, December 25, 2004

Winter Theme for November Template

EE user smeg has contributed a new header image and CSS for the November template.  What a great Christmas gift!  Thanks, smeg!