When you’re building a website in WordPress and using it as a CMS, you’re going to have pages that you don’t want showing in your main site navigation/menu.

How do you keep those pages from showing up in your navigation?

Include and Exclude Specific Pages

There are several methods, but most of them require hard coding the menu to either exclude specific pages from the navigation…

Or including only certain pages like so:

<?php wp_list_pages('include=1,2,3,6,19' ); ?>

These methods work, but are impractical (at least for client work) because they’re not flexible enough.

What happens when you add more pages to the site, or want to add/remove pages in the nav?

Also, could you explain how to make the needed code edits to your clients? I don’t think so.

Use a Plugin

The fastest, most flexible and easiest to use method is to just use a plugin.

My choice is the Exclude Pages plugin from Simon Wheatley.

After you activate it, Exclude Pages gives you a new option on the write panel for each page—’Include this page in user menus‘.

The option is checked by default on all the new pages you create, so if you don’t want the page to show up in the navigation, simply uncheck the box before publishing, and it never shows.

It also removes pages that have already been published.

The Exclude Pages plugin is great because clients (and you) can easily choose which pages to include in the site’s navigation. Unticking a box is a whole lot easier to explain than editing code.

Use Bookmarks For Your Navigation

Another option is to use WordPress’ built-in links to create site navigation.

Justin Tadlock offers an interesting take on using links (blogroll/bookmarks) to create navigation.

This is a pretty creative approach, and it makes logical use of your blogroll.

The only downside I see is that, you’ll have to rework your theme to incorporation this technique—it’s not a quick, drop-in solution.

Do you have any other suggestions for removing pages from your WordPress navigation? Share with us in the comments.

eeSiteKit is a framework to help you build ExpressionEngine-based CMS websites faster.

You’re provided a set of commonly used pre-coded functions, folders, and preset templating system (for categories, navigation, etc) for use with ExpressionEngine.

No EE Hacking

eeSiteKit however doesn’t use any custom PHP custom queries or hacks that break EE core functionality, so future versions of EE shouldn’t break your site. eeSiteKit is actively maintained, so if something does conflict a bit in future versions of EE, there will be updates and fixes provided quickly.

Style Your Site As Normal

Besides this, eeSiteKit also offers a light XHTML/CSS framework for laying out and customing page structure and styling quickly.

SEO Options For Your EE Site

eeSiteKit also includes many SEO-friendly options for page and category URLs and structure.

eeSiteKit Features

Here are just some of eeSiteKit’s features:

• Compatible with ExpressionEngine 1.6.7 (Commercial, Personal and Core versions) as well as EE Multiple Site Manager
• No add-ons required
• Clean, logical, text-only, nested-page URLs (SEO friendly, works with the optional index.php or renamed index.php)
• SEO friendly dynamic page titles
• Landing pages are optional with each weblog (site sections)
• Dynamic page navigation (including sub navigation, dropdown menus, breadcrumbs, etc)
• Categories friendly (use EE’s category system but mask EE’s default category numbers, for example)
• Dynamic category headings
• Simple “keyword” search form code
• Dynamically configured search results page
• Simple blog-style comments and “tell-a-friend” forms
• Well-organized template structure make editing and maintenance easy
• Printer-friendly HTML template for easy printing of any page
• Dynamically generated site map
• 404 page templates with configurable alerts
• EE Pages module integration for easy control over pages and page URLs
• Renders valid and standards-compliant code (W3C XHTML 1.0 Transitional, CSS 2.1, and Accessibility: 508-A and WCAG-1)

Full list of features

More Info

For a full overview of all eeSiteKit, check out the Overview section.

You can also take a look at the FAQ if you have other questions.

It seems that eeSiteKit will add a bit more loading and more queries than an EE site built the traditional way, but this may be worth it for all the functionality you gain.

I haven’t gotten a chance to look at eeSiteKit yet, but it looks like a great EE framework that will definitely speed up site development and easy website maintenance as well.

Earlier, I wrote an article about how to learn ExpressionEngine in 2 days. It included links to some great EE resources and tutorials. If you haven’t heard of ExpressionEngine or what it is, take a look at an overview of this powerful and flexible CMS.

Since then, more resources have come along to help beginners and seasoned professionals alike improve their ExpressionEngine chops.

As with any tool or CMS, you really never stop learning and improving.

If you have already started learning ExpressionEngine, here are some links to help you improve your EE skills.

ExpressionEngine Security

ExpressionEngine and Best Security Practices Thread

EE Forums’ thread—Learn from EE developers what they do to shore up their security when they put their sites online.

EE Forum’s Security Threads

EE’s Official Forum also has more threads about ExpressionEngine security.

ExpressionEngine Tips and Tutorials

EE Insider

Ryan Irelan’s site showcasing EE tips, tutorials, and videos on everything ExpressionEngine.

Let’s keep this simple: EE Insider is here to help you learn how to develop websites with ExpressionEngine.

This is a great place to learn some more advanced EE techniques.

ExpressionEngine Screencasts

Another site from Ryan Irelan, ExpressionEngine Screencasts is a series of video tutorials at $5 a pop showing you the basics of setting up ExpressionEngine.

Smashing Magazine’s ExpressionEngine Developer’s Toolbox

EE Tutorials, advanced training, modules, plugins, extensions and more.

Smashing Magazine published a huge list of EE resources a few days after I published Part 1 of Learn ExpressionEngine in 2 Days. I’ve since added a link to the post, but in case you missed it the 1st time around, here it is again.

More ExpressionEngine Resources

Leevi Graham’s EE Extensions, Modules and Plugins

Leevi Graham has written several very useful extensions and plugins for ExpressionEngine to extend the CMS even further.

EE Install Best Practices

Learn the best practices of installing EE, setting it up, which extensions and plugins are worth installing and how to duplicate an existing EE install.

Continue Learning

ExpressionEngine is the most flexible and powerful CMS on the planet at the moment. Hopefully, you’ll find these resources useful and can use them to build more secure and powerful websites.

The good folks at EllisLab have just reported some good news about the progress of ExpressionEngine 2.0. It seems that ExpressionEngine 2.0 has just achieved feature freeze. This means no new features are likely to be added to EE 2.0 before its final release.

More interesting news is that a new addition that will be included in all versions of ExpressionEngine 2.0—built-in jQuery support.

Built-In jQuery Support

These questions get asked a lot: “How do you link to javascript in ExpressionEngine?” and “What is the best way to link to javascript in ExpressionEngine?”

Many wonder which way is best to link to external javascript files: link as an EE template file or link as an external, javascript file (.js) outside of a template?

With this latest news it looks like these questions won’t be much of an issue anymore (at least for those who use the jQuery library).

The ExpressionEngine jQuery module will be available in both Core and Licensed versions.

Leslie Camacho states in a recent post on the ExpressionEngine blog:

“The jQuery module will allow people to use jQuery and its plugins in their templates without worrying about the location of the jQuery files. This way developers have access to jQuery in a secure way from just about anywhere in EE’s template engine.”

CodeIgniter and jQuery

There was a previous post about the new jQuery abilities in EE 2.0. Since ExpressionEngine 2.0 is built on CodeIgniter, this is going to be great for creating javascript functions.

Example:

// Effect: fade a div into view
$this->javascript->fade_in("div");

// Event: set up a click to show a submenu
$this->javascript->click("#button",
    $this->javascript->hide(".submenu");
);

// Plugin: using a jQuery plugin
$this->jquery->tablesorter();

Code example from ExpressionEngine 2.0: fully CodeIgnited!

Personally, I’m excited to see the new EE, and the news of the addition of the built-in jQuery module just whets my appetite even more. I can’t wait to see how this is actually implemented.

Do you use jQuery as your javascript library of choice when working with ExpressionEngine? How do you think the added jQuery support will affect the way you code in ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter? Tell us about it in our comments.

That’s right. The much anticipated update to WordPress-WordPress 2.7 (final release) is making its debut on WordPress.org after months of development, testing and anticipation! Hurray!

Before you go and upgrade, check your themes and plugins to make sure they’re ready for the newest version of WordPress first.

The dust is still settling on the WordPress website (I haven’t heard an official announcement from WP yet), and some links are still pointing to the 2.6 docs, so I thought I’d post the correct links to the 2.7 docs and guides.

Download WordPress 2.7

Is Your Theme Compatible?

There have been some changes to themes for WordPress 2.7-primarily in the code for comments. Do yourself a favor and check out the Migrating Plugins and Themes to 2.7 section if you’ve made your own theme or are heavily customizing an existing theme.

Also, check WP’s list of 2.7-compatible themes.

Are Your Plugins Compatible With WordPress 2.7?

It’s vital before making the jump to 2.7 that you make sure any plugins that you rely on have been updated and work bug-free on WordPress 2.7.

Check WP’s list of plugins that work with WordPress 2.7

Ready To Upgrade To 2.7?

If your theme and plugins all check out and you’re ready to upgrade to 2.7, take a look at WordPress’ Extended Upgrade Instructions.

I’m not making the leap myself for a couple week probably. There are still some plugins that I’m going to wait on be updated before I take on the upgrade.

What are your upgrade experiences? Let us know in the comments.

In Part 1 of our BlogDesk tutorial, I showed you how to setup BlogDesk and connect to WordPress and publish/edit posts.

This week in Part 2, I’ll show you the basics of connecting to ExpressionEngine (version 1.6.6) from BlogDesk and how to publish simple blog-style entries.

To get the most out of this tutorial, you should:

• Know the basics of ExpressionEngine (EE) and have it setup (either the core or commercial version will work)
• You should also look over Part 1 of this series because we’ll be skimming over some of the basics of using BlogDesk in this tutorial

Note: Although you can add/edit EE entries in BlogDesk, I found it to be very limited. BlogDesk might be a decent option for those who are using EE strictly for blog posts or posting news items. For those using EE’s more advanced abilities (field groups, etc), BlogDesk may not be the answer for you.

I also found uploading images and editing entries that have already been posted to EE to be problematic.

That said, let’s begin.

Install the Metaweblog Module in ExpressionEngine

The first step that we need to take is to make sure that the Metaweblog API module is installed in ExpressionEngine. This module lets BlogDesk and EE communication with each other.

1. Log into your EE control panel
2. Click on the Modules tab at the top
3. Find the module named Metaweblog API and make sure it’s installed. If it isn’t, click Install and let EE install the module.
   
4. Note the Metaweblog API URL—it will be used later in the Blog Wizard
   

Connecting to ExpressionEngine

Now you’re ready to configure the connection to your ExpressionEngine site from within BlogDesk.

Basically, setting up the connection between BlogDesk and ExpressionEngine is the same process as setting up the connection from BlogDesk to WordPress.

1. Go to File>Manage Blogs
   
2. Click New to start the Blog Wizard. The Wizard will guide you through setting up the connection between BlogDesk and ExpressionEngine.
3. Enter the name of your blog on the next screen. It’s just to help you identify your site within BlogDesk, so any name will do.
4. Next, you’ll enter the address of your blog. You don’t have to put http:// or a trailing /—BlogDesk adds them when you click Next.
   
5. Next, choose ExpressionEngine as your weblog system
   
6. BlogDesk will try to guess the location (URL) of your Metaweblog API in EE. The default that BlogDesk comes up with should be okay, but double-check in EE to make sure it’s correct (see step 4 under the section above Install the Metaweblog Module in ExpressionEngine).
7. Click the Next button and enter your EE login information
   
8. The next screen is for your Blog-ID. Click Get Blog-ID. You should get a success message. Click OK and go to the next screen.
9. If you have categories set up in EE already, the Get Categories button will import the list into BlogDesk. EE comes with 3 categories by default (Blogging, News, Personal), but you can always import your categories later if you haven’t set any up yet from Blog Manager>Properties.
   
10. The next screen tests to make sure you can upload images through EE (as opposed to using FTP). Test Upload will upload a small badge image.
    
    If this doesn’t work, you may have to set up an FTP connection instead later. Personally, I could not get this to work. You may need to check your permissions for your uploads folder.
11. Click Next and then Finish to finish and exit the wizard

Now you will return to the Blog Manager window. Clicking the Properties button will let you review your settings. This is a good idea just to make sure everything is set up the way you want.

This is also where you can add your FTP settings if you had problems getting your image uploading working in the Blog Wizard.

Publishing EE Entries

See Part 1 of this series for details on publishing using BlogDesk. The same details apply to publishing entries to ExpressionEngine.

The Verdict

BlogDesk can be used to post simple EE entries, but I found it to be very limited in its abilities. It would be best suited for EE sites that are mostly standard blogs or for making news-type posts. Beyond that, I found BlogDesk to be very temperamental with EE. BlogDesk is no match for ExpressionEngine’s flexibility.

Editing Previous Entries

I had issues editing previously posted entries. Editing the entries made them disappear from the site for some reason.

Image Uploading

I also had issues getting images to upload properly or at all.

Granted, I didn’t spend a whole lot of time trying to make it work, but compared to WordPress, getting BlogDesk to work with EE was much more of a hassle.

Has anyone else tried BlogDesk with ExpressionEngine? What were your experiences? Anything I missed? Tell us about it in the comments.

Previously, I wrote a brief post about BlogDesk, a Windows desktop app that lets you publish to your site without setting foot inside your blog/CMS’s admin section. BlogDesk works for WordPress, ExpressionEngine, Drupal, Movable Type and Serendipity.

Over the next 2 weeks, I’ll be showing you how to use BlogDesk to publish to WordPress and ExpressionEngine.

This week, in part 1, we’re going to look at setting up BlogDesk and publishing a post to WordPress 2.7 (beta 3).

BlogDesk Installation & WordPress Blog

1. First, make sure you have a WordPress blog set up and configured. Even though this tutorial uses WordPress 2.7, any version of WordPress 2.3 and up will work the same way.
2. Although not required, it would be good to set up some categories on your blog if you haven’t already
3. Next, download BlogDesk and install it on your computer (Windows 98, NT, 2000, ME, XP, Vista)

Set Up a Connection to Your Blog

1. Run BlogDesk and you will see the main application screen—this is where you will write, save and publish your posts. First, though, we have to set up the connection to your WordPress site.
   
2. Go to File>Manage Blogs
   
3. Click New to start the Blog Wizard. The Wizard will guide you through setting up the connection between BlogDesk and WordPress.
4. Enter the name of your blog on the next screen. Any name will do—it’s just to help you identify your site within BlogDesk.
   
5. On the next screen, you will enter the address of your blog. You don’t have to put http:// or a trailing /—BlogDesk will add them when you click Next if you leave them out.
   
6. Next, choose your blogging platform. In our case, we will choose the 1st WordPress option since the version is above 2.2.
   
7. BlogDesk will try to guess the location of your xmlrpc.php file. The default should be fine unless you’ve specifically changed your WordPress settings.
   
8. WordPress (2.6 and up) does not enable XML-RPC by default, so now is a good time to enable it if you have not already. You will need to log into your WordPress control panel and go to Settings>Writing. Under Remote Publishing, check the box next to Enable the WordPress, Movable Type, MetaWeblog and Blogger XML-RPC publishing protocols and save the settings.
   
9. Back in BlogDesk, click the Next button and enter your WordPress login information
   
10. The next screen is for your Blog-ID. This establishes a connection to your blog. If you’ve enabled XML-RPC in WordPress, click Get Blog-ID. You should get a success message. Click OK and go to the next screen.
    
11. If you have categories set up in WordPress already, the Get Categories button will import the list into BlogDesk. If you have not created any categories yet, you can always import your categories later.
    
12. The next screen tests to make sure you can upload images through WordPress (as opposed to using FTP). Test Upload will upload a small badge image. If this doesn’t work, you may have to set up an FTP connection instead later.
    
13. Click Next and then Finish to finish and exit the wizard.
    

Now BlogDesk is mostly set up. There are a few more things, however, we can check before we write our first post.

Check Blog Properties

1. In the Manage Blogs window, you will see your newly added blog. With the blog selected, click Properties.
2. The Blog tab lets you see your blog’s details. Make sure your Encoding matches what’s used on your site. For us, we’re going to keep it at UTF-8.
3. If you could not upload files directly (step 12 above), the FTP & Upload tab lets you add an FTP account. If you had no issues uploading the test image, don’t worry about this.
4. In the Categories tab, Get Categories From the Server will update the list of categories if you’ve added or deleted any categories in WordPress. If you want new posts to belong to one or more categories by default, tick the appropriate boxes.
5. In the Publish tab, tick the boxes next to the fields that you want to check for content when publishing posts (think required fields in forms)
   
6. If you selected UTF-8 encoding, make sure Encode Special Characters in HTML is unchecked
7. Click OK to save your settings and exit the Properties window
8. Click Close to close the Manage Blogs window

Now you should see your blog’s name and a list of categories in the upper right panel on the main program screen. Now let’s write a post for our blog.

Write a Post

The rest is pretty self-explanatory, but here are some quick tips:

• Use the main window to write your post
  
• To switch to HTML code editing, go to View>Source
• The Extras menu lets you add/edit tags and custom fields, password posts and edit program settings
• The Save button saves a draft of your post to your harddrive for later editing
  
• By default, the Publish button will publish your post automatically. If you want to just upload the post as a draft to WordPress, untick the checkbox next to Publish after Upload, in the right sidebar.
  
• You can see your brand new post if you log into WordPress. You can edit the post from the WordPress control panel after you publish it, just like any other post.
  

Editing WordPress Posts in BlogDesk

In BlogDesk, you can also edit posts that have already been published, whether or not they were written originally in BlogDesk.

1. In BlogDesk, go to File>Edit Posts Already Published (logical enough)
2. In the Edit Posts window, select the blog you want to edit from the drop-down menu at the top
3. Choose how many posts you want displayed, then click Show
4. Select the post you want to edit and click Edit
5. Once you have made your changes, clicking the Publish button will save the edited post back onto your site

Useful Tool

BlogDesk looks like a solid program for Windows users or for those who have clients that use Windows. With BlogDesk, you don’t have to give your clients access to WordPress or any other blog/CMS’s control panel.

This could be great for times when you need to write a post, but don’t have access to an internet connection. It can also be used to keep local backup copies of your posts.

More BlogDesk Tutorials

Read Part 2—BlogDesk: Publishing to ExpressionEngine.

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ExpressionEngine is a great CMS—flexible, powerful yet unassuming, a designer’s dream. However, the thought of actually sitting down and learning ExpressionEngine can seem daunting at first.

What would you say if I told you that you could learn ExpressionEngine in less than 2 days?

If you have a fairly good handle on coding valid (X)HTML/CSS, you already know most of the code you’ll need to build your site in EE.

Many say ExpressionEngine has a steep learning curve. But I think much of that learning curve is a result of 2 main things:

1. Confusion about EE terms
2. Scarcity of ExpressionEngine tutorials

Once you overcome these 2 obstacles, learning EE isn’t that difficult. Now, I’m not saying you’ll know everything about ExpressionEngine in 2 days, but you’ll know enough to start converting your existing XHTML/CSS design to EE.

ExpressionEngine Terminology

To be honest, this was the most difficult part for me to wrap my head around, and a lot of people go into EE a bit confused when it comes to what this and that term means. So let’s start by clearing up just a few of the basics.

Weblog

Everywhere else, a weblog is a site usually made up of posts, such as what you’re reading right now. In EE however, a weblog refers to a chunk of information. A weblog can contain just about any kind of information you want.

For example, a weblog could contain details about an album: Artist, Album Title, Release Date, etc. Using EE tags (similar to HTML tags), you can pull those individual details out of the weblog—using, reusing and displaying them virtually anywhere on your site.

Templates

If you’re familiar with WordPress, you know what templates are. In ExpressionEngine, a template houses the code for your pages and can contain information from many weblogs (again, chunks of information).

Basically, templates contain your code. They can hold HTML, but they can also contain CSS and javascript.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="{path=styles/base}" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="{path=styles/print}" type="text/css" media="print" />

{!-- External Site Notice Dialog --}
<link rel="stylesheet" href="{path=styles/dialog}" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="{path=styles/jqModal}" type="text/css" media="screen" />

<!--[if lte IE 6]><script type="text/javascript" src="{path=scripts/iepngfix}"></script><![endif]-->
<!--[if lte IE 6]><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="{path=styles/css_ie}" /><![endif]-->

Contents of a header template: Linking to external stylesheets and javascript is pretty much like regular XHTML.

Just as you can link to external CSS and javascript files from an HTML document (and include files into PHP files), you can import templates into another template. This could be used to keep your header, footer, main content and sidebars separate in their own templates.

{!-- DTD, Page Title, Styles & Scripts --}
{embed="includes/html_dtd_head"}

    {assign_variable:page_title="Home"}

    <title>{page_title}&mdash;{site_name}</title>
    {embed="includes/html_meta"}
    {embed="includes/html_styles_home"}
    {embed="includes/html-scripts-home"}
</head>

You can easily pull in code from another template using the embed tag, similar to using includes in PHP.

Template Groups

While EE’s flexibility allows for other uses, basically, template groups are virtual folders used to group similar templates together.

For example, you could create a template group named Scripts to place your javascript templates into. Or a Portfolio template group that contains a few templates with your previous work.

There are other terms, but much of this is explained (and probably better than my attempt here) in the Getting Started section of the ExpressionEngine Documentaion. I recommend reading through this section and following along with the Quick Start Tutorial.

The ExpressionEngine Documentation and Knowledge Base do much better jobs of explaining everything in more detail.

ExpressionEngine Tutorials

The second obstacle to learning ExpressionEngine is finding good tutorials.

Sure, you can find a few tutorials that deal with different aspects of ExpressionEngine, but when you’re just starting out, you need a good set of tutorials that take you from start to finish.

Michael Boyink’s Train-ee site is the best there is as far as leading you through the entire process. His Building a Small Business Site tutorial series is a great place to start.

He suggests finding a free website template and dissecting it. Yet, if you’ve read through the EE Quick Start guide already and you’ve already created the site (or your main pages at least) in regular XHTML/CSS, you can use your own design and follow along. No need doing things twice.

Basically, you’ll be learning how to set up your dynamic information (weblogs) and then add EE tags into your pages to pull in that information.

Getting Help When You’re Stumped

It’ll happen. Instead of pulling your hair out or developing a drug addition, don’t forget about the EE community.

The ExpressionEngine Forums is a great place to find answers. They are a great bunch of people and very friendly and willing to help you any way they can.

ExpressionEngine Tags

Learning and remembering EE’s tags can take some time. Why not cheat.

You can use the handy-dandy ExpressionEngine cheatsheet-er-Quick Reference Guide. It’s also available in a convenient PDF download.

Tips & Tricks

As great as these tutorials are, once you build your 1st site in ExpressionEngine, you’ll probably wish you’d done things a little differently here and there. Instead of making mistakes that others already have, Simon Collison of CollyLogic has some great tips for working more productively in ExpressionEngine:

• Working smarter with Expression Engine
• Expression Engine Top Ten Tips – Part One
• Expression Engine Top Ten Tips – Part Two

Edit: Smashing Magazine just published an insane list of ExpressionEngine resources—including tutorials, plugins much more. You’ll want to check it out.

Note: The It’s All Text plugin for Firefox that I have written about before is almost impossible to live without when coding in ExpressionEngine.

Not So Hard

With all this great information at your fingertips, learning ExpressionEngine doesn’t sound so difficult, huh? Once you get your first site under your belt and see how flexible and powerful EE really is, you may get spoiled when you have to build for other CMS’s.

Schedule For Success

Day 1:

• Look through the EE Getting Started documentation and follow the Quick Start examples.
• Make sure you have the terms and how they relate to each other clearly in mind.
• Print out the ExpressionEngine Quick Reference Guide.

Day 2:

• Take a look at Simon Collison’s EE tips.
• Check out the It’s All Text plugin for Firefox.
• Follow along with Michael Boyink’s Building a Small Business Site tutorials and by the end of the day, you should have the basics of ExpressionEngine down.

What Do You Think?

What has your experience been with ExpressionEngine? Have any tips to pass along? Leave a comment.