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.

Book Review: Building Websites With ExpressionEngine 1.6

If you know a little HTML/CSS but you are brand new to EE, this book will help get you started down the right path. If you’ve been using it for a while you probably won’t get a ton of new info out of it – still, worth browsing if you can get your hands on it.

Mindy Wagner: Viget Inspire
I’ve not read the book myself, but Mindy does a nice job covering who the book is for, what’s covered well in the book and what could be covered a bit better.

You can also download a free sample chapter from the book on the Viget.com site.

Check out the review:
Book Review: Building Websites With ExpressionEngine 1.6

Buy the book:
Building Websites With ExpressionEngine 1.6 (Packt Publishing)

Read more about ExpressionEngine’s features and pricing:
ExpressionEngine Overview

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.

Previously, I shared some of the graphics and web design-related websites that I’m subscribed to. I think it’s interesting knowing what sites other designers go to for news, resources, tutorials, inspiration and the like.

Continuing this theme, today I’m finishing the list of web design-related sites with 14 17 more great sites.

Web Design and CSS Inspiration

• FullSingle
  A CSS website gallery dedicated to sites that are only 1 page.

Web Design Articles, Tutorials and Code

• CSS Zone
  Articles, tutorials, code techniques. Focuses on the fairly technical side of web development.
• jQuery For Designers
  Great jQuery code snippets, tutorials, plugins and articles. Focused on helping designers learn useful techniques for extending their sites with jQuery.
• Vignet Inspire: Web Design Blog
  Nice articles and tutorials for web designers and developers, with a splash or graphic design thrown in.
• WebAppers
  Daily-updated links to top-quality web design-related posts, tutorials, code, plugins and other open-source web resources.
• Min Tran’s Weblog
  XHTML and CSS tutorials and not to mention some great icon sets for web designers.
• Woork
  The consistently great blog of Antonio Lupetti. Features a HUGE collection tutorials on AJAX (Prototype, MooTools, Scriptaculous), PHP and database design, as well as XHTML and CSS.
• Smashing Magazine
  Showcases inspiration, tutorials, icons, fonts, themes, online tools, graphics and web design resources. Articles on just about everything a web or graphic designer would be interested in.

WordPress

• WordPress Publisher Blog
  The official WordPress blog. WordPress news, tools, themes, resources and plugins.
• WPCandy – The Best of WordPress
  Links to WordPress-related articles, tutorials, themes and other resources.
• WPelements
  WordPress themes, tutorials and plugins.
• WPMU Tutorials
  WordPress MU (Multi-User) tutorials, plugins, themes and news.
• Blog Perfume
  WordPress themes, tutorials, plugins, icons and other WP-ish news.

ExpressionEngine

• EE Blog (Official ExpressionEngine Blog)
  The official EE blog with EE news and articles about the inner workings of ExpressionEngine. Great for keeping up with new versions.
• EE Design
  Hasn’t been updated in a while, but contains ExpressionEngine themes, templates and tutorials.
• EE HowTo
  Nice, bite-sized how-to tips, tricks and tutorials for using and building EE sites.
• Train-ee
  The best ExpressionEngine tutorial site out there. Period. This is where I learned how to build my 1st EE site. A must read for anyone wanting to use the EE CMS.

What’s in Your Feed?

What web design-related sites do you visit or subscribe to regularly? Share them with us in the comments.

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.

Even though this blog is relatively new, there have been many great web and graphic design-related posts in the last few months of 2008. Let’s take a stroll down memory lane and look at just a few (21, actually) of the topics we’ve covered.

Tutorials

• DIY Online Incremental Backups
• BlogDesk Part 1: Publishing Posts to WordPress
• BlogDesk Part 2: Posting to ExpressionEngine

ExpressionEngine

I’ve written several posts about ExpressionEngine. Here are a few of the most popular.

• Javascript Templates in EE: Speeding Up Page Loads
• Easier Editing in ExpressionEngine and WordPress
• Learn ExpressionEngine in 2 Days

WordPress

Within minutes of WordPress 2.7 being released on WordPress.org, there was the WordPress 2.7 Upgrade Checklist. This contains tips on upgrading your site, including making sure your plugins and themes are compatible with the newest version of WordPress.

Online Tools and Services

We’ve reviewed and highlighted several online services and websites that make your job as a web or graphic designer much easier.

• Automatic, Painless Backups With Mozy
• Free Icon Search Tools
• 4 Royalty-Free Photo Search Engines
• 5 Free Online Photoshop Alternatives
• Free Online Billing and Invoicing—Curdbee
• Manage Multiple Email Accounts With Zenbe

Web Design Code

• Don’t Remove Visual Cues For Links
• Quick and Dirty: CSS Shorthand Tips
• Quick and Dirty: Lightning Fast Page Setup
• Quick and Dirty: Optimizing PHP (For Fun and Profit)

Graphic-Related Posts

• 12 + Mega Icon Sets For Designers
• OpenX Admin Icon Set
• 10 More Free Icon Sets
• Inspiration: Retro Clothing Labels

More to Come in 2009

These are just a few of the great posts that have been featured here on the blog and there’s more to come in 2009.

This blog is updated 2 times a week—on Mondays and Fridays/Saturdays. The Monday posts deal with web design-related topics and things of interest to web designers. The posts at the end of the week usually deal with graphic design topics.

If you haven’t already, subscribe to the RSS feed so you won’t miss a single post.

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.

EEHowTo posted about Using BlogDesk With ExpressionEngine to add entries and edit existing entries without having to be logged into the control panel.

BlogDesk is a free, desktop app for Windows (sorry everyone else… if I get it working in Linux, I’ll post about it).

This would be great for clients who don’t want to log into the control panel (or for those clients YOU don’t want logging into the control panel).

Another benefit is that you can work on your posts offline if, say, you’re somewhere that doesn’t have an internet connection. Then you can upload the posts when you’re ready.

I plan to test it with WordPress and ExpressionEngine and see how it works. Look for a post soon about BlogDesk. Check out the BlogDesk tutorial series:

• BlogDesk Part 1: Publishing Posts to WordPress
• BlogDesk Part 2: Posting to ExpressionEngine

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.

Using It’s All Text in Firefox 3 on Ubuntu

How do you keep your code properly indented when you’re coding in a textarea?

Spaces are no good, Tab just jumps you out of the textarea. Even good old copy and paste doesn’t work—even from Notepad without having to copy and paste the entire textarea back and forth.

When writing posts in WordPress, you’re not really dealing with a ton of actual raw code that needs formatting. But what about when using the theme editor or editing code in ExpressionEngine?

How can you keep your code from being all jumbled and akimbo when editing in a textarea?

Plugins To the Rescue!

2 browser plugins—Saft for Mac/Safari users and It’s All Text for Windows and Linux Firefox users.

Both plugins do the same thing: Edit the text in any textarea in an external editor of your choice and then save the text back to the textarea.

It even gives you a nice AJAX-like update glow in your textarea to let you know it made the update.

Macs

Saft is a useful developer plugin for Safari. One of its many features is that it can link your textareas to an external editor like TextMate or Coda.

Windows and Linux

For Windows and Linux, there’s It’s All Text, a plugin/add-on for Firefox, which does the same thing. You get to pick virtually any program as the external editor. In Windows, I have mine set to use Notepad++, and in Linux (Ubuntu), gEdit.

To edit the contents of a textarea, just hover your mouse over the textarea and a small purple button will appear. Click it and it launches your external editor with the content from your textarea loaded.

The only slight weirdness with setting up the plugin is that after installing the add-on the first time and restarting Firefox, you will need to choose which editor you want to use. Then, you must restart Firefox again before it will save your changes. Once that’s sorted, it works just fine.

If you’re a Mac user who doesn’t want to shell out for Saft, you should be able to use It’s All Text with Firefox on Mac, but it takes a little extra work to get it set up.

The great thing about these plugins is that they work with just about any regular textarea on a page, so you can use them in ExpressionEngine, WordPress or any other CMS or website that allows editing or posting via textareas.

They’re also useful when posting long-winded comments on blogs or forums.

Other Useful Plugins?

Are there other browser plugins that you use when developing in ExpressionEngine or WordPress? Leave a comment and tells us about it.

When serving up dynamic information, you want your pages to load as fast as possible. In ExpressionEngine (EE), not only pages, but also code such as CSS and javascript can be served using templates. But when should you use an EE javascript template? How does the use of a JavaScript template affect page load speed?

The choice whether or not to use javascript templates in EE can potentially have a huge effect on page load time in certain situations.

Javascript in EE Templates

In ExpressionEngine, you have 6 types of templates you can choose from. If you’re using a template to include javascript code in your pages, you’ll want to choose either JavaScript or Static.

If your javascript file is compressed with the whitespace removed (such as the minimized version of jQuery), EE will not process it properly unless you use the Static template type. Otherwise, you can just use the regular JavaScript template type.

Javascript as a Regular JS File

ExpressionEngine also allows you to just upload an external javascript file to the server and link to it just as you would any other file in HTML, PHP or what have you.

The downside is that you have to go outside of EE’s control panel and use FTP to load the file and then use FTP to edit it if need be later on. You won’t be able to make changes from within EE as you would if you were using a template.

Javascript Templates vs Static Files

First off, why would you want to use templates to display javascript in EE?

When putting javascript in a JavaScript template, you can use EE tags to pull in information from elsewhere in EE. This can be pretty handy at times; saving you from retyping extra info, or when information needs to change based on the page the javascript is being loaded. For these situations, using templates are great.

The catch with javascript in templates is that the code isn’t being cached. Each time a new page loads, EE treats the javascript template as a dynamic file and downloads it again; looking for EE tags it needs to process. Your browser doesn’t cache the javascript.

When dealing with larger javascript files—especially javascript frameworks, this can significantly increase your page load times.

Just linking from a page template to a regular old javascript file, on the other hand, means your browser can cache the file and then when a visitor goes to another page, wham-o, it’s already cached.

Speed Impact

I don’t have any benchmark tests for this, but from my personal experience, using javascript templates for serving multiple javascripts and/or large chunks of javascript code in EE can noticeably slow the loading of pages when compared to just linking to regular .js files. If you combine this with the time it takes to process the PHP and EE tags and the other templates for pages and pull in weblogs, this all adds up.

Recap

Using javascript templates in EE makes sense when:

• You need/want to use variables in your javascript
• Dealing with smaller javascript files
• You want to manage/organize/edit your javascript files through EE’s control panel

Serving javascript files as just regular old .js files makes sense when:

• You don’t need EE to parse anything in your javascript code
• You’re using a javascript framework such as Prototype, jQuery or MooTools
• You’re using several small javascript files
• Your pages are loading slower than you’d like