Thanks for your patience if you came by and noticed the test pattern. I’ve updated the CMS and all seems to be working well.
For those who’re interested, the CMS I use is Expression Engine, which I really like. It’s a lot more configurable than any of the alternatives I’ve used, and for those of you who maintain your own site I recommend you give it a try. One downside is that updating the software is not a one-click process. But that’s an upside, too: about half the stuff I hear about WordPress, for instance, is that people are locked into upgrade features they don’t want.
EE isn’t open-source, but it’s all php scripts, so there’s nothing to keep a tinkerer from getting in there and rewriting/augmenting the code to suit their own uses. There’s a developer community that does just that, and they make some of the results available for free. Cool stuff. End unsolicited, unpaid product endorsement.
hmm, looks interesting. I’m putting together a complex site for myself to use. I want to be able to specify categories of entries with certain properties or fields.
For instance: Book review, with most of the code/wording pre-filled-in for Author, Title, Link, Thumbnail of cover, before or after the review. Or Puzzle, with fields for Name, Credit, Easy /Medium/Hard Version, thumbnail, then some blathering.
Is this the sort of thing that Expression makes really easy? Wordpress has been extended all over the place, so I know how to make the coding dance for me there—but it takes work.
Once you get familiar with the Expression Engine tags and their parameters, it is in fact really easy to make customizations like you describe.
An example: I decided, writing a book review on the old blog that I wanted to have a thumbnail of the book cover to the left of the review, and that clicking it should take the reader to the Amazon page linked with my affiliate info. I created custom fields for the thumbnail graphic URL and the Amazon URL, which was a matter of filling in a couple of forms in preferences, then added code to the blog template along the lines of
{if thumbnail !=""}<a href="{AmazonURL}"><img src="{thumbnail}" alt="Buy This Book Now PLZ"></a> {/if}And for every post where I’d enter an image URL in the “thumbnail” field, the link appeared, with no weird missing things in other entries.
A single page rendered by Expression Engine can include data from a number of different “weblogs” — EE’s terminology for sections of a site. You could define a book review “weblog” and a puzzle “weblog,” then write a page template in which the five most recent puzzles take center stage blog-style and the book reviews are listed by title in a sidebar, another where the last puzzle is at the top and then excerpts of the first arbitrary number of words of the reviews (and cover thumbnails etc) appear beneath, all looking like posts in the same blog, and another that just displays everything you post in chronological order…
There are a few limitations on the way you can mix things up, notably in the RSS template. But it’s way flexible.
Those are *exactly* the sorts of things I need, so I’ll definitely be taking out for a test drive.