Since the purpose of the site is to help visitors find events, the Search Events functionality needed to be quite comprehensive — more comprehensive than ExpressionEngine’s native search functionality allows. Visitors must be able to search events not only by criteria and keyword but also by county and date — and since some events have non-contiguous date ranges, this was yet another complication to overcome. But we did.

Also, events are added not by the site administrator but by the individual organizers of the events themselves, so the site needed a specially-designed events publish/edit screen. As of this writing over 250 organizations have published almost 500 events on the site, making it a fabulous resource for locals and visitors alike this spring.

salt. agreed with Danny that what they needed was a content management system, and Danny recommended ExpressionEngine and enlisted Engaging.net and the ExpressionEngine Consulting service to ensure that the site’s EE setup would be robust, up-to-date, aligned to EE’s strengths, and that few if any changes would be visible to the visitor.

Because the site’s design, content and front-end architecture were already done, we could focus on the back-end architecture and template coding. For the CMS to have as much flexibility as the client had gotten used to, every type of content with a one-to-many or many-to-one relationship with another type of content needed its own ExpressionEngine channel. The result was the following data structure, heavily centered around the fundamental unit of the site, namely, film titles:

Danny and your author, Adam, then collaborated on installing and configuring EE with this architecture. That done, he went off to take care of the data population. We reconvened to undertake the coding.

One novelty was salt.’s password-protection system, where a password is required to see some of a film’s related content. Rather than basing this on the visitor’s login and member group, as is standard in EE, salt. wanted to continue providing access based on film title alone, without logins and site membership. The solution was to add at the back-end a password field in the films channel, and at the front-end a simple form for the visitor that writes to a cookie; if the value of the cookie matches that of the password field, then once the form has been submitted and the page reloaded, the visitor can view that film’s password-protected content.

Check it out — regardless of what’s powering it, salt-co.com is at the very least a fun collection of film trailers to watch.

With difficulty, has been the answer. With a series of embedded templates or a long SQL query in your template. But now it’s easy. The new Tied Entries plugin enables you to span the relationships and reverse relationships among fields every which way using the most intuitive shorthand we could devise — see the docs for details. It’s literally a whole new dimension for ExpressionEngine sites.

The license per commercial ExpressionEngine license costs $20, per personal license $7.50, and it’s free to try before you buy. The download contains a version each for EE v1.x and v2.x.

First, some background. The Christian Schools of Florida’s Master In-Service Program manages the activities that the CSF member schools hold for their staff so that they can be re-certified as educators. Each in-service activity qualifies for credit towards a component set by the Florida State Department of Education. What the new report does is summarize the various types of participants — teachers, administrators and non-certificated people — who gain credit towards each component.

In previous years the report was compiled manually. This year however, since all participants in all activities are now entered into CSF’s MIP web system by individual school in-service administrators, the report is simply a print-out of a web page on the CSF site (that must nonetheless be a precise replica of the handwritten paper report). With over 500 teachers participating in almost 100 activities this year, the automatically-generated report has saved a lot of tedious manual calculations.

Uniquely, the report has two views: a summary, which is sent to the DoE, and the full details view, which drills down to the level of individual participants and shows how the summary’s totals are calculated. The report also generates warnings, such as when an activity has been assigned more hours than its component’s maximum.

The totals are not stored on the server, but instead are calculated each time the page is loaded. Some of this is done client-side using Javascript with the Numeric and Calculation jQuery plugins.

“Thank you for your good work,” CSF head Ken Wackes emailed at the conclusion of the job. “We are greatly satisfied.”

This page must detect which version of which ebook you have, and indeed that you are actually coming from the link within the ebook. Then it must provide you with any free and/or paid updates as well as specially-priced bundles with other books.

It must also link to news items and errata pertinent to that version of that ebook, with the news items pertaining to a range of versions of the book but the errors appearing only for this particular version.

Implementing this functionality was the latest phase in the ongoing job of converting takecontrolbooks.com to the ExpressionEngine content management system. “Wonderful,” wrote co-manager Tonya Engst regarding the new system’s features.

Thanks again, Adam and Tonya, for the opportunity to work on this site and the pleasure of viewing, if only from afar, your smooth operation. Next up for Take Control: account management.

First, we coded the HTML/CSS from comps supplied by Mark. There were only three pages: the homepage, a page about children’s activities using the words-focused template, and a page about the church staff in the pictures template. Thank you “The” Danny Barnes for the HTML/CSS mark-up.

After launching the static site we began the dynamic setup, populating the EE installation with channels and fields. The EE channels were grouped into two types, core and multimedia, where entries in multimedia channels — such as photos, PDF documents and sound files — can be related to any core entries. Thanks again to Yvonne Martinsson of fellow EE Pro Network member Studio.Freewheelin for implementing this build-out so smoothly.

Another way we kept costs down was by relying on jQuery. Many of the site’s design wheels would have taken much longer had clever javascripters not already invented elegant ways to do them.

To wit, in Mark’s design all photos have dropshadows and photo sizes can vary. The jQuery Dropshadow plugin by Larry Stevens handles this nicely.

Mark wanted the homepage intro photo to be a slideshow. For this we recycled the trusty Cycle jQuery plugin by M. Alsup.

For the main menu, the corners of the first and last entries were to be rounded. There are a number of jQuery plugins for this, but I went with David Turnbull and Steven Wittens’s Corners because unlike others it handles transparency, which was required because behind the menu is a gradient background.

The menu itself runs on the Menu jQuery plugin by Marco van Hylckama Vlieg.

And in order to display photos fullsize from the photos layout, we added the Lightbox jQuery plugin by Leandro Vieira Pinho.

With extensive use of jQuery plugins on the client-side, a well-architected ExpressionEngine deployment on the server side, and a fresh and flexible design serving every page, this is an inexpensive yet powerful contemporary web site that the church staff members themselves are now operating.

My previous-century patronage is not however why Music Box made contact; instead, what happened is that Chris Welch, then Music Box’s web designer, had read about Engaging’s role in the EE conversion of subtraction.com and figured that what’s good enough for Khoi Vinh is good enough for them. So thanks again, Khoi! — this one was a satisfying bit of personal continuity.

Converting MBT and MBF to EE wasn’t only fun, it was also quite challenging, as Program Director Brian Andreotti and I discovered during numerous Skype conversations in which we hammered out the sites’ publishing business logic, which became more subtle and complex from an EE perspective the closer we looked at it. But that challenge — pushing EE to places I’d never taken it — was also fun. Really!

The result is two web sites that appear the same as ever — except where Music Box wanted design changes and additional features — but that are now regularly updated with ease by Music Box staff.

Thanks to the bright and generous Yvonne Martinsson of fellow EE Pro Network member Studio.Freewheelin for helping with the build-out.