Building Websites with ExpressionEngine 1.6: A clear, concise, and practical guide to creating a professional ExpressionEngine website Review

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(More customer reviews)I have been looking at Content Management systems for the last year and love wordpress as a blogging platform and CMS. After reading blogs from other web designers who use Wordpress for small sites, they mentioned using Expression Engine for larger, more complex projects. I became very interested in this platform and searched for a book to help me learn how to install it, administer and design for it. This book turned out to be the answer! The book is well organized with lots of screenshots, code examples, and sidenotes. The book is highly detailed with step by step instructions. It is targeted at web designers and marketing professionals so I felt that it gave me the right amount of information for the my level of experience. The book answered many questions that come to the surface such as what are the server requirements and how much space my site going will take up. The CSS presented was basic and enough to get me started to style the site with my company's branding. The book covers the tasks necessary to back up my website and how to upgrade when the time comes. The last part of the book contains exercises that helped me dig in and actually test out the code. I highly recommend this book.

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Go from the basics of setting up ExpressionEngine to creating professional ExpressionEngine websites with this concise, practical guide. This book is ideal for new users of ExpressionEngine. The book is targeted at people who are responsible for creating and managing a site with ExpressionEngine. It is suitable for web developers, designers, webmasters, content editors, and marketing professionals who want to develop a fully featured web presence in a simple and straightforward process.

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Building Websites with ExpressionEngine 2 Review

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(More customer reviews)I recently read through Building Websites with ExpressionEngine 2, by Leonard Murphy.
As one of the first books out to cover the relatively recently released ExpressionEngine 2, I was eager to get my hands on it. I've found before that reading through books, such as Michael Boyink's, Building an ExpressionEngine 2 Site for Small Business, has been instrumental in developing a set of standards to use as I develop sites in ExpressionEngine 2.
In case you aren't familiar with the product, ExpressionEngine 2, released in July of this year, is the latest release of EllisLab's flagship content management system. The tool is extremely powerful, and is a top choice of web designers and developers for site-building projects that might otherwise resort the such CMSs as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and the like. While ExpressionEngine isn't free, and many of it's top addons are commercial as well, they come with professional support, which more than makes up for the initial cost outset when you run into a bind along the way. ExpressionEngine allows you to work with your content in an entirely different way than other content management systems, completely separating it from the design, and this has led to a very active and dedicated fan-base.
With the power and flexibility of a complex and mature tool, such as ExpressionEngine, comes the challenge of working efficiently. In a wide-open playing field, one must set his or her own rules and standards, so that it's easy to go back to a site you worked on several months ago and still know how it works. This has been the topic of sessions at the EECI conferences, such this one by Leevi Graham.
It's in this area also, that I've found books such as Building Websites with ExpressionEngine 2 immensely helpful. Murphy's new book is a good choice for the beginning ExpressionEngine user. It covers all the basics for a user who needs a little hand-holding. I appreciate that it also goes beyond the basics, with a chapter about implementing ExpressionEngine's powerful membership features, both for control panel administration, and front-end site membership.
As any developer familiar with ExpressionEngine will tell you, one of the greatest features of the tool is its ability to be extended through add-ons. There's a huge library of them available at Devot:ee, the ExpressionEngine community site, and it becomes a vital part of the development workflow to find appropriate add-ons for a given project. The end of the book includes an overview of several popular ExpressionEngine add-ons, which is fantastic. It's extremely important to get a firm grasp of the available add-ons before really digging into ExpressionEngine.
While this book certainly isn't the one for you if you're already a seasoned ExpressionEngine user, I think any new user will find its contents valuable as they begin using the tool.

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This book is a clear and enjoyable tutorial packed with carefully explained steps for constructing a small business website, and information for applying the skills learned to your everyday work with ExpressionEngine. If you have familiarity with building websites using HTML/CSS or with software such as DreamWeaver or other content management systems such as Drupal, WordPress, Joomla!, or Plone, then ExpressionEngine may be what you are looking for. This book is suitable for anyone who wants to develop a fully featured web presence with a simple and straightforward tool. No prior knowledge of content management systems, PHP or ExpressionEngine is assumed. A basic understanding of HTML is necessary to follow the examples.

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