Expression Engine CMS

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KayJay

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I wrote an article recently on my blog about using Expression Engine as a CMS. I know a lot of people would like to have a CMS powered flash website so I wrote a little article that details how to do this in Expression Engine. The flash side will come in a seperate article, but for now I've written the section that lets you generate an XML file with site content that you can feed into your Flash front end.

It's not really an article for those developing in the time line or using flash templates. This is for people who write AS3 class files. I know there are a couple on the site. I've used this method on several high traffic flash websites.

I normally use Wordpress to power my flash sites, but the XML templating system in Expression Engine in fantastic.

Building a Site Structure Similar to Wordpress in Expression Engine for Flash Websites

However, one thing that Expression Engine does have up it’s sleeves is its template engine, which includes the ability to create XML templates. I’m not a fan of the EE template engine, it can be labour intensive, but the XML template is a cool functionality that you can’t ignore. Can you see where I’m going with this? If we could create an XML template that would spit out a navigation structure and site content we’d be onto a winner! We could feed that XML file into our flash website to generate our site structure and content. With the revamped XML (E4X) handling that came with AS3 this will be a breeze for a flash developer.
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It doesn't go into huge detail, but it will form part of a series of articles that I hope some people here find useful.
 
That looks like a good read, I'll check that out in full later.

2 things though (maybe these should be on the thread about your site), have you got an RSS feed? And the right hand side of the content on that post was cropped off. (IE7)
 
Hmmm, **** I didn't know that. I'll fix that tonight. Cheers mate. I have a feed, but will need to add a link to it on the site. But if you're using firefox you can get it from the address bar.

I just added another blog post about a form builder plugin for Expression Engine, incase anyone needs to build complex forms on a website. Very handy.
 
It looks OK on Safari (or have you fixed it already?) the RSS that comes up in the Safari address bar is for the comments and FF too, just checked. Interesting read though.
 
It's expression engine that's been used to build our work site. It seems to need an understanding of web building to begin to be able to change the structure of pages which isn't ideal for us. Basic updates are really easy to do and it seems well organised though :)
 
Yeah, you definitely need more understanding of HTML and php for building an EE website than say Wordpress or Drupal, but I think it's worth it. The only thing I dislike about EE is that it can seem too open ended. There's always more than 10 ways of doing the same thing, but it rewards with perseverance.
 
Craikeybaby said:
It looks OK on Safari (or have you fixed it already?) the RSS that comes up in the Safari address bar is for the comments and FF too, just checked. Interesting read though.
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Not fixed it yet. I think I'm missing the rss feed in the header of my theme. Will add that later on.
 
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