On-Site Training

    Your Developers
    Your Location
    +
    Our Instructors
    & Courseware
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    Focused Training
    Just for Your Team!

Learn how to build powerful, fast, and scalable websites with ExpressionEngine in this 3-day class. You won't just be staring at a book for 3 days. By the end of the class you'll have built your first ExpressionEngine website—from beginning to end!

  • Get your team up to speed quickly and efficiently, while avoiding common mistakes and pitfalls.
  • Learn the skills necessary to manage an existing website running ExpressionEngine, including how to expand and build on top of it.
  • Explore the power and affordability of developing websites on ExpressionEngine, and leave behind the other so-called CMSs that break your spirit or budget.

Learn the tried and true methods for building websites with ExpressionEngine, directly from the expert.

What Will I Learn?

How to develop ExpressionEngine websites like the pros. Through a series of guided instruction, hands-on exercises, and discussion, you'll learn how to develop ExpressionEngine websites the way the experts do. Topics include:

Getting Started: ExpressionEngine is a web application. Learning how to install it in a local development environment is an important first step.

  • Setting up a local web development environment
  • Testing the environment meets requirements to run ExpressionEngine
  • Installing and configuring ExpressionEngine
  • Exploring the application

Building Templates: Before jumping in to build an entire EE site, we first want to learn some of the basics of working EE templates.

  • Learning about EE URLs and how they interact with templates
  • Displaying dynamic content in the templates
  • Creating your own EE variables
  • Using EE template tags to bring a template to life with dynamic content

Creating Your First EE Site: With our basic EE skills at the ready, we learn how to build a website, step-by-step, from beginning to end. This is the longest portion of the course and will cover a large number of topics.

  • Setting preferences, content sections, categories and member accounts
  • Coding templates to display content, and categories
  • Reusing code with embed templates
  • Displaying content by category
  • Creating and managing static pages
  • Building an RSS feed
  • Adding search functionality to the site

Advanced Techniques to Enhance Your Site: With our first EE site built, we will build on it with advanced EE development approaches that will make it possible to build complex websites.

  • Writing custom MySQL queries in the template to retrieve the data you need
  • Setting up Stand Alone Entry Forms to add content outside of the Control Panel
  • Using Embed Variables to share data between templates
  • Advanced tag use, like searching for entries and dynamic parameters

Website Optimization: The important last step in building your EE site is to make sure it will perform well for your audience. These techniques will help you build a lean, efficient website that will not buckle under traffic.

  • The four types of caching
  • Disabling unneeded queries
  • How to handle extremely high traffic

Who’s It For?

Web Designers & Developers. This course is taught so both Web Designers and Developers can quickly learn ExpressionEngine. No previous experience with ExpressionEngine or programming is required. The course is hands-on and we will build an ExpressionEngine website from beginning to end.

Who Teaches the Course?

Ryan Irelan

Ryan Irelan is a noted expert on ExpressionEngine development. He has created a wildly popular series of training videos, the ExpressionEngine Screencasts, and is the author of the book ExpressionEngine 2.0: A Quick-Start Guide. Ryan also runs the premiere website on ExpressionEngine information and news, EE Insider.

As the Technology and Development Director at Happy Cog West, Ryan builds customized, large-scale ExpressionEngine websites every day. He has been a featured speaker at conferences covering ExpressionEngine, including the EE Roadshow in Seattle and the ExpressionEngine & CodeIgniter Conference in the Netherlands.

What Do I Need?

Laptop

This course is taught on site at your location. As such, you'll need the following:

  • a room to comfortably accommodate your team
  • a laptop projector and screen
  • a whiteboard or flipchart with markers
  • laptops (or desktops) on which each attendee can complete the hands-on exercises, and access rights on those machines to install the required software