I started writing a small tutorial (cue derisive laugh here) on Expression Engine only to have it spawn wildly out of control. So I figured that I might as well do this properly. Over the next however many tutorials, we’ll create an EE site from scratch. We'll try to keep redundant code down to minimum to avoid maintenance nightmare when we want to update (and, trust me, you'll want to update — sooner than you think).

EE On A Diet

EE Core is remarkably similar to a manticore except that 1. it's two words not one, and 2. it's not a monster. It's powerful, flexible, and, in my opinion, the best CMS incubating in the wild. It's free. The free edition doesn't have as many choices as the Personal or Commercial Editions, but it is more than enough for a personal site.

Credits And What Not

Bartelme's Fresh Theme

Our end product was designed by Wolfgang Bartelme over at Bartelme Design. In fact, this was the design used on the previous version of the site. I loved it and asked him if I could create an EE theme out of it, and he graciously agreed. :-D I changed the XHTML/CSS templates to suit my own tastes, but the icons, the content, and the layout was created entirely by Bartelme.

What Do I Need?

Now that we got all that out of the way, we'll need:

  1. PHP
  2. MySQL
  3. LinkList Module
  4. Markdown Plugin
  5. (Optional) File Manager Module