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For a long time now I have struggled with removing index.php from my EE websites. I have used a mix bag of the include/exclude method and add-ons that deal with making the include/exclude method easier.

This is just a quick blog post to relay some info I just learned. I am in the process of upgrading Show-ee from 1.6.8 to 1.7 and then to 2.1.4b. As part of that site we used to use FieldFrame from Pixel & Tonic. Specifically we were using the CheckBox Group fields for the checkboxes that tell what add-ons a developer used. Well as part of the process I upgraded from 1.6.8 to 1.7 but neglected to upgrade all of the add-ons before moving to 2.1.4.

This is the second installment in our Creating installable templates tutorials for ExpressionEngine. In this post we are going to talk about the actual package that needs to be delivered to the end user and all of the associated files. Plus we even have a bonus of some useful code for you.

A year ago I was perusing the user guide and wiki over on ExpressionEngine’s website for any information regarding creating your own installable templates. At that time there were none. At I just did a quick search for some of the files involved like theme_preference.php and default_content.php and the information available is still minimal.

Spam sucks. If you are a spammer there is a special HOT place waiting for you after death. No one likes you and your mama thinks you are ugly.

OK now that I have that off my chest there has been an awful lot of registration spam hitting ExpressionEngine websites lately. While I cannot consider myself an expert (although I do think Greg from Purple Dogfish is) I do think I have some to share. I have come across a few things that I do to help fight registration spam that I will hit on after the jump. Just click on the Read More to… well… read more.

I have been getting hit hard by some comment spam on a client site for the past week. I was really confused as I even turned off comments and it was still posting them. It was not till I searched for the title of the entry on the edit page that I got a clue as to what had happened. The client had posted an event to their calendar with the same title as the title of a blog post. The intelligent spammer somehow figured out that he could post comments to the site by subsituting the entry titles for other channels into the url structure for the blog/comments. So in other words instead of sitename.com/blog/comments/blogentrytitlehere he typed in sitename.com/blog/comments/eventcalendarentrytitlehere and it allowed him to post comments to that channel.

So… when creating the channels for your sites make sure to shut off comments for all channels that don’t require them. It can be found in admin -> Channel (weblog) administration -> Channel (weblog) Management -> Edit Channel (weblog) Preferences. Find Comment Posting Preferences on the left hand navigation. The radio button at the top turns them off.

This morning I was having a discussion with a fellow EE developer about website speed optimization. I was mentioning various methods for speeding up a website. One tool that I find useful is the Google Chrome Resources Graphing tool. With it you can tell where latency and download speeds are slower than could be. I find that the problem with most sites is not ExpressionEngine but more than likely excessive calls for JavaScript and CSS files and even more so for images.

This tutorial will show you how to add a calendar to your ExpressionEngine based website. And as an example we will be using our Tudobem template. The HTML/CSS and necessary ExpressionEngine code will all be included. So make the jump to the full page article to read more.