A Perfect Time to Panic

06/17/2008

In the Pixar animated classic Toy Story, Woody and Buzz Lightyear find themselves in a particularly dreadful situation and while Buzz keeps his cool, Woody loudly proclaims, “It’s a perfect time to PANIC!”

We all have those moments, and I have mine of course, but I have a very different reason to PANIC.

In my particular case, I am referring to the cool tools from Panic. Integrating Coda and Transmit with Expression Engine makes coding EE sites so much easier.

To start with, you need to set your preferences in Expression Engine > Templates > Global Template Preferences > Allow Templates to be Saved as Files? to Yes and set the Basepath to Template File Directory. I create a template_file directory in the administrative directory. I find it helpful to open up Transmit to determine the path. A typical path looks something like this: home/username/htdocs/files/admin/template_files/

If you are backing into this, it is helpful to go through all the existing template files in your EE site and click the Save Template as File button. This action stores a php file version of the template in the designated template file. Once you have done this with all the files, use Transmit to synchronize all the files on the server with your local folder. Then you can import the server settings from Transmit and create a new site in Coda that links directly with the template_files directory on the server. Then as you save and upload your files the changes are made to the database and the site. It is a very slick process and has saved me hours of development time. Check out the Expression Engine User Guide for additional information about the Saving Template to Text Files. It really is a perfect time to Panic.