‘Hidden’ features in Expressionengine 2
If you’ve been using the new Expressionengine 2.x you’ve probably noticed a lot of changes - a shiny new interface, new custom field types, and the new file manager to name a few. However, hidden beneath the surface there are a lot of improvements that aren’t immediately obvious.
Resizing publish page entry fields
This one’s really neat!
Go to a publish page and click “Show toolbar”. In each custom fields “box” you should see a small icon in the bottom right corner, click on it with your mouse and drag it to make the box narrower.
Now you can group several input fields in one row, save space and make things a bit more organised.
Show categories and dates under the Publish tab
Until now we’ve all been used to things like selecting dates and categories from their respective tabs on the Publish page. Sometimes it would be more practical to have all inputs on one page, and now with EE2 you can.
Go to a publish page and click “Show toolbar”. Grab the “categories” item from the fields list and drag/drop it to wherever you want it to appear on the publish page, then remove the categories tab from the toolbar list. Now you will have your category selection in view without having to click a tab.
You can use the same method for dates, options, statuses and pings - there are no limits for your publish form!
Template management
Did you know that the template editing window is resizable. Look for the “dots” bottom centre of the edit field, it’s actually a handle to resize the field up or down. Try it! By the way, this also works for normal TEXTAREA fields on publishing pages as well.
While I’m talking about templates did you know you can drag ‘n’ drop Template Groups to reorder them?
Numerical Channel custom fields
You can now specify the type of content a text input field has. In particular, you can now specify that the field should be numeric so that data will be treated as a real number, perfect for when you need to compare or search numeric ranges.
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