Help us, help you

Hi Dolva,

Thank you for participating, we appreciate your feedback!

I’d love to see some best practices guide in terms of server setup, common things that tend to create problems with different hosting environments. So many times I find myself re-opening stack exchange or forum threads from 5-6 years ago to find a solution for some weird server issue. There’s no list of common issues and configuration options that need to be set up for a flawless server setup for EE. Sure there’s the server wizard that checks the basics. Common issues I tend to have: csrf causing logouts for clients, gzip compression errors, xss file filtering. I know it’s hard to pinpoint what the biggest issues for most people are but surely you can share your ideal configurations for shared hosting environments.

We do have a troubleshooting guide in our documentation that outlines some of the most common issues. https://docs.expressionengine.com/latest/troubleshooting/index.html It purposefully avoids server specifics, due to servers all being configured differently. I’m not sure we could successfully offer that type of guidance in a way that didn’t make things worse.

Another thing that bothers me is the lack of materials for best practices for templates. Perhaps this could be a more in-depth tutorial on how to build a simple news portal, how to structure channels, single entry pages etc. A lot of times I find myself building out a huge structure to a site and then wondering if there was an easier way with less channels, less variables etc.

This is definitely a hole in our documentation, and something we have as a goal moving forward to remedy.

Setting up git was a huge undertaking for me, took me months to figure out all the details, variables and database issues and it’s still not as rock solid as I would like it to be. There’s quite a few articles written on this topic but I feel that it should be a part of your official documentation. Version control is a must for any software development and I don’t like that fact that I have to change EE’s core so much just to get it working. Database syncing is a pain for me and I frequently run into issues that have no clear way to solve.

I would guess the reason we don’t have this in our documentation would be similar to the server issue, there are several version control products, and many different ways to approach the problem, and no real one size fits all solution. I look at it as similar to HTML and CSS, in that it’s very opinion heavy, and part of your workflow we don’t want to control.

Thanks again, I really appreciate the discussion!