Frequently Asked Questions About eeSiteKit
Q: How much time will eeSiteKit save me?
A: The first couple of times you use it, it may only save you a few hours as you’ll need to read the eeSiteKit User Guide and get familiar with this powerful tool. The most significant time-savings comes when you are creating your third, fourth, fifth and additional sites with ExpressionEngine. Once you become an experienced user of eeSiteKit, you’ll find what used to take a couple of days now only takes a couple of hours.
Q: Nested URIs with no Category ID number or Category indicator segment, and Categories still work correctly?
A: Yes! ExpressionEngine’s Categories system and the /template_group/template/content/ URI segment system are absolutely brilliant. I totally love the way it works, and it makes perfect sense to me. Unfortunately, my clients just don’t get it. I’ve coached several hundred people in the use of EE and they just don’t get it; perhaps just as importantly, they don’t want to get it. They want nested URIs. So we found a way to give clients the nested URIs they want without sacrificing EE’s Categories system. It’s a win/win solution and it works without any custom queries, plugins or extensions; there’s nothing extra to maintain. We think you’ll like it.
Q: Is eeSiteKit endorsed or recommended by EllisLab?
A: The short answer is no. eeSiteKit takes full advantage of ExpressionEngine’s powerful template engine, and in doing so, provides an alternative system of handling URI content to achieve friendlier nested URIs. Best of all, it does this while maintaining the full use of EE’s flexible Category system for managing content. For many CMS websites, its publishers and visitors, this is the best of both worlds. eeSiteKit’s system of nesting URIs is an alternative method that is not officially supported by our friends at EllisLab.
Q: Is eeSiteKit going to be simple enough for my clients to figure out?
A: Yes; and that’s one of the reasons we created it. We’ve trained hundreds of people to use ExpressionEngine over the last few years and many of the concepts used to create eeSiteKit were inspired by that experience.
Q: Will eeSiteKit work in future versions of EE?
A: eeSiteKit is built using EE’s own template engine, so there is no custom PHP, custom queries or homemade functions to break. It’s coded to have little or no effect on your ability to upgrade EE. Should the developers of EE change the way something in the template engine works, and should it break some functionality in eeSiteKit, we’ll recode that portion of the eeSiteKit and release it as a patch on our site, and/or we’ll publish instructions on how to resolve the issue on your own. In our primary business, we maintain over 100 EE websites and most of those are based on eeSiteKit, so we have quite a bit of motivation to keep things working across future builds and versions of EE.
Q: Does eeSiteKit break any of EE’s functionality?
A: Yes, eeSiteKit’s nested URI structure is not suited for use with EE’s Category Heading Tag, so we created a temporary workaround for it and we’ve made an appropriate feature request with the EE development team so we won’t need the workaround some day. Our temporary workaround works on the home, landing, category and single-entry pages and even has a fail-safe for “Pages Module” pages.
Q: Will eeSiteKit work with my CSS?
A: Yes. eeSiteKit is designed to allow you total flexibility in your CSS styling. We’ve integrated YAML by default, and in a way that makes it easy to remove if you choose. All the code in eeSiteKit is editable, so you can configure things to your needs pretty quickly.
Q: Will I have to buy a copy of eeSiteKit for every site I build?
A: No. When you purchase a copy of eeSiteKit you’ll have access to the download area of our site for 180 days. You may download and use eeSiteKit on as many website projects as you like. After 180 days, you’ll need to purchase eeSiteKit again to continue to have access to the download area.
Q: May I download a free copy to try before I buy?
A: We have no interest in encrypting any of our code, so the only way to ensure our business sustainability is by reserving our downloads-area for paying customers. The funds raised through the sale of downloadable products on this site help to offset the costs of future development and of supporting our growing user-base.
Q: Is eeSiteKit scalable (can I build Amazon.com with it)?
A: During our testing, a typical page load in a fully featured eeSiteKit site required between 50 and 130 queries. That’s about a 20% increase over our EE websites built using traditional development techniques. eeSiteKit makes use of several of EE’s native caching techniques to reduce the average number of queries down to between 35 to 55 queries per page load, sometimes even fewer. The additional dynamic functionality and ease of use you’ll enjoy with eeSiteKit does require a little more effort from your host server. If you need to build a website that thrives in the Alexa Top 500 then eeSiteKit may not be right for you. If your new site will be one of the other 162+ million though, get a copy of eeSiteKit today and see what it can do for you.
For example: this page required 86 queries and took 0.5547 seconds to load running in a busy single-server shared-hosting account.
