Welcome to Greycells!

Welcome to Greycells.net! We publish free guides, tips, and news on ExpressionEngine - the best CMS ever!

ExpressionEngine is totally Open Source and free to use, with a very dedicated community behind it.

We cover everything related to ExpressionEngine. From getting started, designing, developing, and running sites to the technologies behind it all.

You can read more about why we created this site below. If you want to know who is behind this site, you can read this article. And you can read more about why we think ExpressionEngine is the greatest thing since dynamically served, database-driven bread in this article.

Why this site, and why now?

Because we do not think ExpressionEngine gets the credit it deserves, and that is because not enough people know it exists. When people try ExpressionEngine — either by developing sites or end-users publishing with it day-to-day — they invariably fall in love.

And so, we want to advocate its use as much as we can.

ExpressionEngine’s biggest hurdle in the past was its cost. The fact that it had a cost meant that many people never gave it a chance. It was certainly worth its price, but because its competition was free, most potential users never even tested it. A limited evaluation version was made available, but you just can’t compete with free, even if you are the best.

But that is all in the past now. ExpressionEngine is finally open source and free to use, so those who would have chosen another CMS, or WordPress, now have a way better alternative.

My hope is that we as a community will be filling this site with great content, making it a resource for all things ExpressionEngine. One that will strengthen the adoption and knowledge of ExpressionEngine, as well as making us all better and more creative designers and developers.

From those just evaluating ExpressionEngine, those graduating from other CMS’s or WordPress to the hard-core hand coders who want to be in control of their code, this site should be of value to everyone.

However, this site is not an advertisement or some fanboy site. We are completely independent and not affiliated with Packet Tide, LLC in any way. We value them and the direction they have taken ExpressionEngine and think they are the best thing to happen to the platform ever. But if they pull any crap, we are free to say so :)

Content! We need your help!

Of course, we need fresh content published here all the time. And now that we are live, we will get on that promptly.

But we would also love your help! So if you would like to have a guide, article, or collection of tips published here, please let us know. Also, if you have older content that you have not had the time to update, we would be happy to take on that task if you will let us post it here — all credit will, of course, go to you.

So please don’t hesitate to reach out, mail address is in the sidebar.

No Ads?

The purpose will never be to make a profit from this site. That is why there are no ads here at the moment. At some point, we may have to display some subtle ads, but not yet.

If hosting costs grow to more than I can pay for myself, we will see. The goal will never be making a profit, ever. If we must display ads, they will be few and unobtrusive from EthicalAds or CarbonAds.

And again, it may never happen!

Who created Greycells.net and who are “we”?

Well, right now, it is actually just me and not we. My name is Thomas Boelskifte, and I am from Denmark, Europe. If you want the story of how I got to this point in time and ended up creating this site, you can read this article:

• Who are “we” and who am I

It was initially part of the article you are reading right now. But apparently, I am very complicated because the section grew so wordy it made more sense to split it into a separate article.

What’s to come?

Now that we are live, I need to catch any bugs that I may (will) have overlooked, so please send an e-mail if you find any. And then:

• First and foremost: More content!
• Save a cookie with User’s choices for Use Serif/Sans-serif font + Text size.
• Getting the “Send an e-mail” link to show an e-mail form instead of opening your e-mail application. This, however, is related to some Linode configuration I need to dig further into when I have the time.
• Create preview for comments.
• Optimize code further.
• Minify various resources.
• Maybe divide articles and guides into separate URLs. At the moment, we have everything under /news/ but it would make more sense to have guides under /guides/ and news + regular articles under /articles/ or something similar.
• Ohh, and more content!

I hope you will like the site and that we can build it into something great together. I have had a lot of fun creating it, and I can’t wait to run and develop it further. If you want to help by writing or contributing already written content, please get in touch via the e-mail link in the sidebar.

A bit about the backend

Here is a bit about the site’s backend:

• We are running ExpressionEngine 6.x, and I am updating pretty soon after new releases come out. I wanted to run the latest version for this site and actually started development using the first beta-version of EE6. And it has performed great through every update since then.
• The site is based on the Editorial template from HTML5Up.net, but I have customized it a lot, as you can see. This shows the freedom you get with ExpressionEngine — you can take any HTML5/CSS3 template from the web, put in some EE-tags, and have a site up very fast. Check out our guide showing this here.
• Right now we are running on a Linode VPS, that we can quickly scale as the need arises. I can not recommend Linode enough, everything has just worked. Their support is great, the website is very helpful and it has just been a joy to experience.
• We are running a LEMP-stack (Linux, Nginx, MariaDB, and PHP) on the server.
• Backups are done daily and automatically by Linode. But we also do daily and ad-hoc backups of the database and files when needed.

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