SGF Journal: A blog about business, web, and technology.
Mount:ee + Coda = EE Awareness
Here at shotgunflat, we’re huge fans of the ExpressionEngine CMS platform. We’re very grateful to our friends at story+structure for turning us on to EE a few years ago. Since then, we’ve put dozens of our clients’ sites on EE and watched them thrive on the system.
However, sometimes (ok, always) the process is a bit clunky when we’re trying to edit or build more complicated solutions on the EE platform. Here’s a screenshot of what the editing dialog looks like on the backend:
Easy enough to work with for basic stuff, but having to scroll in a window-inside-a-window, worry about accidentally closing the browser and losing work, etc. makes the setup suboptimal.
A few months back, I started looking around for a better solution—a way to work with ExpressionEngine and its tags and structure locally. It would make for a much greater means by which to work and follow best practices.
I found Mount:ee. Simply put, Mount:ee allows you to mount your entire ExpressionEngine site—templates and all—as a drive on your local machine. By doing so, you’ll have an up-to-date version of your site, mapped to the server, and ready to edit. Here’s the simple setup screen:
But this is only half of the beauty of Mount:ee. In addition, you can take advantage of Mountee’s free developer tools to hook yourself up with some sweet syntax highlighting in your favorite editor (Coda, Espresso, Textmate). Once you install your free tools, you’ll enjoy the following view of your application:
By spending $99 on Coda and $59 on Mount:ee (per computer), we’ve got ourselves the perfect little ExpressionEngine development setup.
Added bonus: saving your file to the server is incredibly fast.
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