I’m looking for some general guidance in terms of my site and would appreciate any thoughts you might have.

I have a site about motorcycles (Harleys to be specific) that details various models over the past century. The site as it stands now is broken down in to decades (1920-1929, 1930-1939, etc), and each of those pages has half-a-dozen or so bikes on the page. There’s a small blurb describing the bike, and a picture of said bike.

Clicking on the picture takes you to an individual page (1923-info for instance), with more specific details (engine type, production run, etc…), and a larger picture specific to that particular bike.

I’m not sure the best way to approach this. Should I create two separate weblogs, one for the decade pages, and one for the individual years? Or is there a way to do one weblog, and then use categories (I’m still fuzzy on category concepts!)? I’d like all the pages to be searchable, and as I understand it the searchable content needs to be in weblog form.

I am revisiting this topic (if it seems familiar to you), but it’s been awhile and I’m hoping to gain some new insight. Thanks in advance for any help you might be able to offer!

punt - 12 November 2007 06:46 PM

Should I create two separate weblogs, one for the decade pages, and one for the individual years?

Here’s your error so to speak: a weblog is nothing mere than a container for your data, that’s it. How you transfer this data to a template is up to you and EE is extremely flexible in this regard.
My suggestion would be to use 1 weblog that has all the data for a given bike and use categories for the years as this gives a lot of options to display your information.
For example for a decade page you’d just have to display the categories belonging to that decade. You could even use a category group for each decade and just display that category group on your decade page.

punt,

you may want to check out Boyink’s tutorial here. It was really helpful for me.

Building an expressionengine site

/ff.

Thanks for the heads up to Boyink’s tutorial Francis! That helps a bit. I did some more reading of the docs as well, and it seems to be at odds with what you suggested, e-man, mostly along the lines of layouts - as the two sections (individual pages and the “overview of the decade” page) will be laid out differently, they suggested weblog. I imagine I’ll play with both (at least attempt to) and see what makes the most sense, I guess.

Thank you both for taking the time to answer. I really do appreciate it.

(and yeah, changed my user name - goes with my gmail address )

I’m with e-man on this; you don’t need two blogs, just two templates. If you have two different weblogs, you’ll end up duplicating a lot of information - dates, images, etc. What you need is two templates each showing different sub-sets of the information from a single weblog. Each weblog entry would include a bike photo, name, date, blurb, and other extended info. The “decade page” template would pull the photo & blurb for a specific decade (category), and would link to a different template that displays all of the info for a specific bike.

Think of it like a blog that shows an excerpt on the home page with a “read more” link to the full post on a different page.

Wow.

There was a lightbulb moment for sure. One weblog with all pertinent fields, and then two different templates, each one pulling in only the information they need.

Geezus, why didn’t I ever think of that?? And that’s exactly what e-man was saying.

Thank you SO much aircrash (and e-man)...seriously, that just totally opened my eyes.

He he, you’re on your way, man! Once you have grokked the concept of weblogs/templates things really start to fall in place.

heh - I edited my reply to include thanks to you as well, but I’ll say it again: thanks for helping me out e-man!

helbnt - 14 November 2007 07:49 AM

Wow.

There was a lightbulb moment for sure. One weblog with all pertinent fields, and then two different templates, each one pulling in only the information they need.

Geezus, why didn’t I ever think of that?? And that’s exactly what e-man was saying.

Thank you SO much aircrash (and e-man)...seriously, that just totally opened my eyes.

You’ll have a lot of these moments believe me. When you first start with EE you’ll be confused, but after a couple weeks of playing and asking questions you finally get the proverbial light bulb moment and you can start to do some cool stuff.

Sorry for resurrecting this thread, but it pertains directly to my question, so rather than rehash details, I thought I’d just reply to this one.

Basically, I’m looking for another light bulb moment. As stated, I now have one blog (called bikes) that has two templates that pull different custom fields from it. One template is years (for the individual year, 1903 for instance) and the other is decades (1900-1910). The year template works exactly like I want and that’s quite exciting for me

I want the decades template to work like so: For each decade, I have several different bikes. For instance, in the 1900 decade, I have entries for 1903, 1906, 1908 and 1909. Each of those individual years will be a blog entry. On the decade page, I’d like all four of those to show up.

Now, I can load up the decades template, and it pulls up my 1903 bike. The url, however, is /bikes/decades/1903-info - which is the title of the individual blog entry. Is there a way to put all four bikes on one page, and have the url something like /bikes/decades/1900-1910/?

Does any of this makes sense? If someone needs, I’ll post the full urls - it’s just that my site is nowhere near ready.

And again, thanks for you help. You’ve all been great

You could use categories (decades) and subcategories (years). Categories can have custom fields, and you can use category URL titles in links.

You could use url segments and conditionals.

One way is to add a “decade” custom field to your entries. Then, call your decade page with a url like bikes/decades/1900-1910/ where the years are whatever you enter in the custom field for each decade. You can then pull that from the url using segments and use that info plus the weblog entries tag’s search parameter to pull only that decade’s entries.
Something like this:

I haven’t tested this, so it may not be exactly correct, but hopefully it should help get you on your way.

aircrash - 20 March 2008 07:39 PM

You can then pull that from the url using segments and use that info plus the weblog entries tag’s search parameter to pull only that decade’s entries.

Damn, I didn’t even know that parameter.
Solid suggestion though, that’s exactly how I would do it; man I learn a new trick every day

e-man - 20 March 2008 08:46 PM

aircrash - 20 March 2008 07:39 PM

You can then pull that from the url using segments and use that info plus the weblog entries tag’s search parameter to pull only that decade’s entries.

Damn, I didn’t even know that parameter.
Solid suggestion though, that’s exactly how I would do it; man I learn a new trick every day

YEAH!

Truly insightful aircrash!
This solves a small problem for me as well.

Aircrash, thank you so much. That is a beautiful thing!