We’re looking at implementing EE for our site, but have some specific requirement in regarding to templates and design.

- How does EE handle navigation? Is there a way to automatically generate a main, horizontal menu with drop-down menus?
- Similarly, is there a way to create a menu that lists all pages on the same “level” as the current page by inserting one of the EE tags into a template?
- How would you recommend handling the management of a rotating “featured content” gallery on a page? Is this something that can be handled with EE or a plugin or would this require hand-coding?
- Do EE templates allow you to have separate, distinct areas of the page that can be edited? For example, I would want users to be able to edit various columns or boxes designated by the template?
- If I wanted to display a list of, for example, the five latest news stories on my homepage, how would be the best way to do that?

I understand these are rather broad questions and I’m looking for any kind of help I can get, whether it’s some direct advice or just a link to a tutorial or guide.

Hi, dualpower - welcome to the forums!

You have full control over your design and data infrastructure, so you can do what you’ve listed, it’s just a matter of having the HTML/CSS skills, and structuring your data appropriately for the kind of output you need in the templates.

As an example of code, for your last question about news stories:

You do all the styling around the tags as needed.

For editable"regions” you would store that content as an entry in a weblog, updating then is a matter of editing an entry.

To learn ExpressionEngine, check out both eescreencasts.com and train-ee.com. The Agile Theme with the EE 2.0 PB also has detailed in-line comments and is a great learning resource.

Please post back if you have any other questions.