Hi,

Apologies if this post is in the wrong section.

I’m evaluating EE Core to build a website, with the view of upgrading to a commercial license if all goes well.

Now, I’m used to creating php/mysql based sites using index.php as a master template with sub-templates being included into index.php based on a query string.
e.g.
www.domain.com/index.php?section=home = Homepage
www.domain.com/index.php?section=news = News Page
www.domain.com/index.php?section=news&id=12 = News Item #12

So I’m building my templates in EE at the moment, and ideally those same URLs should equate to something like:
www.domain.com/index.php/home/
www.domain.com/index.php/news/
www.domain.com/index.php/news/news_story_title

I realise that index.php/home is one template group and index.php/news is another. However, both of these template groups will contain large amounts of duplicate code.

In my main template snippet below I’ve stripped out the header/footer into sub-templates, as these are constant. However I will need to embed the correct layout template based on which page is requested.

If I were building a normal PHP site, the embeds would be include() calls, and the layout call would be something like include(‘layouts/’.$_GET[‘section’].’.php’);

I can think of two (not very suitable) solutions to do this in EE:
1. Create the site with one master template and use query strings and php code to identify and determine sections.
2. Create duplicate templates with identical code except for the {embed=“layouts/home”} line.

I hope I’m making sense with all this? Can anyone think of a better solution?

Ideally there should be one master template which loads a dynamic sub-template based on the page requested.

You could probably use url segments…I haven’t used it with embeds but should work I’d think…

{!—Include layout based on section (one of: home, news, ...)—}
  {embed=“layouts/{segment_1}”}

Thanks PXLated, that may work. I’d guess I would need a htaccess hack to override all urls to the same template.

On another note, I’ve tried using the following code, where {default_section} is a global string variable.

{embed=”{default_section}/index”}

This doesn’t appear to work. My guess would be that I’m missing an operator to concat the two strings. I’m not sure if EE even supports string manipulation like this.

I’ve also tried the following in the template with no success:
{embed={default_section}.”/index”}
{embed={default_section}+”/index”}

Maybe I should be using PHP in the template instead to do this?

How about passing the variable via the embed?

Also, user defined global variables can be used in EE tags.  You could instead use path.php variables.

In any case, I’m going to move this down to how-to, since you’re working through a solution. =+)

I do this on every EE site I’ve worked on so far, using the method Lisa mentions above, via embed:

You can then use this variable in your home embed with something like:

Perfick!

Hiya,

I must admit I’m a little confuddled on exactly what it is that you are trying to do here. If you are after (and I could be wrong on this, please let me know if I am) having a different style to the page based upon what entry or section you are in then the latter would be taken care of by correct usage of the template_group->template hierarchy scheme.

Say for instance you wanted a section to show all your news posts you would have something like this :

http://www.example.com/news/

This would contain a weblog tag to spit out all the news entries using whatever parameters you need to limit the output (if you want to limit them that is). Next up let’s say that each of the news items on that page has a read more link and when you go to read more for those news items you wanted a different style to the page then all you would have to do is point the links to say something like :

http://www.example.com/news/detail/news_item_title

and then you would place slightly different styling into the news/detail template to take care of that for you.

If on the other hand you want different styling based on the actual entry you are viewing then this could be handled by having a custom drop-down field in your weblog which holds names such as :

light
dark
bright

You could then place a conditional into the template to place different layout code into the page based upon what that field contains. Something along the lines of :

You could then have templates called light, dark & bright which would refer to the value that you placed into the custom field for each entry.

Don’t know if that is what you are trying to accomplish though as I must admit I was a little confused with the explanation above due to the way you used to do things but please don’t take that as a bad thing it’s just that I have never done that before so didn’t quite understand it

Hope some of that throws some ideas your way though?

Best wishes,

Mark

thanks for all your help
I think Lisa / Andy are on the right lines.
I didn’t realise you can embed and pass through a variable like that… very neat!

I’m actually at home now, I’ll let you know how I get on with it tomorrow.

I don’t think the template_group/template layout would work well for me. The problem is that the root (index) of each template group would have to duplicate the same HTML structure.

i.e.

Using the embeds, I should be able to create one single template which loads a dynamic content chunk (rather than hardcoding it in the root of each template group).

Again thanks for all your help.
Its much appreciated.