I recently made the decision to move from EE from Wordpress.

Here is an image of the website: my web design

I am confused on how EE handles templates. In my website I have 2 repeating “templates” that are included on the page no matter what and they are the header and footer. Basially I want to know the best way to do this.

Here is how I am doing it currently (Lets take the “About page” for example):
I have made a new template group for the “About page” and called it “about”
In that template group I have the index.php which includes the following:

If I continue doing it this way I have to manually embed the header and footer in every template. I am sure this must be an easier way to do this - maybe like some sort of parent template?

Any ideas?

This will depend on how you structure the site and how many actual “pages” you have. For example, the home page (Index) is a page which consists of a template, probably with other templates embedded into it (header, footer, body, right column, etc.). That’s rather standard.

You also need a page/template for Entries, maybe one for Archives, another for Categories, and so on. Each is a similar page in that the Header, Footer and other elements may be the same, probably even in the same location on the page. For each of those Page templates you’ll need to embed {embed=“template_group/template_name”} the appropriate template.

While that may sound like a lot of effort it’s really nothing more than copy and paste for each of those site pages, not for each page where there’s an entry. Most EE sites I manage have only five or six “pages” each of which has embeds to hold various page elements.

everpixel,
One of the first problems i see is that one of your embeds is not closed properly.

Second each template group is a “directory”. For example you design your about page the way its supposed to look. Inside of the index template inside of the about template group could look like this:

So if you wanted the site to look like site.com/about you would add a new template group called about. When you are creating a template group you can copy another template group to save yourself some time. It might be the easier for you to create a “template” template group so you can choose this to copy from when creating a new group.

everpixel, if some of those embedded templates will always appear together, you can combine them into one template and embed it. But, otherwise, you’re going about this the right way, as far as I can tell.

Thanks for the prompt help guys, I appreciated it.

You all solved my issue.

On thing I like to do with headers, footers, etc. is make them “invisible” templates.

I make a template group called “embeds” and anything I put it this group I state with a dot. “.sidebar, .footer, .etc.”). This prevents people from navigating directly to that template.

Not that it would matter a whole lot in most cases, but you can get weirdness if someone brought up just your sidebar or whatever. It’s just prettier.

The bestest thing about using embeds is that they are so easy to change. Add one thing in on your .header file, and it’s instantly updated sitewide.

I went a bit embed crazy on my first site once I figure out how to do this. I then figured out a lot of the things I made as embeds could be their own weblog. For example, I have a “Currently Reading” element on one of my sidebars. This is an embed that I manually update, but in retrospect it would have been better off being a weblog (restricted to current entry). This way I could maintain a history of the books I’ve read, and update from within the CP rather than the flat file. Oh well, live and learn.