I’ really new to EE, haven’t done a single project with EE, but now I’m planning one.
It’s a site for a non-profit organization and I would like some help on how to divide the site.
The site is actually a redesign of http://www.innerwheel.hr/

The main structure will be something like this:
- Home (some into text with a couple of photos)
- About Us (like the above)
- Events (a list of events that are organized by the org, blog articles)
- Committee (just a list of the member of the committee, just text and photos maybe)
- Archive (1 article per year with an overview of the activities)
- Contact (some contact info, and a contact form)

Now for the more demanding part. There’s also a section called Clubs, and it contains a list of all clubs, but every club also needs to have some sub sections. Every club needs the following section:

- News (blog)
- Photo Galleries (gallery module is ok i guess)
- Members (a table with a list of all the members in the club)

One more thing is that every club should only have access to the sections of its own club. Is this possible in EE?

I know it’s a lot to ask but I would really appreciate the all the help I can get.

Thanks.

strija,

Your main structure will be straighforward.

For the club section, how many clubs will you have?

Need more info about the Club section.

However, based on your description, I’d do a weblog for the basic site, with templates/pages for About, Events, Committee, etc. And a separate weblog for Club, with categories for Club sections (depending on complexity and number of Clubs). There’s no hard and fast rule for setting up and organizing a site, but the general idea is to make it easy for users AND easy for administration and maintenance.

First let me apologize in advance for not knowing Croatian.

Is it your desire to permit only club members to view there club section and be excluded from all other club sections?  Or is it your desire to treat them more as different sections within the site like your reference site does.

I see at your reference site, there are 12 clubs. Do you anticipate haveing about the same number of clubs?  More?  There are two ways to segregate the clubs and everything to do with a particular club.  That is to either create a separate weblog for each or create categories for each.

I personally find it easier to keep it straight in my head if I use separate weblogs.  This way you have the ability to create categories to organize information within a club section.  Also if you are going to delegate the responsibility to maintain the information within a club section you could then use the members module to assign persons to be able to maintain just that weblog.  Secondly, if you did want to actually exclude non club members from all but their club’s section, you once again can best control that with the members module.

Otherwise, the site seems like it would be a piece of cake to do.  There is not much really to InnerWheel.hr

Hope this is helpful.

I concur with Herb.  If the number of clubs will remain relatively small, setting up a weblog for each club is a good approach.  They can use the same field group and perhaps the same category group, for simplicity’s sake.

Thanks guys for all the help.
So if I understad correctly the main structure is best done with templates in 1 weblog? Because I kinda thought that every section of the site shoud be 1 weblog.
The club part is clear I guess, 1 weblog per club. Just 1 question, how do I divide the club sections (news, galleries, members)? With categories?

Regarding the permissions, everyone will be able to browse the site, so everything is public. I just need to create 1 admin user that has access to all the sections in the backend, and also 1 for each club, that can only change the articles in the clubs weblog.
The number of clubs is 12 for now, but it may change in the future.

Once again thanks for all the replies.

strija - 29 November 2008 06:54 AM

The club part is clear I guess, 1 weblog per club. Just 1 question, how do I divide the club sections (news, galleries, members)? With categories?

For each club you have a news, gallery, and members. 

  News: Create one weblog for each club.  This gives you the ability to create one category group news should you need them in the future and assign it to each club weblog.

  Gallery:
        Create a gallery for each club. The gallery doesn’t do categories by group/category.  It just does categories.  This will require you to create categories for each gallery if you want to use categories. 
  -or-
        If no categories will be required with the gallery, you may want to just create one gallery and make the a category for each club.

  Members:  This is best handled by the members module.  You can add custom fields to the members profile to include the information that would be extracted into the table for Članice [members] by creating member groups for each club and assigning them to such.

Ok, thanx a lot.
I don’t think I’m gonna use the members module for Members, because there to much members. I think ist just goind to be a simple table, so the admin can edit in a simple way. But I’ll have to se about that exactly.

This just leaves the question why is it better to you use templates for other sections of the site (about, events, committee…) instead of weblogs.

I’m sorry if the questions sound silly, it’s just that I’ve been using other system and they all have a different logic.

How many members? The EE Forums has almost 65,000 members and seems to handle it all quite well.

I think it’s about 300 members, but quantity is not the reason I wont do this with the members module. The thing is that 99% of the members wont ever login. The members section is only there so they have a list of their members. I only need 1 admin, and 1 editor for each club.
Maybe I’ll end up doing it with the module, can you just tell is it possible to divide the users in club, so that on the member list of a club are only members of that club. I presume this can be done with member groups.

Now if just someone can help me with that final problem
“This just leaves the question why is it better to you use templates for other sections of the site (about, events, committee…) instead of weblogs.”

“This just leaves the question why is it better to you use templates for other sections of the site (about, events, committee…) instead of weblogs.”

The reason for this is less calls to the database.  If you have a couple static pages that you will maybe update once or twice a year, just put them in templates.  Just use the Embed tags to include the header, menu, sidebar, footer, etc.  Basically anything that is the same throughout the whole site so if you need to make a change you only have to do it in one spot as apposed to every page.

Hopefully I didn’t confuse you heh.

Don’t worry about confusing me I understand the basic concept how EE works, I just want to know about some best practices.

About the template thing. The problem is that the client wants control over all the content, and I don’t think they would want to edit the templates. So I guess I need a weblog for each section, and 1 article in each weblog.
Or do you have a better suggestion?

In that case I would use the Pages Module.  That way you only have to use one weblog and one template for as many static pages as you want.  You can also specify the exact URL you want for each of them.  To get started look at the documentation here: http://expressionengine.com/docs/modules/pages/index.html
Also look at the quick start wiki entry here: http://expressionengine.com/wiki/Pages_Quick_Start_Guide/

That way they only have to edit a weblog entry to change any of the pages .  If you don’t mind paying 5 bucks for a screencast, I would recommend looking at episode #5 as it explains this module in complete detail and also gives you tips for the end user as well: http://www.pragprog.com/screencasts/v-riexp/building-a-dynamic-website-with-expressionengine

Thnaks a lot. This Pages module seems like exactly what I need. It’s just too bad it isn’t included in the Core version. I’ll just have to wait for the funds to buy a license.

The screencasts also look like they are well worth the money