I’m currently struggling with a design for a site which has the following requirements:
- Homepage has a Flash animation which loads content into several panes based on an EE-provided XML file
- Three different sections around the site have three different footers (all markup the same, but articles from different sections shown, etc.)
The original developers simply hard-coded everything into the templates. Now the site owners have contracted with us to rebuild the site’s backend to allow them to edit the items in the homepage Flash and various footers, and I’ve a dilemma: how do I represent these one-off content items in the backend? I could create a unique weblog for each one that has different field needs, but those weblogs would each only have one or two entries. This seems wasteful and needlessly complex. I could create a single weblog and corresponding entry with a long list of fields for managing these dynamic portions of the site, but this seems difficult for the end user to administrate.
How do you get around this kind of problem? I’m curious to see how other EE users handle one-off areas of their sites.