Thread

This is a bit of an EE noob question. My client has a multi-level services section and I’m trying to decide if it’s better to use a weblog (with categories for each subsection) or the Pages module. Here is the basic structure:

- Services Index
    - Service Type 1 Index
      - individual service detail page
      - individual service detail page
      - individual service detail page
    - Service Type 2 Index
      - individual service detail page
      - individual service detail page
      - individual service detail page
    - Service Type 3 Index
      - individual service detail page
      - individual service detail page
      - individual service detail page

The Services Index and each Service Type Index page show a thumbnail & description for each subpage (i.e., the Services Index shows three thumbnails & descriptions, one for each Service Type; Service Type 1 also shows three thumbnails & descriptions, one for each service detail page associated with it). As you might guess, the thumbnails link to the associated page.

Right now I can see this both ways. Using the Pages module, which I have started to do, it’s easy to set up each page and create a custom URI that fits the structure above. Each page of thumbnails would probably need to be a separate template, or just a manually edited page. There’s less EE code to deal with, so the initial setup may be faster. On the other hand, this will require manual addition of new services (which probably won’t happen often).

Using a weblog for a section that isn’t updated frequently seems like overkill, but the advantages as I see them would be: dynamic updating of the index pages; and easy addition of new services, with a drop-down menu to choose the Service Type (an EE category).

Are there other considerations I’m missing here? Any advice is welcome.

I’d probably go with a weblog with categories:

Weblog for “Services”
Categories for “types”
Weblog entries for individual services

Using a weblog in this way certainly isn’t overkill 😊

The only PITA about using categories though is the lack of categories image upload. They need to be FTPd :down:

@Steven: You mean uploads that are tied to a category? You’d just set up a separate destination directory, wouldn’t you?

@Rob: Thanks, I think that’s what I’ll do.

No - I meant if your categories require images, they can’t be uploaded from within the control panel, they need to be uploaded via FTP which can confuse a lot of clients.

I can see why… I’m not new to web development and *I’m* confused. 😉 I’ll have to try this out myself to see what you mean.