Thread

Greetings,

I’m a little stumped; maybe someone has an idea for me?

I’m doing a site where one of the sections will be a page with a main topic, and on that page will be (for now) three lengthy articles, each with a title, and then sections with subtitles.

I first thought of just doing a regular entries, with the title of the article being the title of the entry, and then dumping all the text in and hand-coding all of the subtitles. But that didn’t seem the right way to go.

Then I thought I would make all the subtitle sections individual entries and use a category to specify the title of the article, but that seems a little problematic too….

Not sure if I’m being clear here so let me simplify: what’s the strategy you use if you need to post long articles that have several subsections each with a subtitle?

...what’s the strategy you use if you need to post long articles that have several subsections each with a subtitle?

EE is so flexible that there’s probably not a ‘best practice’ for long articles, or multipage articles.

You can create additional fields for additional pages (paginating to each one), even create fields for subsections and subtitles, though that’s less common. H2 and H3, etc., works just fine within the content. Multiple pages for very long articles may be better off using multiple fields (a field for each page, to break the long article into smaller sections).

Thanks so much for your input!

I use this excellent pagination plugin.
http://www.vayadesign.net/blog/comments/pagination-plugin-expression-engine/

Just type {paginate} in your textarea wherever you wish to split your article.

Some of mine are very long and I split them into 10+ pages but with only one entry.
Kudos Vaya Design.

John

I use this excellent pagination plugin.
http://www.vayadesign.net/blog/comments/pagination-plugin-expression-engine/

Just type {paginate} in your textarea wherever you wish to split your article.

Do you type {paginate} or {pagebreak}?

Is this available for EE 2.0?

This plug-in looks interesting….

Although the issue I was having was not so much about long articles (even though that’s what I said!), but now that I think about it, I think the issue was how to deal easily with articles with a hierarchy that goes a few levels down. In other words, there would be a name for the page, then a handful of sections that would each have articles in them, and the articles would have subheadings. Originally, I was thinking of using categories for the sections on the page, but somehow that struck me as not maintaining the hierarchy, in a strict sense. Of course, I’m for what works best, but I was just trying to find my way around this issue.

I think the issue was how to deal easily with articles with a hierarchy that goes a few levels down. In other words, there would be a name for the page, then a handful of sections that would each have articles in them, and the articles would have subheadings.

Obviously, there are some limitations (point of diminishing returns**) with digital content vs. printed content. It makes sense that an article, in the traditional sense, be assigned to a specific category. Sections of the article can be divided into sub-headings, of course, and it seems logical that a longer article can be further divided into paginated pages. Then, there’s the option of mix and match. Each sub-heading becomes a separate page, and so on.

The problem really enters into the realm of diminishing returns, which means lots of extra effort in layout and design and implementation for what could amount to very little gain.

It’s 2010 already. Browser users know how to scroll down below the fold (legacy term from print media). A 20,000 word document is in the extreme minority for most sites and readers. Creating 20 pages (20 fields in EE) has positives and negatives, so a simple and straightforward way to paginate the occasional extra long article is worthy. I like the plugin above for just that purpose.

Do you type {paginate} or {pagebreak}?

It was late and from memory but I it’s {pagebreak}

I don’t think it’s available for EE2 not sure it will be done by the author.

It is something I will look at porting myself when I start to use EE2 in anger. (if the author doesn’t)

An approach I enjoy is to treat “chunkable” subsections as individual entries and aggregate complete articles at display-time. I set up a main article to contain the assembly as a Page via the Pages module. Significant subsections appear as individual entries in relevant channels, but the site doesn’t serve them on their own Detail pages.

Rather, they’re selected into the main article (or sidebar displays) using embedded templates that serve a custom Playa field for “related entries” via the CP. This gives the client complete control over what’s in, what’s out, and which order subsections should appear. HTML in the Page templates assign H2, H3 etc. to subsection entry {titles}.

You can see an example here: http://www.e2naturalenergy.com/index.php/geothermal/

That page is a composite of three entries, any of which could stand alone as topical content if that ever became part of the SEO plan for this site.