Thread

Hi all,

I’m currently working on a medium size company website and I choose EE because of its flexibility and my client would like to expand it later with different features like member management, file database, event calendar ...

Before that happens I’m tasked to built a basic site with more or less static pages. I’m heavy struggling how to set up the data structure, how to setup the navigation and ... basically with the whole thing EE works as there are many ways how to approach things. Let me describe what I have so far and what I need.

At the first page the user can choose between 5 different options - a basic webpage with 5 icons on it, nothing more. After he has chosen where he wants to go (Consulting, Solutions, Service,...) he gets to the content area.

Each of this 5 areas has it’s own left handed navigation with a maximum of 2 layers. So for the area “Consulting” I only have 2 options as for the area “Solutions” I need to create this:

Option 1
Option 2
Option 3
  - Sub 1
  - Sub 2
Option 4

As nearly all content pages use the same layout I first tried to use only one template for all content pages. As I read the user guide it confused me a bit as it said that basically every page on the website would be represented by a template which meant in my case that I had to duplicate the same template. That didn’t make sense to me as I guess this is not the way a CMS works.

What I have so far:

I set up a content template and I tried to set up the data structure. What I don’t understand yet is the way how channels and categories work. I need to built this:

[ Consulting ]
- Option 1
- Option 2

[ Services ]
- Option 1
- Option 2
- Option 3

[ Solutions ]
- Option 1
- Option 2
- Option 3
  - Sub 1
  - Sub 2
- Option 4

Each area is separated from each other and can be accessed by a top navigation bar.

What I’m asking myself is if I set up the 5 areas ( Consulting, Services, Solutions,...) as Channels or as Categories (and is it better to create a Template Group for each area)?

I’m a bit confused when to use channels, categories and template groups. i need to make it as logical as possible so that my client can easily update and expand the site by his own. I also thought about using Structure or NavEE but as far as I understand Structure limits me to only use pages (I may be wrong) and to be honest - I didn’t get how NavEE works and espacially how it can be linked to my channel entries.

I have a lot of other question - but if someone could lighten me up here that would be very nice.

Many thanks in advance for your help and sorry for that long post.

Cheers
Duffy

Duffy - hopefully we can help.

I normally setup my sites to have 1 channel/weblog per main navigation item. For example, site I’m building now has home, about us, services, industries and downloads on the main nav.

Then for each sub item (where applicable, home won’t have subs) these are entries within that channel. Mike B has some excellent tutorials (1.6x granted) http://www.train-ee.com/courseware/free-tutorials/ that would be a great starting point for you.

Hi Duffy.

I too have built sites using Mike Boyink’s v. useful techniques. Well worth checking them out.

Other people have used categories to control the navigation, but I have to say I’ve never actually done this myself.

Also, I’ve used Structure on a client site as well.  They liked it a lot I have to say.  You aren’t completely restricted to using pages.  You can set up pages easily such as you’ve described. And then if you have a news section for example, you would create a ‘news’ page in structure but this time tell it that it is a listings page.  If you then create a channel for ‘news’ and a template to display the news listings and individual articles you’re on the way. It is a bit different to normal EE practise though.  It’s a bit tricky to explain in text. I think they used to have a video on their site which made a lot more sense that I am probably making right now…