Thread

I’m working on building my first large EE site and I love the flexibility it offers, but I’m not sure how to best handle some pages. While looking over the wireframes for the site and planning my template groups and channels, I thought of several ways to handle interior “Landing Pages.” For example, we’ll have a section called Conservation, which will be its own channel with info about several conservation organizations. Organizing the listing and the individual organizations seems easy enough, but I’d like the content for the landing page (/conservation/) to be editable. Situations like this one pop up throughout the site.

I’m not sure how to best handle these pages. It seems like I could use the Pages module, or maybe create a “Landing Pages” channel, or use a snippet, or… I’d like it to make sense to the client, as they’ll be frequently updating these pages.

Any thoughts on the best way to handle these sorts of pages?

Depends on the type of content you want on that page, if it is truly going to be just a single page then Pages module will work as it too will use Channel as storage and dedicated entry. Generally entry/page is easier (for end user) to manage then a snippet. The catch - educate users about URIs.

One thing to consider is URL structure and if you are going show more “conversations” eg. site.com/index.php/conversation/entry-title-goes-here then visitors might expect a listing of conversations (index) on the site.com/index.php/conversation/. You can always use a custom field (checkbox for example) to mark a specific entry and then on the template_group (index page) filter for just that one entry. The catch - no way of preventing users form marking more than one entry to be the ‘landing page’.

At the end…your choice while knowing your users and what makes the most sense to them while adding content.

Well what’s we’re planning on is /conservation/ having a title, an image, a few paragraphs about the clients overall conservation stance, and a listing of the organizations they support on the right. The pages for the individual organizations would be /conservation/a-conservation-organization .

It sounds like the Pages module is the way to go, will that work with the above URL structure though? Can I have a page at /conservation/ if I also have a “conservation” template group?

... Can I have a page at /conservation/ if I also have a “conservation” template group?

You can, just make sure that your Page entry uses that template (it will be seen as ‘conversation/index’)
OR just have them enter the desired Page URI and use some generic(dedicated to pages) template…

You can reuse the template group for other sections as well but then you depend on them entering the correct URI…generally people have easier time selecting given the choices vs. entering URI themselves…again something you need to evaluate knowing the client/user and their ability as content manager.

That’s perfect. Thanks a ton!