Thread

We are building our first ExpressionEngine site for a client, and I’m having some trouble wrapping my mind around some of the concepts of how ExpressionEngine manages content.

My biggest problem is not being able to define what I’m trying to do, so I thought I’d bring it to the forums for help. The entire site we are doing is very simple and doesn’t have any dynamic content. It’s basically 8 pages including two forms. Not too bad. I’ve begun splitting the structure of the site up and organizing it into embed-able templates.

I’m trying to make it as easy as possible to find and change content on the site if they need to, so I started putting each “page” in a separate channel and template file. I then went ahead and created custom fields for each channel. Some of the fields were common on every page, like meta information and extra head information. Other things, like sidebars and image descriptions were unique to a single page. Of course, with custom fields, I can only have one “meta_description” across all channels.

My question is this: is there a way to create custom *global* fields for all channels, like the existing {author} and {title} tags?

Edit: After posting this, I realized I may be approaching this with the wrong strategy. If anyone can suggest a better way to achieve the same result, I would greatly appreciate it.

Do each of your pages have multiple pieces of content?  Or would a single body field work for all of your pages?

For static pages, we generally make a channel called “static” or “general”, give it a body field and then use that for our static pages, hardcoding the entry ID or url_title into the channel:entries tag for the template for that page.

You can make it more dynamic than that, but if it’s only 4 pages, it’s probably not worth the trouble.

If each of your pages has a really customized content structure, you may need something more involved.  I’d still use a single weblog with a single field, but plug multiple entries into each template.  You can make editing easier for your client by adding a front-end edit link to each content block:

{if member_group == "1"}<span class="edit_link"> <a href="http://www.yoururl.com/yoursystemfolder.php?S=0&D=cp&C=content_publish&M=entry_form&channel_id={channel_id}&entry_id={entry_id}" target="new" rel="noopener">[edit]</a></span>{/if}

Take a look at this basic tutorial for basic content management in EE.

@ruraldreams:
You make a good point. I may be overcomplicating it. And thanks for the front-end editing link. That’ll prove useful.

@boyink!:
I’ve found your article before but the concept of weblog was out of date. from 1.x to 2.x, did they just change the name to Channels, or did they add any functionality?

There is a link in the sidebar to a page that explains the code differences - but the fundamentals are the same.

Groovy, thanks.

Just wanted to thank you guys again. Today was much more productive with your help.