Thread

Greetings - I’ve just purchased a licence for SchoolHistory.co.uk but I’m posting in this forum rather ahead of time.  I haven’t even got ExpressionEngine installed and working yet.

I’m a secondary school teacher from Cambridgeshire in the UK.  I have run the SchoolHistory.co.uk website for just over 10 years.  It is an entirely free resource to help students and teachers in their study of history.

However, a site I was once very proud of has now become dated.  The main Flash-based navigation is six + years out of date and the whole thing needs a major freshen up.  The site forums, both for teachers and students are still very popular and active though.

What I hope to do with ExpressionEngine is keep the parts that are working well - i.e. the forums, but then overhaul the main design of the site, especially removing the Flash-based navigation.

I shall update this topic as I (hopefully) make progress 😊

I’ve started learning how to use ExpressionEngine, mainly through the ‘ExpressionEngine 2 - A Quick-Start Guide’ book.

As a test, I’ve recreated the basic template that I use for my current design - see http://212.113.144.58/

However, I’m a bit confused between best practice for templates.  Ideally I’d like to have a core structure that uses the name header & navigation - then allows me to customise the main contents - and then ends with the same footer.

Clearly I need to experiment a bit more, but I’m currently confused between categories, articles, pages, static pages and channels.

Any suggestions for best practice with a basic site?  Most of my content will be largely static - pages of links, pages of resources but then I would like to bring in an RSS feed and other dynamic content too.

Thanks.

Edit: I’ve since found http://ellislab.com/expressionengine/user-guide/overview/summary.html which offers a good summary but I’m still not quite sure of the best methods to use.