Thread

Hi.
I working my way through EE, which seems to be powerful but not as user friendly as I would want (or not as much as you guys might think it is 😉 )
Anyway - I still struggle to understand the basic, so bear with me.
So - I’m working with channels, this is where the meet is. In order to make a channel I need to:
1. Create a Custom Field Group
2. Create Custom Fields
3. Create or assign a Category
4. Create or assign a Status Group
5. Create a Channel and Assign Groups

I wonder:
A. What is the purpose of Custom Field Group? Why I need to have them? Can you give me a couple of example in their context of a way to utilize them? It would seems to me I’d rather have the option to take any Custom Field I want to my channel.

B.  Basically, the same questions about categories. What are categories and why I have to have them? Can you give me a couple of example of how to use them? Where Category Group can become useful?

C. Status Group - that seems to be like a property you assign to an item or group of item, to toggle open or close. if I do understand it correctly, why would I create more of them? Why not have a boolean property to the items themself?

D. Why can’t I assign, for instance, a couple of groups to a channel along side few stand-alone Custom Fields?

E. You have a nice diagram explaining the flow from Channel to Template (http://ellislab.com/expressionengine/user-guide/overview/summary.html). I think having one explaining the flow leading to channels might prove useful.

A. Custom field groups
An example may be where you have two Channels, both with totally different sets of data, eg

Channel 1 is for articles, so might have custom fields for Summary and Story, Video and Image
Channel 2 is for Products, so might have custom fields for Description, Price, Thumbnail image, Main image, large image, Product specifications

There’s nothing stopping you using one custom field group for your whole site and use EE2’s ability to define what fields you want available on a per Channel basis. Sometimes this may be practical, other time not so much.

B. Categories
Can be used to literally categorise any sort of entry information. Normally these can be generic categories such as those you might find on a blog, but you could use them for a number of other purposes, eg

- define which entries appear in a navigation list
- define locations, you might have one group for city names, and another category group for population ranges
- allocate other variables so you can use the categories mechanism to help filter or sort any information, eg products by price, products by colour, products by size

C. Statuses
You could create additional Statuses to control output of any information, “Open” and “Closed” are obvious but you could add generic ones such as “Featured” or “Editors pick”. I’ve used statuses to control items in navigation lists and even outputting different layouts.

D. If you need a lot of fields for any Channel then they need to go in a single group. This is where having a single group that can cater for most needs comes in handy.

Thanks for your fast reply!
I need some time to process this, to see if this make sense to me.
One thing that your reply does not seem to address, though, is why all those different “grouping techniques” (for lack of a better words) are mandatory?

All of the techniques are available because the system is designed to be flexible. Technically none of those are mandatory - you could build a page entirely out of templates and never touch a channel entry, if you wanted to 😊

It took me a long time to wrap my head around what’s going on, and I’m still learning, but, once you get the hang of it, it’s pretty slick. 

Bluedreamer pretty much hit the nail on the head with regards to how the various organizational structures work; we’re using all of those features in similar ways on our projects.

Nick, Thanks.
Building out of a template would be counter-productive, the whole point of EE for me is that I can use my own HTML/CSS.
But why I got to have a category in my channel, for instance, if I don’t intend to use it? On the other hand, why wouldn’t it be that some entries in my channel are from one category, and some belong to another? I mean - I have the structure of a channel if I want a way to address all the entries in the channel?

Building out of a template would be counter-productive, the whole point of EE for me is that I can use my own HTML/CSS.

Template as in “the foundation of what every EE page is served with,” not as in “a bunch of code someone else already wrote.”  See: Template Documentation

But why I got to have a category in my channel, for instance, if I don’t intend to use it?

You don’t.  Categories are optional.

On the other hand, why wouldn’t it be that some entries in my channel are from one category, and some belong to another? I mean - I have the structure of a channel if I want a way to address all the entries in the channel?

Imagine you have a channel called “Friends,” which contained the following fields:
- First Name
- Last Name
- Biography
- Notes

You could setup the following categories to use with your Friends channel:
- Gender
—Male
—Female
- Occupation
—Doctor
—Lawyer
—Web Developer

With such a setup, you could easily display all of your friends who are, for example, female web developers.

If you haven’t already, I highly recommend working through the getting started portion of the documentation.

Nick (your name is Nick, I hope?)
I’ll need to process this and I can’t think straight right now.
I just wanted to say that:
A. I worked through getting started. But the tutorial isn’t really explaining anything, it’s just going through the steps (“click here, write there”). That’s why I thought categories are mandatory - it doesn’t say that they don’t, so I assumed it is a necessary step. Are there more steps in there that are optional?
B. I read quite a bit of the other docs, and it rarely contain explanations.
C. Thanks again, my man

Yep, my name is Nick 😉

Mike Boyink does a lot of EE training stuff, and while I haven’t worked through this tutorial myself, I suspect it’d be pretty helpful to you: Building a Small Business Site

Well - at least I got your name right 😛
Thanks!

gString (I bet that’s not your real name!)

Did you ever play with “Lego” when you were a kid (or some kind of building block toy)? I liken EE to “Lego”, in that it gave you a load of bricks of different shapes, colours and sizes, plus things like wheels, doors, motors and lots of other stuff that slotted together to make whatever you wanted, a car, a spaceship, a house, the Millenium Falcon, whatever you could dream up. EE’s a bit like Lego, it gives you a bunch of building bricks (eg Channels, Categories, Statuses, Tags, Templates) to build whatever you want with. You could build a Lego house but not use the Lego wheels because houses don’t need wheels, similarly you could build an EE site but not use, say, categories if you didn’t need them.

Does that make sense?

Are you saying I’m not supposed to be playing with Lego any more?  🐛
OK - maybe it’s all a big misunderstanding.
I went through the tutorial, which took me through all those steps without explaining. Do this and then do that. In the end I got data on a web-page. I concluded (rather logically, I think) that you need to go through all those steps to get you’re data on a template. From your answers I understand this is not so.
I’m relieved, but now I guess the next question would be: what are the minimum steps needed to get data on a web page?

Oh - and the name’s Gush.
It should have been g:String - too many hours with AS3

Are you saying I’m not supposed to be playing with Lego any more?  🐛

he he - if James May can still play with it the it’s ok - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1PxRt_MsgI&feature=related

The minimum you really need is one Channel and one Custom field group.

1. Create a Custom Field Group, click Add/Edit custom fields, and add one field to test with, type Textarea, give it a fieldname of “story”, leave all other settings as they are and Save/Update.

2. Create a Channel, give it a “Full channel name” of “My first channel” and “Channel name” called “mychannel” (one word, no spaces you’ll need this later)
Under “Channel group assignments”...
- select Status group “Statuses” (you don’t have to use but need to assign one)
- select the Field group you just created
- Click Save/Update

3. If you haven’t done create a Template group, it will automtically create an “index” template for you, make sure you check “Make the index template in this group your site’s home page?”.

Open that template for editing and add in a Channel entry tag:

{exp:channel:entries channel="mychannel"}
<h1>{title}</h1>
{story}
{/exp:channel:entries}

Now click Publish > My First channel
Add a title
Add some blurb in the Story field and save

Now visit your sites home page and you should see the entry you just added?

Thanks again, mate.
I actually already done similar steps, but I understand now I can drop the categories stage if I want to. The “Custom Field Group” and “Status Group” are mandatory, I reckon, although you can use existing one. Of course, “Custom Field” and “Channel” are mandatory too, but it’s clear why.
I still didn’t figure out is:
A. How to make good use of “Category”, “Custom Field Group” and “Status Group”. You mention some uses before, but I couldn’t decipher them 😛
I know that’s a lot to ask, but maybe you can try and give more detailed explanations? I don’t need the code - I probably can figure out this myself. What I need is to get the picture right. As I said, I think that’s a lot to ask, so please don’t feel oblige.

B. This is mare curiosity - I don’t HAVE to understand this for my work. But still: Any idea why “Custom Field Group” and “Status Group” are mandatory? Needless to say I quite ignorant, but it looks like a design flaw to me. Not having those features, just having them mandatory.
Again, it isn’t something I must know, unlike my previous question. But I am curious, having dealt with with work-flow and UI design.

Anyway - you’ve done more then your fair share of hand-holding, so feel free to bail out.

Categories are used to split content by type, eg in a web shop you might find categories for different type sof products. Another example, if you run a news site you might want to categorise your news stories, eg Politics, Sport, Tech, Education, and so on.

A custom field group is a set of input fields for a particular type of content. For example, for “articles” you may have fields Title, Summary and Full Story fields, but for say “products” you may need a different set of fields, eg Title, Description and Price.

Statuses - by default you have “Open” and “Closed”, if the status is set to Open the entry will show on the site, if set to Closed it won’t show. You might want to add another status eg “Featured”, that wopuld allow you to show just items that have that status.

Requiring at least one Custom fields group and one Status group, well they are the foundations of any CMS, all CMS’s have them even if they are called something different.