Thread

Hello all, Im excited to be working my first EE project!

I have read through most of the documentation and I think I have a good idea of how this works but I would like to be clear before getting started on the project.

Basically I will be building a site which is 80% static marketing pages where I will want to have complete control over the layout, consisting of things like google maps location locator, product marketing pages, special offer landing pages etc…

Then the other 20% will be dynamic content such as blog, news articles, etc…

If I understand correctly, I simply create a “template” for each page whether it be static or dynamic and thats about it right?

So really, the only difference between the static pages and the dynamic pages will be the EE Tags used to connect and retrieve data from the database right?

Or maybe the better approach is to simply create the 80% static portion of the site as standard ole hand-coded html documents and then install EE in a sub-directory to handle all of the dynamic pages?

You could do that but then you couldn’t easily edit them from EE 😊

For content that doesn’t change very much (aka static pages) I normally create one or two Channels and store page content as normal entries. That way you can still manipulate that content as and when you need to.

For templates, you could either just use a single template for those pages or use different templates if you wanted different styles/layouts etc.

There’s always the “Pages” module if you need it.

Just to throw another option at you Stefan1, I tend to treat “static” pages exactly the same was as a blog, effective, but using the limit parameter set to “1” each post can be treated as a single page right from the start (as opposed to within a blog wherein you would have a list view which links to the single entry view).  And I create a channel for each section that will be treated this way.  So the “about” section would be a channel with multiple entries, each entry representing a page.  I’ve avoided the Pages module do handle this for two reasons:

1) I don’t necessarily trust the client to handle the url structure correctly so I’d rather control it for them; and
2) this way the editing process is extremely familiar because it’s the same as list-style content too.

For me, this has worked well and kept the client out of trouble.  And then of course for the menu within the about section, you just use the titles (or you create a “menu title” custom field if the client would prefer to handle the title within the menu differently than the actual title on the page).

I can’t lay claim to the idea - I got it from Mike Boyink who demonstrated this approach in one of his screencasts - I thought it was a great idea and have been using it ever since.

Hope that helps you.

Ok! Great ideas guys and quick replies too.
Seems like a nice community so far…

I am still feeling my way around EE so this will probably be touch n go but thanks for the help so far!