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Hello guys,

I’m a beginner with EE so my question may seems a little trivial but I wasn’t able to find help in the user guide or a tutorial for it.

It’s a general question about the templating system :

let’s say I create a “team” page, meaning a page which contains the list of the team member, and for each of the member I want a personal page. This page is not the index page.

So I have the CSS and HTLM for both the “team” page and the “team member profile” page. I also created a channel called “team members” which contains informations about each team member as entries.

So here my questions :

- How do I define different templates for specific entries (“team member profile” page) the and for the “container” of the entries ( the “team” page)
- How do I sort them using a specific field of the entries, for example sort them by “field” ( i.e. creative, management etc…) ?

Once again it may seems trivial, or maybe it is already explained somewhere else but I wasn’t able to find it. So may I ask you to help me or to point me in the right direction ?

Thank you all,
Gautier

P.S. I double posted this topic in Tech Support, I know it’s bad but I think this could be useful for other beginners.

Here’s a good reference:

http://ellislab.com/expressionengine/user-guide/general/urls.html#entries-and-other-things

A very common pattern would be:

yoursite.com/template_group/template/url_title

Applying this directly to your question:

1) yoursite.com/team_members would would render the index template from the team_members template group.

2) yoursite.com/team_members/member/neoginb would would render the member template from the team_members template group; and it would replace any entry tags in that template with data about you.

In both cases—1 and 2 above—you will only actually see data about team members if you use an exp:channel:entries block in the template. In the first case, exp:channel:entries returns one or more team members. In the second case it returns only one team member.

Sorting, along with countless other things you might do to a group of channel entries, is a parameter of the exp:channel:entries block. See here:

http://ellislab.com/expressionengine/user-guide/modules/channel/channel_entries.html#parameters

In your case I think you actually want a combination of the sort and orderby parameters.

Make sense?

Hi,
yes it makes sense.

So is this the “policy” on how to use the templating system ? Using for each group of entries a template group containing an index template and another template to display individual entries ?

I’m asking that as I plan to use EE for future projects and that would be important to streamline the process of devellopement.

Best regards,
Gautier

The method I suggest is only one way to do it. Once you become more familiar with EE’s routing, you may find other creative ways to build templates and template groups that suit your purposes.

There are also some commercial add-ons that completely change how you’d build a site. For example:

http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/structure

http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/navee

http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/taxonomy

Have fun!

As you planning on streamlining development of more ee sites, you’ll want to consider now the effective use of if/else conditionals in your templates to simplify things.  Chris

Thanks, I will look into it.