Thread

I’ve been going through some tutorials and doing lots of reading on how EE works but some things I dont fully understand yet.

1. To create the pages I have so far on my site, I created Template Groups and named them the page names that I want.  Is this the correct way to create pages?

2. When I browse to site.com/index.php/pagename it works fine since there is a template group, but it also works for pages without a template group such as site.com/index.php/aofsjoiasfiojsaf. Is this normal?

3. Is NavEE, Structure, and Taxonomy the only way to create subpages? Is there a way I can do it manually so my url will be site.com/index,php/parentpage/subpage?

4. My homepage is pretty much a summary of a whole bunch of other pages like the blog section, videos, etc.. If for example I wanted to grab 4 of the video entries with:

{exp:channel:entries channel="video" limit="4"}

    video+video title+video description summary

{/exp:channel:entries}

How do I format video+video title+video description summary with divs to display it the exact way i want to?

Instead of naming templates as “pages” you’re better off naming them by “function”. For instance I might create a template group called /news and inside that have an “index” template and a “story” template. The index template would then be used to list news items summaries, and the story template would be used to display any full news story. This would give you a URL such as site.com/index.php/news/story/hampsters-ate-my-dinner

If I create an “about” section on a site that would usually be a set of individual pages. What I do is create a Channel called “about”, then create a custom field group for my about page content. For templates I’d create one template group called “about” with just the index template which is used to display any about page.

Then in the /about/index template I call one entry at a time, plus a list of all about entries for navigation:

{!-- output single entry/page --}
{exp:channel:entries channel="about" limit="1"}
<h1>{title}</h1>
{page_content}
{/exp:channel:entries}

{!-- output list of page for navigation --}
<ul>
{exp:channel:entries channel="about" dynamic="no"}
<li><a href="http://{url_title_path=about/index}">{title}</a></li>
{/exp:channel:entries}
</ul>

That would ouput URL’s such as
site.com/index.php/about/history
site.com/index.php/about/who-we-are
site.com/index.php/about/contacts

Does that help?

If you’re still thinking in terms of pages you haven’t fully grokked EE yet.

As Rob suggests one template can be used to generate multiple “pages” as they come out in the browser.

I’d suggest seeking out some tutorials - mine or others - to learn the basics of EE before getting too far down a road that will be hard to dig out from.

nyc, from my own experience, I would recommend going through Michael Boyink’s “Building a Small Business Website” tutorial (free on trainee.com) top to bottom, ideally building your own copy of the same site as you do.  That one process was an invaluable part of my EE education, which continues to this day as EE evolves and I get more creative with the powerful tools it makes available to the designer/developer community.  That tutorial walks through concrete examples of many of the core elements you would need to learn to wrap your head around EE.  And with the foundational understanding, all the other great resources available from the training side of the community - Mijingo, Create-ee and others - will make a lot more sense to you and help further your EE-ducation.

All the best!

nyc, from my own experience, I would recommend going through Michael Boyink’s “Building a Small Business Website” tutorial (free on trainee.com) top to bottom, ideally building your own copy of the same site as you do.  That one process was an invaluable part of my EE education, which continues to this day as EE evolves and I get more creative with the powerful tools it makes available to the designer/developer community.  That tutorial walks through concrete examples of many of the core elements you would need to learn to wrap your head around EE.  And with the foundational understanding, all the other great resources available from the training side of the community - Mijingo, Create-ee and others - will make a lot more sense to you and help further your EE-ducation.

All the best!

Thank you 😊 I think I will go through that tonight after I install a 2nd EE installation! after taking a look, it does seem like a great tutorial to learn the basics from