Thread

My navigation looks like the following.

About
    - History
    - Goals
    - Sponsors

Our Work
    - International
    - Books
        - Children
        - Animals
        - Earth
    - Social
    - Sport

I’m using NAVEE for managing the front end of a 3 level nested navigation but deciding on a back-end channel strategy that makes sense for the client is tough.

Some of the top level sections could be channels, but a lot of the child entries cannot be entries of that channel as they require different channel field groups, but as soon as I start placing sections in their own channels, so that I can use custom channel field groups, I start loosing structure/organization, and the whole back-end becomes a mess with some child sections being multiple entries of a channel and other child entries of the same top level section being a channel on their own.

Also some sections like books require a (general page channel field group) channel entry to manage the books landing page and multiple (books channel field group) channel entries for book data. Those 2 entries cannot be nested under the same channel, never mind being nested under our work…?

How does one structure the backend so that the client does not become confused?

Hi nomoretables,

How to best structure an ExpressionEngine site is an old question, with many answers. Ask a dozen EE devs and you will likely get a dozen different answers 😉

My suggestion would be to set your “top level” as template groups, with your landing pages as the index template in those groups. For instance, you have the “about” group, and in that you have templates for history, goals and sponsors. Your URLs would be /about/history/ and so on. You could also choose to set these up as Pages using the Pages Module. With that, you could have a Pages channel that hold the content. This will really be determined by how dynamic these sections need to be.

Also some sections like books require a (general page channel field group) channel entry to manage the books landing page and multiple (books channel field group) channel entries for book data. Those 2 entries cannot be nested under the same channel, never mind being nested under our work…?

You can mix and match the use of Pages and typical channel entries. Having your Books landing be a Page, while having the various subjects as channel entries in another channel. You could separate your subject with categories as well.

These are just some ideas on my part. Since the overall topic isn’t related to any technical issues you are having with ExpressionEngine, I’m going to have to move this thread over to Community Help. You’ll get a much broader audience and it will keep the discussion going.

Cheers!