Hi all
This is a basic question, which probably says a lot about my experience with ExpressionEngine. Hoping you can help anyway. I’m developing a site at the moment and really need some advice on how to configure/structure the channels and entries in EE.
Conceptually the site is split into 6 main sections with 3 tiers of pages below this. Navigation is done with a main horizontal menu (showing the 6 sections) and tiered drop downs. The menu within each section will be repeated on almost all pages as a set of nested unordered lists.
The majority of the content is effectively static pages, all using the same layout. There are a few exceptions such as “News”, “Events” and “Announcements” which lend themselves to EE’s classic multi-entry/single entry way of working and these will be using a modified layout.
Menus will be managed using NavEE because the main menu needs to contain multiple links in the tiered drop downs (in different main sections) to the same page/entry.
So I’m asking myself, if I enable the Pages module we’ll be able to reuse the same template for all the “static” pages in the site and create a URL structure which will be identical to the concept of main section > tier 1 page > tier 2 page > tier 3 page. But with Pages enabled will I be able to still use the classic multi-entry/single entry templates for the News”, “Events”, etc which need it?
My other thought is to forget Pages, create Channel Groups and Channels as required, write entries in the normal EE way and use NavEE to create the menu hierarchy. This would I’m sure be fine for the “News”, “Events”, etc but I’m not sure if the URL structure would/could match the menu hierarchy. I’m also not sure if this solution would require me to duplicate templates for each “static” page.
There may well be other solutions - I’ll listen gratefully to any ideas you have! Thanks in advance!