Thread

Hi there. I’m using EE to build out a travel website. Since this is my first “real” site with EE I could use a little advice on how best to approach setting things up on the back end.

I have a sample site of what I’m recreating in EE here:  http://cappcreative.com/staging/bigplanet/

To cycle through the pages select Africa from the main nav dropdown, then Eastern Africa, then Cheetah Safari. So it’s basically Continent > Country > Trip.

What I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around is how to best approach setting up my EE templates and channels.

I’ve set up a channel for trips and I have set up all the categories and sub-categories on the back end. So for the online example above I’ve posted an entry called Cheetah Safari which I categorized under Eastern Africa which is a sub-category of Africa.

Where I’m a bit lost is: should I create a Continent channel for the 8 Continents (Africa, Asia India etc) in addition to my Trips channel? When you select Africa from the main nav, would that go to a template that pulls in the Continent Channel info and the Trip channel info on a single page? There may be some Continents that don’t have any Countries or Trips as the site owners will be building the content out as they go along.

Is that an efficient approach? Between Categories and Channels I’m a little unsure how to proceed.

Any insight is appreciated.

OK - after thinking about this a while here’s how I think I’m going to approach the issue.

I’m going to create 8 identical templates - one for each of the Continents in the drop down. I’ll them be able to code each page to pull in the proper content from the channels. I realize that there’s probably a more efficient method that would use only a single template but I’m not making any headway with that approach.

I’ll create separate channels for Trips, Countries, and Static content so the content can be maintained outside of the templates.

While not the ideal ‘fancy’ solution I had initially imagined, I think it’s a more practical approach to keep things progressing.

If you have some ideas or a link that might be helpful, please feel free to share.

You can see my suggestion on your other post.