Thread

Hi, all,

EE newbie here…pleased to meet you all. A little background: I’ve inherited a Wordpress site with lots of custom post types. I’m looking at EE as an alternative because I think its architecture better meets the client’s needs.

The client’s site has major sections: blog, about, magazine, etc. The Magazine section is a good place to pose my question. It has multiple content types: poems, articles, interviews, quotes, music.

Should each of those content types be channels? Doing it that way would take advantage of EE’s field groups, which are powerful.

Or should Magazine be the channel, and the different sub-types are just categories? Doing it that way I lose the benefit of field groups, right?

Does that make sense? Help appreciated.
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Ray

Hi Ray welcome to the forums

First thing to do is to look at the content structure in each of the “content types” to see if there is a common theme running through it. Do the input fields vary wildy in purpose or are they similar but split into WP post types because they had to be?

Putting my EE head on for a moment the Magazine section is really just a bunch of articles themed by subject type aren’t they? I would suggest using one channel for Magazine articles and a Custom field group that would cater for any sort of content data that could appear in a Magazine article, then as you suggest use categories for types.

Typically I’d set up a Custom field group that caters for anything you might want to throw at an “article”, eg fields for:

Title
Sub-title
Intro (or short story)
Main story
Main image
Image gallery (for a small article gallery)
Video (either Youtube URL or user file upload)
Audio (user upload MP3 etc)
Download (for PDF’s etc)
Related articles

That usually caters for most “article” needs. You could the use the same field group for other Channels such as a Blog if you wanted to if you wanted a common publishing page for your authors, or make up another field group for the Blog. Either way you can still add new custom fields to any group as and when you need to.

Does that help?

Hi, Rob,

Thanks for the welcome and the quick reply. Yes, it helps me understand the “EE way” of doing things. I’d hoped to find that there was some way to glue together multiple channels into a higher-level structure, but it sounds like channels are the starting point.

Thanks, again.
—
Ray

Keep in mind you can aggregate separate channels together into one channel:entries tag pair and treat those multiple channels as one (as far as templating is concerned).

You might want to review
http://shapingthepage.com/journal/how-to-build-a-simple-tumblr-blog-with-expressionengine

Either approach is valid - and I’ll actually be facing the same decision in my new tutorial series as the sample blog is really a tumblr knockoff.

No problem, keep on firing questions if you get stuck!