Thread

Hi there,

I’m getting slowly back into the groove using EE, but I keep wondering if I really need to explicitly setup templates for each channel, although they are absolutely identical.

Actually I only have two types of templates: a multi-entry-view and a single-entry-view, which currently I’m embedding based on the url path of each channel.

So, I’m accessing the multi-entry-template for a channel like this:

{preload_replace:channel="{segment_1}"}
{site_header}
{embed="site/index-view" channel="{channel}"}
{site_footer}

And the single-entry-template like this:

{preload_replace:channel="{segment_1}"}
{site_header}
{embed="site/single-view" channel="{channel}"}
{site_footer}

It works beautifully, but it seems, that I have to duplicate those templates for each and every channel, just to get the path working. Am I missing the forest for the trees here or does it have to be like that?

I’d love to just setup those two templates in my site-template-group and use them from there.

Hi Heiko,

Of course, you don’t need to have a separate template for each channel. It looks like you’re on the right track here, but you do have one extra layer that’s not necessary. Why not just use {segment_3} to tell your templates which channel to display?

In other words, something like this, where the URL for the “news” channel might look like http://example.com/site/template/news:

{exp:channel:entries channel="{segment_3}" limit="10"}
    <h2>{title}</h2>
<p>    {body}<br />
{/exp:channel:entries}

Thank you very much! Finally I got it right… 😊

Well, sorry to bother you again, but it turns out, that my template structure is still not working, if I don’t create one template group with duplicated templates for each channel, that I’m using - which is really dull, because the templates are identical to the bit.

How can I tell EE to make use of the single-entry-template, independently from the current URI?

Ideally I only want to have one template group with two templates only, which then dynamically show entries from all the different channels.

template_group
   index-view
   single-view

Alright, now I’ve reduced my overall template count to 1, using a combination of Stash and Switchee. :D

{preload_replace:channel="{segment_1}"}

{exp:stash:get name="interior" context="wrappers" scope="site" file="yes" save="yes" refresh="60" replace="no" output = "yes"}

{exp:stash:set name='content'}
{exp:switchee variable="{segment_2}" parse="inward"}
  {case value="''"}
    {site_ad_listing}
  {/case}
  {case default="yes"}
    {site_ad_single}
  {/case}
{/exp:switchee}
{/exp:stash:set}

It works great, but I don’t know, if this is good pratice. So, if anyone has any experience to share, I’d be glad to hear about it.

Hmm… it looks good to me in general, though some parts are a bit confusing. Is this the whole master template? Are you actually using the channel variable that you’re setting with preload_replace anywhere?

When it comes to best practices on using Stash, that’s going to be something better handled by our community since it’s a third-party add-on and I admittedly don’t have any experience with it.