Thread

Hello,

As some backround I am a PHP Developer of many years and I have a great grasp of the web stack, so I don’t mind detail - however I am absolute novice with Expression Engine.

I have a very popular cooking site, I wrote the PHP framework its built upon, but I feel EE would be better going forward - this is what my current site has that I need to accomplish with EE.

Before I dive in, I want a little guidance if at all possible! Some of my followers recommended EE to me as helpful!

1.

I need to preserve the structure so…

I have standard pages like /help /about and those don’t seem to be an issue.

I want domain/recipes/italian/minestrone-soup as the content

So I understand that recipes would be the channel, and that italian would be a channel and minestrone-soup would be the content item.

However it would appear that /recipes/minestrone would be the default - I want to have the “category” included and I want to do so in a way that doesn’t break the EE functionality!

I want it to show all recipes paginated if they visit /recipes, all the italian recipes paginated when I go to /recipes/american, and the recipe itself when I go to /recipes/italian/ministrone-soup.

And I want any links on the site to that soup, or a recipe to include the full path!

I did find this; http://fortysevenmedia.com/blog/archives/setting_up_custom_category_url_structures_in_expressionengine/

Is that what I am after?

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2.

I want to show X random entries as “related recipes” so at the bottom of a recipe these links are shown - does EE or a plugin support this?

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3. I have memcache in use - this looks ideal http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/ce-cache is that something people would recommend?

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4. I have a mobile version of the site, its under the same url structure, but the system does a bit of platform detection and basically does: if mobile load /mobile/template.file if desktop look in /desktop/template.file, if its mobile and there is no mobile template - it falls back to the desktop one.

From what I read, EE practice would be to create a subdomain like m.domain.com for that content, but I would rather have all the links the same and the EE to detect how to show it.

Is my approach worse for SEO, or better? What recommendations or opinions do people have

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5. Nivo slider in EE, or equiv

Anyone got any content managed sliders in EE - one of the worst things in my framework was I had to manually upload the images and add rows to the db table directly for the slider - I never had time to write an interface!

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6. Can I auto create RSS feeds of my content, like a feed of /recipes like a /recipes.xml or something?
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My timescale to launch the site rebuilt in EE is about a month, I have about 100 recipes to port over, and maybe 20 articles, I dont plan to change any of the sites design and I wrote the front end to be responsive.

Ultimately, I need a bit of a hand getting going, but I promise the site will be one the EE community will be proud of, and I have 22,000 followers who will be keen to see the exploits of the next site update! I will gladly return favours if people need CSS help, or some editorial advice or anything - even a twitter shoutout to all my followers - but as yet I can’t pay anyone for any help, so I am doing the work myself - with hopefully some advice from people!

—I did do a months reading before buying EE, I even thought of WP for a while, but I need to go further than a blog, I am building a major recipe portal for people to enjoy!

Regards and kindest thanks,

DJ

Welcome to ee!  You’ve definitely made a wise investment and are joining an unbeatable community.

There are top developers in this community who will comment here to give you extremely helpful direction on architecture.  I’d just suggest low variables and playa be incorporated in your initial plans.

Hello,

Thanks for responding, unfortunately I would not be able to launch the site without these features - or otherwise it would be a serious step back! The traffic is starting to grow and I don’t want to jeopardise it by the site structure changing for the worse!

These constitute a minimum viable product for my site…

Hi DJ welcome to the forums!

1. I want domain/recipes/italian/minestrone-soup as the content

So I understand that recipes would be the channel, and that italian would be a channel and minestrone-soup would be the content item.

However it would appear that /recipes/minestrone would be the default - I want to have the “category” included and I want to do so in a way that doesn’t break the EE functionality!

I want it to show all recipes paginated if they visit /recipes, all the italian recipes paginated when I go to /recipes/american, and the recipe itself when I go to /recipes/italian/ministrone-soup.

And I want any links on the site to that soup, or a recipe to include the full path!

Yes for that structure I’d do it this way:

/recipies it a tempate group (you can pull any channel data into this template)
- use conditionals inside the /recipes/index template to specify what’s being viewed, eg top level, catgeory or entry
/italian is the category name
- check out the LowSeg2Cat addon from http://www.gotolow.com so you can remove the /category segmen name
/minestrone-soup is the url title of the entry

Using that structure and LowSeg2Cat you’ll be able to paginate everything (/recipes) or just from a category (/recipes/category-name)

2. I want to show X random entries as “related recipes” so at the bottom of a recipe these links are shown - does EE or a plugin support this?

You can use EE’s native relationship fieldtype to do a “what links here” (reverse_related_entries) or one “related link” from an entry (related_entries), but you can only assign one relationship per field. Look at the Playa addon (http://www.pixelandtonic.com/) as that will allow you to set up multiple relationships and more.

3. I have memcache in use - this looks ideal http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/ce-cache is that something people would recommend?

I’ll pass on this one!

4. I have a mobile version of the site, its under the same url structure, but the system does a bit of platform detection and basically does: if mobile load /mobile/template.file if desktop look in /desktop/template.file, if its mobile and there is no mobile template - it falls back to the desktop one.

From what I read, EE practice would be to create a subdomain like m.domain.com for that content, but I would rather have all the links the same and the EE to detect how to show it.

Is my approach worse for SEO, or better? What recommendations or opinions do people have

In an ideal world you’d have one site and use resposive design to adjust presentation for different platforms, that solves any duplication issues. However that’s not always possible so a separate “mobile” site/template set is needed - search engines are pretty savvy nowadays and generally recognise variations like m.domain.com as mobile and will take that into account, you can always tell people like Google that a certain URL is “mobile” to help them analyse your site.

I did see an EE article explaining how to load up separate templates based on platform thus preserving URL’s but I can’t find it now - anyone seen it?

5. Nivo slider in EE, or equiv

Anyone got any content managed sliders in EE - one of the worst things in my framework was I had to manually upload the images and add rows to the db table directly for the slider - I never had time to write an interface!

There are numerous approaches here:
a) Pull in slider content from one or more channels (eg the main image from x+y+z recipe entries)
b) Use Matrix (http://www.pixelandtonic.com/) to allow a set of images/content per entry
c) Use EE’s File tag to output a set of images from the File manager

For the JS all you need to do is upload your scripts and apply to whatever copntainer in your template(s)

6. Can I auto create RSS feeds of my content, like a feed of /recipes like a /recipes.xml or something?

Yes, you can create XML templates for your feeds, just define your XML structure and pull in data from channel entries or even categories

Hope that helps!

Fantastic response!

Yes I should probably use this as an opportunity to make the site responsive!

CE Cache is amazing. I had a spike in traffic today and CE Cache/Redis made me smile.

Regarding my requirement to have some URL’s like

channel / category / content

Would it be possible for someone to explain in a little more detail how to accomplish it?

I would be massively grateful - I will be starting development in like 8 hours or so and this will be near the top of the list!

Thanks

It would be wise to take a look at a previous forum thread: “making a website in ee”
http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/192695/ - and check out the simple schematic in the post from Matt P so you can visualize the relationship between channels/ categories etc. specifically for your site. 

I think you misunderstood my previous post in this thread.  Playa simply makes your life much, much easier doing related entries in ee.  Because you are a developer and will inevitably want to write simple global & repeated variables in ee, Low Variables organizes and simplifies that process from day 1.  Neither LV or playa requires rewriting existing code.  They are for your new {ee code}  Good luck!

Hello,

I will look into that, thanks.

I must admit part of me is still in two minds, I am not quite 100% sure whether EE or Wordpress is best suited to me; but EE just seems more “professional” although both are popular, and WordPress powers some massive sites, I am also aware that most of those sites have a $15k license and some pretty serious hardware too.

I keep finding as I research that there are lots of plugins, but most of them seem to cost money, whereas with WP they are free - is there quality differences?

Sorry - I am just throwing that out there!

You get what you pay for.  EE is a Rolls Royce compared to WP.

WP free plugins are notoriously problematic.  The EE developer community is unbelievable at creating 1st rate add-ons with 1st rate support.  It future -proofs your work because you can add incredible functionality without worry. http://www.netmagazine.com/features/top-12-expressionengine-add-ons

Furthermore, you asked about SEO. . . then you have to focus on content. . . not going down the WP rabbit hole losing parts of your life.  Time is money.  Spend your time testing your recipes.  Your users who recommended EE were right on the money and are truly loyal to you.
Good luck!

Hello,

Still at a total loss at how to create that URL structure.

I have a channel called Recipes, I made a Category group called Recipes and I have added categories like “Indian”, “Chinese”, “British” and I have removed index.php from the links.

I would like to create a URL Structure which is exactly like…

domain.com/{channel_name}/{channel_category}/{content_title}

For example

website.com/recipes/british/shepherds-pie

or

website.com/recipes/chinese/spring-rolls

I will also create a similar structure for my articles like;

{domain.com}/{channel}/{category}/{content_item}
http://www.website.com/articles/food/how-to-boil-eggs

I need {domain.com}/{channel} to show a list of its categories

{domain.com}/{channel}/{category} to show all the recipes in that category, paginated

{domain.com}/{channel}/{category}/{content_item} to show that content piece.

I still cannot fathom why this isn’t in the core of EE, and why it appears to be so damn difficult to do! :(

* I did buy the Learning EE 2 E-Book, but as yet it hasn’t helped answer my quite specific questions!

Can someone please provide me some help, or a walkthrough? I don’t mind having to buy a plugin, but just now EE and the eBook feels like a waste of money :(

I am doing research, but can’t find clear answers, and it would appear I am not the only one!

http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/218200/

>> I need {domain.com}/{channel} to show a list of its categories:

In your homepage template do this:

{if segment_1 == ''}
Homepage goes here….
{if:elseif segment_1 == 'category' AND segment_2 == ''}
Go here to look at displaying categories as a list (of various kinds).  Here we are displaying all the category
<a href="http://ellislab.com/expressionengine/user-guide/modules/channel/categories.html">http://ellislab.com/expressionengine/user-guide/modules/channel/categories.html</a>
{if:elseif segment_1 == 'category' AND segment_2 != ''}
Here you should use the entries tag, category filtering is automatic and hard coded, you can include the information for that here.  This is because we have the magical 'category' keyword in our URL (the word category can be changed in the preferences somewhere).  You could use Rewrite rules to remove it at the risk of massive danger (someone could publish an article with a category name as a title).
{exp:channel:entries channel="news" limit="10"}
    <h2>{title}</h2>
<p>    {body}<br />
{/exp:channel:entries}<br />
{if:elseif segment_1 == 'category' AND segment_2 != '' AND segment_3 != ''}<br />
{exp:channel:entries channel="news" limit="10"}<br />
Same but you probably want to display a whole article here…<br />
{/exp:channel:entries}<br />
{/if}

>> {domain.com}/{channel}/{category} to show all the recipes in that category, paginated

>> {domain.com}/{channel}/{category}/{content_item} to show that content piece.

>> I still cannot fathom why this isn’t in the core of EE, and why it appears to be so damn difficult to do! :(

Yeah, it should be easy and instead you seem to have to hack templates to do it.

Routes should be separate from everything IMO.

Yeah, anyway that hack might work for you.  But you’ll need to be very clever about how you create your links for this to work - how do you know which category to put in the URL for specific articles for example?

YMMV.