Thread

Hi there

I’m hoping to use EE for a fairly straightforward promotional site, but one I will need to update a lot.

The main focus of the site will be a blog page with three distinct areas:

TOP BAR
MAIN CONTENT: BLOG ENTRIES
SIDE AREA (listing categories, ad code, promotional items etc)

The remaining pages will retain the TOP BAR and SIDE AREA but will have their own individual content to replace the MAIN CONTENT: BLOG ENTRIES section.

The individual content will sometimes be straight text. Other times, designed HTML.

My questions are:

1) Can I design one single SIDE AREA element and pull it into every page I need it to appear on?
2) If so, when I edit that SIDE AREA element, will the changes automatically ripple across every page it appears on when I publish?

Could you answer in EE terminology (i.e. weblogs, templates, group etc) just so I can start making the adjustment.

I’m sorry if this is all listed in the EE User Guide but I’m in a bit of a rush and I have to make a near snap decision on this.

Thank you for your help

D

1) Yes
2) Yes

Your requirements are simple, so there is many ways of doing it. This is how I would go (just played few days with EE, so training for myself too, I guess):

index template you will have customized index page (or maybe newest entries from every weblog).

index template has embedded templates like topbar and sidebar (these could also be global variables - templates gives you more possibilities).

Then you have other templates for remaining sections (or are they pages?). Those templates embed those very same topbar and sidebar templates.

This seems to be much harder than I thought. There is so many possibilities 😊

But quick answer: YES - I would go for EE in that case!

thank you for that.

i’ll start playing around and see where i get

cheers
d

No probs. If you need things like dynamic navigation, then check this entry: http://www.boyink.com/splaat/comments/three-tier-static-content-in-expressionengine-approach-c/

It depends much of what kind your site structure is. If you have static sections, that all have dynamic data (news, articles etc), then you probably don’t need dynamic navigation. Just update one template and you are ready to go, if you want new links to main navigation.