Thread

I am trying to replace Plone for my company’s website, which is entirely static pages that a large group of people work on.

Is there a ‘howto’ to create a site very similar to expression engine’s website (ie, no blog, just categories/subcategories/content)?  EE seems like a blogging platform, whereas I want to have an easy way to add/remove categories/content.

This EE site seems to do exactly what I want as well:

http://www.robbinslibrary.org/about/fox-branch

Is there a general walk-through on how to setup and manage this type of layout?

Nice example site.  And I can think of a couple of different ways I’d have gone at setting it up- which illustrates the pro/con of EE.  It’s HIGHLY flexible and there’s almost always several different ways of approaching site creation.  Thus there isn’t a simple 1,2,3 tutorial on how to create a specific site. 

What I’d suggest- try out one of the trial options- either the Core or the hosted trial would likely work for the type of site you want to practice on.

Then- read the Getting started guide- and I’d read the section on EE urls and the templates and tags overviews.

That will give you a feel for the core logic.  Then I’d run through the Quick start tutorial- create a weblog, add some content.

Once you’ve got a feel for the basics, it’s time to think about structuring the site- and at that point, the big decision will be how you break things out into different weblogs and categories- check this wiki article for an overview of what goes into that decision.  Also- the forums are great for giving advice on a specific setup.

I know it sounds like a fair bit of work to get ‘up to speed’- but it’s worth it.  Once you have a feel for how it all works, it’s much easier to start planning how best to structure things for your particular needs.

Make sense?

Thanks Robin!

The main problem here is I am not really typing to create ANYTHING that includes a blog/blogging functionality.  I wrote more details about my needs here: http://ask.metafilter.com/69276/Website-for-the-masses

I think another product that isn’t designed for Blogging might work better for my needs.

Thanks!

You give up too quickly…;)

Most of the EE work I do isn’t weblog-related.

There are a number of ways to do non-weblog content in EE.  Mark Huots “Tome” module is a popular one.  I’ve also published some tutorials on more native to EE methods.

Boyink is dead on- some of the terminology and the default templates in EE still shows its blogging roots, but if I had to bet, more folks are using it as a CMS than as a blog.  Don’t let the terminology throw you- it’s an excellent tool for creating sites like the one linked.  But it does take a time investment to realize the full potential.

Hi CMCS,

Don’t let the word “blogging” fool you. You can actually change that in the Control Panel if its messing with your head. EE is not a typical blog tool. It is a CMS that uses some blogging terminology. I mean, do you know of a “blog tool” that manages 40k+ members across 4 websites on a single installation using just out of the box features? That is not a blog tool by any means. Take a quick look at our Showcase and you’ll see that the majority of the sites listed are not blogs (or not just blogs). EE is meant to power an entire website.

Here are 5 quick examples of how diverse EE can be:

Boston Magazine
The Sacramento Union
Union Bay
Your Music Zone
Giant for Women

Based on your write up at Metafilter I think you’ll find EE quite suitable for your project, especially since you are a php developer. EE is extremely developer friendly so anything that EE doesn’t do out of the box you can create without having to “hack” the core files.

Robin,

I am willing to invest time, but it seems silly to develop both a template, and the admin interface to support adding content.  As I mentioned in the Metafilter thread, I just installed typo3 which immediately seems to work nearly in the way I suggested.  For EE it seems like quite a bit of customization would need to occur, which would probably take nearly as long as simply writing something from scratch in my case (except for the whole adding new content/moving content piece).  If there was a starting point, an existing thread discussing how to conceptually make these changes—great.. but making huge changes to EE seems like a major undertaking.

Leslie,

The showcase sites are beautiful, but none seem to act in the way I need.  I need a list of major categories that I can somehow create a li from to style into a horizontal nav at thetop.  Then I need to be able to return a list of subcategories to build the lefthand sub-nav with, and a way to create the tree of resulting sub-topics. 

On the admin side, there needs to be an easy way to interface with all of this.  typo3 blew away my EE install (I will reinstall) but I didn’t see an easy way to add anything except flat content pieces.

but it seems silly to develop both a template, and the admin interface to support adding content.

Not sure where you’re getting that from.  The admin interface is provided, you only need configure a content admin member group so they have the appropriate permissions.

If Typo3 is more to your liking I certainly won’t argue against it. We’re very much of the opinion that people should use what they are most comfortable with.

However, I do want to make clear that what you describe is very possible and easy with EE as well. Typo and EE just take very different approaches.

For doing what you want, you would just need to style the Categories tag as your main nav. You can use the same tag styled differently to generate the sidebar nav using subcategories.

On the admin side, your content editors simply add/remove/edit categories in the appropriate place to generate new sections of the site and maintain the navigation dynamically.

The upside of this is you get absolute control over everything. Its true it might take more upfront time to setup. I’ve never used Typo so I can’t make a direct comparision. But I know with EE what you want would take about 10 minutes once you understand the tool, tops. And it certainly doesn’t require customization, ie hacking or modifying the underlying code, to accomplish.

I created my main and subcategories in EE.

Am I going to be able to dynamically create a list of sub-categories and articles?

Am I going to be able to have categories w/o the ‘category’ keyword in the URL?

I created my main and subcategories in EE.

Am I going to be able to dynamically create a list of sub-categories and articles?

Yes. That’s what the category tag listed earlier is for. Basically it will give you a styled or unstyled list of categories based on what you’ve created through the Control Panel. There is a lot of flexibility in what you can display and this can be set per-instance of the category tag. So you can display parent categories, sub-categories, both, specific categories, only show categories with articles assigned to them, etc…

Am I going to be able to have categories w/o the ‘category’ keyword in the URL?

Yes. This key word can be just about anything you want and helps make EE more SEO friendly. 99% of the time its the URL that tells EE what to display on a given page so having the category keyword is important.

Yep.. but back to blog v. not blog, I don’t want that there.  Also I want sub-categories AND articles.. not just one listed.

Hi cmcs,

You can change the word blog to any word you want in the Control Panel. You can do this in the Control Panel by going to:

Admin—> System Preferences—> General Configuration.

From here change the Section Designation Word to anything you want. If you haven’t yet it will probably be very useful to read the Getting Started section of the User Guide as it goes into what we mean by “weblog”, ie a data container. You should also check out the video tutorials for an example of how this is put together.

And you can certainly list sub-categories and articles. For categories you use the categories tag, for articles you use the weblog entries tag. You can mix and match as needed.

One of the key things to understand about EE is that it makes almost no assumptions about what you want to do. This is its strength and what gives EE its flexibility. But its also what gives EE its learning curve as there really isn’t usually a “right” way to accomplish something. But once you have that “light bulb” moment where you understand how EE works you can do just about anything you want with it, especially if you have php skills.

I’m using EE to handle content management for problems that I have run across in the IT world.  It has been a fun project.

I use categories such as Operating Systems, Software, etc.  And then under each category I have subcategories for a bit lower level.. I.e.

Operating Systems
- Windows Server 2003
- Windows 2000 Server
- Windows XP
- Windows Vista
- Linux

I have a single “Weblog” called Articles that I post the article in.  I click on the categories tab and Shift-Click on the categories associated with the article.

While it uses the term Weblog, it doesn’t look or act anything like a blog.

Take a look at the site to get an idea of what can be done.  Please remember that this is a work in progress, and isn’t a finished/polished product.

http://www.my-network.info