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Over the last few weeks, since I began writing in our blog for your reading pleasure, I have gotten a few suggestions about what to write on. These articles are to help you, so {encode="[email protected]" title="keep those suggestions coming!"}

Before we continue, this article is going use terms from The Importance of Semantics, so you may wish to take a moment and review that article.

Last Week,  I said we had completed the default URL handling, but you see, it doesn’t actually end there! Every site, including my own, has certain pages that are “static” in nature and would benefit from a simple URL structure. For example, almost every site has an About page. It would be really nice to easily add to and edit this type of content which is exactly what the Pages Module is for.

Pages makes managing “static” content very straightforward. A Page is identified by a few characteristics that set it apart from a standard weblog entry.

* You decide the URI when you create the entry in the Publish form’s “Pages” tab.
* When creating the entry, you choose the template to use for displaying that entry.

How, then, do we take advantage of these custom URIs so that we can have our articles appear magically wherever we want?  Well, read on!

Onwards!

I haven’t made much use of the pages module as of yet.  I guess I am still working through hard-coded templates.  Eventually I will migrate!

Thanks for adding some detail to this!

I wonder if “static” is the right word to use.  With me I find it is the blog entries that remain unchanged while the pages get changed quite a lot.

I don’t really love the term “static pages” either - but that is the most commonly accepted term for this kind of page, so I used it. =)

I’ve found the pages module to be really useful. Is there a way to restrict which templates show up in the pages dropdown? Right now I’m working on a site that has about 40 different templates, but of those, there are only about 3 or 4 that could actually be used to display content. Since I’m the one who will be updating the site, it isn’t a big deal, but I can forsee it being a problem if someone else had to use it. It would be great if there was a “display in pages menu” option in the template preferences.

There isn’t a way to do that, though it may be possible via an extension.  The way I’d see it easily happening is saying, “only show templates in this group” etc.  But I haven’t seen anyone take this up yet.

Hi,

I think the Pages module really is an excellent addition to EE.

I’ve run into one major problem though, and that is that I have other dynamic content on the page (like a small list of recently added blog posts in the footer which is added on every page on the site through the embedded footer template). That doesn’t load if I use the Page module.

Maybe I did something wrong, but my experience is that you’re either static or dynamic. You can’t mix them. Mixing would be a great addition to the next version though.

/ Ayza

P.S. I really like your weekly blog posts, Liza. Keep up the good works!

ayza, it should load - dynamic=“off” would normally be the reason it wouldn’t.  But if you have that and it’s still not working, go ahead and post in technical support and let’s get it ironed out.  You shouldn’t see behavior like what you describe if things are properly set up. =)

And thank you!

Excuse me if I sound stupid lol because I’m new to all this sort of stuff. But I’m just wondering what the benefit is of having a static page over a dynamic page? I prefer blogs where the content is dynamic but maybe I’m missing something.

Thanks,

Bowtrol | Web Marketing

I personally hate the term “static page” but I entitled this article that way because that’s the common use.

A static page is more often considered one that doesn’t change often - it can still have dynamic content, but it needs to be accessed more often.  Say something like an “About Us” page, or “Terms of Service”

So it’s not static as in static vs. dynamic, but static in a totally different way.

Make sense?

I’ve been confused about “static” pages and “dynamic” pages so the post above this makes no sense to me. I like to use wordpress for any blogs that I do and I’ve always been told to make whatever page I want to show up better in the search engines a “static” page. Is a “static” page in wordpress the same as a “dynamic” page? I’m so confused right now.

It’s confusing because there are three mindsets driving the terminology: content management,database/backend/implementation, and search engines.

From a Content Management perspective:
Static pages are those that are not likely to change as often.  About pages. Contact Pages. Terms of Use. Write them once and they probably aren’t going to change - hence they are “static.”

OTOH there is content that changes more often.  Blog index pages change whenever you post something new.  Product content changes with new releases. Staff profile pages change when someone leaves or someone new hires on.  Because the content changes more often it’s “dynamic”.

From a database/backend/implementation perspective:
Static pages are those where when you navigate to http://mydomain.com/about/the_company.htm there is a /about/ directory on the server with a file named the_company.htm that contains HTML, CSS, and content.  It’s “static” because the file gets created and sits on the server.

OTOH are systems like EE and any other templates-tied-to-a-database system like EE.  With EE everything past /index.php/ in the URL doesn’t exist on the server.  When that URL is requested EE goes to it’s template library, and creates the web page on the fly using instructions found there.  The result only exists in the users browser - so it’s “dynamic”.

From a search engine perspective:
Historically dynamic content has had ugly URLs - like something from Amazon:

<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0000VYDHA?ie=UTF8&tag=rvou-20&link_code=wql&camp=212361&creative=38060">http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0000VYDHA?ie=UTF8&tag=rvou-20&link_code=wql&camp=212361&creative=38060</a>

Search engines had a harder time indexing this content, and even when it was indexed it wasn’t ranked as highly due to the ugliness of the URL (and because some of those numbers were user ids or session ids that didn’t apply to everyone navigating to that page). 
What the search engine wanted instead was something like:

<a href="http://amazon.com/home_improvement/ladders/werner_folding_ladder">http://amazon.com/home_improvement/ladders/werner_folding_ladder</a>

In EE-land, from a Content Management perspective content can either be static or dynamic.  From a database/backend/implementation perspective it’s usually *all* dynamic.  From a search engine perspective it’s the best of both worlds, dynamically generated with with clean URL structures.