I’m still testing EE Core on my new biz site but have installed two full EE installations so far (albeit only simple sites), and have another more complex site in production. One theme that keeps repeating is setting up your site structure for as many different sections/content types that you have. I know this subject has been discussed many times before but if this helps someone with a lightbulb moment!
Anyway, I set up a site that has several different content areas each based on a Blog, lets call them Design, Hosting, Telecoms and Weblog. I used a custom field set for Design but used the default summary/body/extended fields for everything else.
And so I added my content, many pages, and then took a look at the site - it struck me that I needed to have some customs fields for the Hosting section to present hosting specific data. Easy enough by adding them to the Default group! However, doing this means these fields now appear on other blog entry screens which seemed pretty pointless as they’d never be used. Later on as I learnt more about how powerful EE is I found that I could give myself more flexibility with content than I’d imagined, and I kept spotting opporunities for using additional custom fields.
Eventually the Default group started to bcome unweildly - eg 15 data fields on the entry screen which was totally OTT. To use a different field set on another blog (which it needed) would mean that any blog that used the default set would lose data(?), so a massive copy/paste operation would have to be done. I had to rethink (but not very long!) and the solution was easier than I’d imagined…
I have copies of all my content so adding it back in was not a problem. The trick is, if you base your sites content areas into separate blogs, to make a custom field set for each and every blog, you don’t need to use the Default set at all.
This gives you total flexibility with your content and if you need to modify data for one particular blog it has no effect on the others as it works independantly, and the entry screens only show what you need them to.
So to summarise…
1. Decide on the sites structure using multiple blogs
2. Set up a custom field set for each blog, don’t use the Default set
3. Add custom field variables/tags to your templates as appropriate - you’ll need a separate template set for each blog
4. Add your content
Hope this makes sense!