Thread

Hey guys,

Been pouring through all the good info available here and just need a sounding board on some ideas concerning the best possible route to go in setting up a medium to plug content in. I will have about 6 main nav menu items with about 3 of those main ones having 3-5 sub menu items under each of those 3. All pages for the most part will remain fairly static from what I can tell at this point. In reading I know there is no right/wrong way as far as doing things but rather what is most efficient vs. maybe not the most efficient, etc. I was thinking of creating weblogs for each page and keeping all weblogs under one main category although I had thought about creating categories for each main nav item and then having all weblogs, main & sub nav content(weblogs) residing in that one particular category. I know that there has to be a template for a weblog to reside in. If I’m creating say for example 12 weblogs will there also need to be 12 templates resulting in the following - index.php/template_group/template(about,resources,mission, etc., etc). ‘About’ template will house ‘about’ weblog and so on and so on. If I’m not exactly tracking on that please let me know. I’m just trying to conceive of the easiest way for my client to ‘get’ how to create/edit pages.

Thanks in advance for the input

I’m climbing the same learning curve that you are with EE.  The introductory material does a great job of driving home the weblog and template concepts but stops short of providing advice on how to intelligently structure a site.

The thought that I have about the site you are describing is you may be able to use the segment variables to determine the page content of sub-item pages instead of having to create separate templates.  Fewer, smarter templates would make it a bit easier to maintain and expand.

Well skydoc and Joe, You came to the right place. EE is the magic elixer to your website CMS itch. For starters I would suggest reading through and actually completing the Articles that Michael Boyink wrote.

Boyink’s Articles

Then when you are done with that you will have a little better idea of the direction you need to take.

If it helps any I am currently working on a small site for a Financial Services company.

Southern Capital Services

The weblogs that I have are as follows

Home Page
About SCS
Articles - This is found under resources
FAQ
Newsletters
Resources
Services

I did this for a couple of reasons. 1 I wanted the site to be extremely easy for a non-technical person to update. I also wanted to be able to control the formatting in a simple way. Could I have set up one weblog and assigned different categories for each section and pulled in the data that way? Sure. That is one of the more difficult things to figure out about EE is that there really are several ways to do things.

For my own site
So having said that Blue Fish Design Studio I have one for the portfolio and one for the blog. All of the content for the main page gets pulled in from those two. I also have a weblog for testimonials and I will soon have one for Services as soon as I finish up with the previous site (paying customers come first 😉

Anyway, I hope this was helpful. Feel free to ask more questions…

If I’m creating say for example 12 weblogs will there also need to be 12 templates resulting in the following - index.php/template_group/template(about,resources,mission, etc., etc). ‘About’ template will house ‘about’ weblog and so on and so on. If I’m not exactly tracking on that please let me know. I’m just trying to conceive of the easiest way for my client to ‘get’ how to create/edit pages.

Thanks in advance for the input

Welcome to the wonderful world of EE. 😊

When it comes to things like About Us, Terms of Use, Contact Us, etc. I use one single data container (weblog) for all of these.

So I’d have an entry for each of these.

Then I create a template in the main template group called “info”. That template is a single entry template. limit=“1” is inside the exp:weblog:entries tag.

So in order to “see” these entries, my links are like this:

<a href="http://{path=site/info/about-us}">About Us</a>
<a href="http://{path=site/info/terms-of-use}">Terms of Use</a>

about-us and terms-of-use are the url_titles for the two entries.

See…  lol 😉 I didn’t even know that was a possibility. Too funny… this system really is about the most complex but simple system there is…

M.

If I’m creating say for example 12 weblogs will there also need to be 12 templates resulting in the following - index.php/template_group/template(about,resources,mission, etc., etc). ‘About’ template will house ‘about’ weblog and so on and so on.

This is perhaps the hardest thing to “get” in the beginning but there is absolutely no relation between weblogs and templates save the relations you define. So you could have 1 template calling data from 12 weblogs or 1 weblog which provides data for 12 templates.
Think of weblogs as your data containers and you’re halfway there.
Sue’s suggestion is an excellent one for small sites, and Mike Boyinks tutorials come highly recommended as well.

Michael Boyink’s articles have been a huge help for certain, as have many other private blogs of EE pros.

I guess what I would really love to see is a collection of high-level examples of how to structure a site with a little explanation of the advantages and disadvantages of each.  I know it sounds like a infinitely massive undertaking but the purpose of such a collection would NOT be to highlight every way to structure a site…  just a few example “foundations” to get us beginners started faster.

This type of documentation is something I specialize in, so I may put in on my own site after I’ve gained enough understanding to tackle such a project.