Thread

I have most of what I want built in wordpress, but hear good things about ee and the fact that I can have multiple sites running from one installation and admin is something I am in favor of. So please help me out and tell me if what I want is possible.

Is the following possible and if so, how to do it?

Site has a home page and say 5 top level pages, title, keywords and description to be defined per page.

Home page shows content and finishes off with excerpts of the five top level pages with clickable titles of the excerpts.

Each top level page has say again 5 subcategories.

Each top level page has its own content and finishes off with excerpts (with clickable titles) of the five sub category pages.

Top level page has title, keywords and description that are defined per page.

Subcategory page has its own content and finishes of with clickable excerpts of underlying articles.

Articles page have content and - in case part of a series of articles, each article shows at the beginning a clickable TOC of the series, and finishes the article page of with the clickabel name of the next article.

Any insights will be much valued, I have the core installed so will test it out, if it can be done and if it is easy enough to apply this.

Thanks

Robert

Hi there,

I would appreciate some help here, have looked at the videos. read through the user guide, to no avail as far as figuring out the above.

If anybody knwos if this can be done with ee, please let me know. Or if it is stated somewhere in a user guide that I have not seen, tell me so I can check it out.

thanks

Robert

Site has a home page and say 5 top level pages, title, keywords and description to be defined per page.

Home page shows content and finishes off with excerpts of the five top level pages with clickable titles of the excerpts.

Each top level page has say again 5 subcategories.

Each top level page has its own content and finishes off with excerpts (with clickable titles) of the five sub category pages.

Top level page has title, keywords and description that are defined per page.

Subcategory page has its own content and finishes of with clickable excerpts of underlying articles.

Articles page have content and - in case part of a series of articles, each article shows at the beginning a clickable TOC of the series, and finishes the article page of with the clickabel name of the next article.

EE allows you to structure your content in many ways…

Weblogs
Weblogs + categories
Static pages

The big thing here is that you can have as many “blogs” running on one site as you want, so you could have a separate “blog” for each of your 5 site areas. Think of “blogs” as content areas/sections call them what you will.

Now, each “blog” can have it’s own set of categories, and if you wished a unique set of input fields for each content type. So for arguments sake you could have a field for an excerpt and another for the full page/article.

Typically when you create an item of content you can use any part of it on any page, so there would be no problem displaying excerpts on one page linked to the full article on a sub page.

EE doesn’t come with meta tag input fields out of the box but there are a few ways of adding them, there is a plugin for meta tags somewhere, and you can also add custom input fields for your entries to name two. Page titles can be configured any way you want using nearly any parameters.

Certainly what you want to do is totally possible with EE. It does take a bit of head scratching to find the best way to organise your data but once you have the eureka moment you’ll never need W*******s again 😊

One approach for your site would be to have one blog and utilise categories for your home page - each top level page would be a category. This way you can display your category titles and descriptions on your home page, all link throigh to the relevant category section.

Thanks bluedreamer for stopping by.

It does not get me any further yet though. I figured it would be possible, but the big question is how?

It probably has to do with the ee-tags that would allow me to only show articles or their excerpts of a certain category on a top level page, but how would I go about that. I looked at the ee-tags instruction and that is too shallow for me. Where do I find an overview of the tags that can be used to do this?

Any help appreciated. As this is a pre-sales forum, and I am considering buying and even having things built in ee, I am a bit disappointed by the reactions so far. I am in europe, so maybe there is a timezone difference.

Thanks so far bluedreamer

Robert

Good morning, Robert!  There is indeed a time-zone difference, and you posted over the weekend.  It is early Monday morning here (8:30am where I am). 

As a pre-sales forum, the intent here is to really to help you figure out if ExpressionEngine is the right tool for your project.  I can point you to some of the documentation in the resources so that you can read up more on things, though.  For showing information based on category viewed, you could either use category custom fields or conditionals.  You might also like to read about the Semantics of Displaying Categories.

You will also need to dig in and figure out the architecture, as some of your language doesn’t fit in with how EE Works - a Page, for instance, is not how you structure an EE Site; but you do so through weblogs, categories, and relationships.  I would recommend reading EE Wiki: Category or Weblog?.

You can also use custom fields, as bluedreamer notes, for storing any type of data about an entry, including meta data.  You would just set up custom weblog fields for that.

In short, ExpressionEngine is incredibly flexible, and you can achieve what you are asking for in ExpressionEngine - but you’ll want to sit down and figure out the infrastructure, and how ExpressionEngine can work for that site, before building.

I would highly recommend reviewing our support resources, including the Video tutorials and Getting Started sections, as well as trying out EE to get a feel for it.

Sorry you’ve been skipped over a bit, OlivierF.  But as bluedreamer suggests, there are a multitude of ways to set this up, and they’ll boil down to personal preference and site specific requirements.  Your overall question is a bit broad.

In general- my answer is, ‘yes, it’s definitely possible’.  But- you’re going to need to determine the best approach for your particular site.

The first big decission will be how to break things out- using categories or weblogs- you’ll undoubtably use a combination of both.  To help you make this decision, I’d recommend reading this wiki entry on the topic.  Once you get a feel for how you want to section things, you’ll need to have a good understanding of EE’s url structure.  I’d also play with the default templates- understand how they display the categories- though I generally put categories on their own template.

Once you have a better feel for things and a general idea of how you want to section your site, I’d break the questions down into parts.  My first focus would be figuring out the template structure and how to get the overall navigation going.  If you get stuck on that, I’d post on just that bit- probably to the ‘How to’ forum- though if the tags aren’t behaving as you’d expect them to, a trip to ‘Tech Support’ might be advised.  Linking to a page where you’ve tried to set things up will help folks give specific advise- and the advice may even be ‘Well, I’d set things up different- such as….’.

The keywords issue will be a post of its own- there’s a third party module I might suggest using, but it depends on what you want the keywords to do.  At a minimum, I’d expect you’ll be creating a custom field to hold them.

Likewise- showing part of an entry might be worth a post of its own.  Some folks will do this using a custom field that holds a summary- others might put the full text in one field- and then use a plugin to truncate it.

In short- you may need to break this down a bit rather than shooting to get everything answered at once.  Take it one step at a time- there is a learning curve, but once you ‘get it’, EE will prove to be a very powerful tool.  Personally?  I’d start by deciding on my weblogs and categories- then I’d create my custom fields for my categories.  Once that’s all setup, I’d move to creating templates and a logical navigation structure.  Once all of that is down, you’ll be down to the tweaking.

Thanks Robin,

Appreciate your reply.

I did already look through the docs re categories or multiple weblogs and for the above it seems ok to do this all with categories.

As far as the url structure number one thing is seo friendly url’s. I am not so sure of that currently, I do not like the directory type notation, I would prefer http://www.sitename.com/doc-name.html.
SEO friendly ofcourse goes for metatags on a page basis as well. I understand this can be done through custom fields. I did look at the extension for that, even installed that, but that seems to be site wide, which I definitely do not want.

Excerpts, looks like it is best to have extra fields as well for that.

I am getting a feel for this, partly by the forum comments here, partly also by the fact that I am having the whole thing built right now in modx, and when I look under the bonnet there I recognise things I see here as well.

Reason I have it built in modx, next to doing it myself on wordpress is that I want to compare on an output level and on teh level of ease of working with the solution. Wordpress is ok, but seems cumbersome because of all the needed plugins that come from different sources, that sometimes breaks under upgrades.

Two reasons to also check EE:
- 1 is that I sometimes prefer a paid solution because then I have someone to fall back on. I rather not want to become an expert on any of the solutions on the technical - programming - side of things. I would rather become an expert in the using - build great internet propery side of things. I prefer having the thing built and concentrate on delivering content (within a smart structure - userfriendly wise and seofriendly wise)
- 2 multisite thing appeals to me, having it all in one database and just add content from there. Easier from backup point of view, the less systems the better type of thing.

So perhaps I should change this post into an invitation to build what I want on a functional level, while using my current look. And then compare it to modx and wordpress.

If anyone is game to give me a quote on that I am happy to consider this.

thanks

Robert

Greetings, Robert -

If you wish to hire someone, then please contact folks via the pro network or by posting on our Job Board.

Let us know if you have any other questions.  Thanks!

Lisa, thanks, also for your earlier reply.

Robert