Thread

Hello,

I am new to EE and in the recent days I tried to learn as much as I can about the system. I made quick progress and I already fell in love with EE 😉

But there is one question open (yes, I already studied the guide):

What is the sense behind the Pages module? Or in other words: For what should I use the Pages module instead of the Weblog module?

Thanks and regards…

Can’t speak for everyone but I use Pages for relatively “static” parts of a site - about, contact, location, etc - and the Weblog for everything else. Pages allows one to specify an exact (simple) URL. Weblogs adhere (mostly) to a TemplateGroup/Template/Something URL structure. Weblogs are more full featured/flexible, at least to me.

I’ve moved this up to the General forum since it really is a general question, and is about first-party modules.

Like PXLated, I use Pages for entries that are consistent navigation features that I want super-short URLs.  Bio, Colophon, that sort of thing. Anything that is going to kind of roll down into archives I just use a standard entry without a Pages URI.

Another reason to use the Pages module is if you need to keep an existing about.htm or about.php file because it’s in the search engines with that file name.

You would rename your “real” about.htm or about.php, and set the pathing on your Page version of the entry to /about.htm or /about.php

I typically only do a few Pages per site, but your mileage may vary.

Thanks a lot for your postings. Now I understand it better and know how to use it.

Best regards…

I guess I’ll be a bit of a dissenting voice…I haven’t yet used the pages module.  My perspective is more around using it for client sites - but here’s a copy of a post I had in another forum around it:

Overall, I would only consider using Pages if:

* The site was all (or very nearly all) static content that could be handled with the Pages module.
* I had *very* tech savvy clients/content administrators
* The site had complex URL requirements
* The content on the site was very similar page to page (so I could use one or two templates to display it all).

What I don’t like about Pages is:

* It begins to define my content as a Page, when I think one of the strengths of EE, once you can get your arms around it, is that it thinks of content as “Posts” instead, and it’s up to you and your templates to decide what combination of posts wash out in the site as a Page.

* I don’t like clients having to think about URL structures.  For most of my clients this would be beyond them.  I just like them to be able to publish their content and let the system define the URL.

* I don’t like clients being presented with a choice of output template. I don’t want them to have to see or worry about what template to use, that’s my role as the developer.

* I don’t like having >1 workflow for content on a site, and the Pages module creates a workflow for managing some content that’s different from other content.

* I don’t think it’s all that easy to educate clients on what “Static” content is - is something static if it only changes once a year, once a month, or once a week?  And didn’t I sell them on the fact that their whole site would be dynamic/database driven? For me *all* content is dynamic - just with varying degrees of likelihood of change.;

There are a number of ways to handle “static” content without the Pages module, and still have the site build navigation dynamically.  I’ve documented a number of them here:

http://www.boyink.com/splaat/static/

@ Michael - Amen!

Terry