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Before we can adventure into filtering and sorting content, we should first come up with a good display for that content.

One of the things that newcomers often don’t realize with ExpressionEngine is that the templates really are entirely under your control.  Expression assumes very little, so it follows that the weblog entries tag outputs only what you’ve told it specifically to output, and this leaves the design entirely in your hands.

While the default templates ship with CSS based layouts, a bug tracker is more tabular data.  So let’s explore how to create a table with the weblog entries tag.

Onwards!

Thanks much for taking the time to walk us through this!  I love seeing all the different ways to accomplish something with EE.

Thanks for the series, I enjoy reading it but on your last note, I’ll confess that I do not understand the rationale for the conditionals.
I mean I understand what you’re doing but it seems easier for me to just move the opening and closing table tags outside of the {exp:weblog:entries} loop.

<table><tr><td>title</td><td>title</td></tr>
{exp:weblog:entries ...}
...
{/exp:weblog:entries}
</table>

Is it because you don’t want to display the table if there are no entries or is there another reason to use the conditionals? Thanks in advance for the clarification.

Hi, Benoît ,

From this article:

At the same time, we don’t want the table tags outside of the weblog entries tags.  Why?  If there are no entries, we’ll have an empty table!

So, yes, that is exactly why we’re using conditionals. It’s also important to remember that these series are teaching tools, and so it’s important to cover a good many features so that those following the series can be exposed to those features.

Understood and I know the difficulties in building good examples to demonstrate all the features. Thanks.