Thread

I tend to think of weblogs in functional terms, as well as in structural terms (where weblogs correspond to sections on my site). As was mentioned earlier, it’s a good idea to do some good analysis of the content on your site. You might find that you can use one weblog to control multiple sections of your site.

For example, if you go to http://hahndentalclinic.com/meet-the-doctors/ and http://hahndentalclinic.com/meet-the-team/, you’ll see that those are two separate sections of the site. However, the content of both sections is coming from the same weblog.

When the site’s administrator adds a new staff member, they select which category that staff member belongs to—they’re either a “Doctor” or a “Team Member”. The templates for the two pages are then coded to pull in the correct content, based on the category.

Another example of this might be an event calendar. Say you’ve got a website that displays information for multiple departments, and each one of those has their own event calendar. Rather than create separate weblogs for each department’s calendar, I’d create a single event calendar weblog, and then organize the events using categories, where each category corresponds to a department.

Then, as with the site above, I would set up each department’s event calendar template to pull just the info from its corresponding category of event calendar entries. (This assumes that each event, regardless of department, contains the exact same info.)

In the above examples, I’m thinking of weblogs in terms of their function—what they do—and not just in terms of their location—where they reside on my website’s site map.

Good examples Opuszine…

You use the term “function”, it’s pretty much the same as when I use “data types”. The doctors/team info is the same (people info) so can use a common set of custom fields (name, image, bio, etc). and can be differentiated by categories. The event calendars are a totally different “type” of content/data, and perform a different function, so that needs a totally different set of custom fields, hence a different weblog. You could shoehorn all that in one weblog but it would be a mess and hard to manage.

Content and location don’t necessarily match up. Some content may in fact show up in multiple locations/sections.

So, let me put some examples out there and see what you guys think.

Here is the homepage of the site in question.

Notice how it breaks out into several main “sections” of the site.

Homepage
Camps & Retreats
Adventure Ministries
Oak Forest Center
LTD Program
Media Library
History Center
About Us

Inside of each one of these sections are a lot of static content.  The About Us section breaks down into:

About Us - Top Level
About Us
Facilities
Staff
Summer Ministry
Volunteer

And inside of each of those sections, there are several sub-pages as well.  The “About Us” section breaks down to:

About Us - Second Level
Administration
Founding Vision
Desired Outcomes
Ministry Strategies
Doctrinal Statement
Program Sites

This is fairly consistent throughout the entire site.  I do understand the concept of using different data types for different weblogs.  That is being implemented with things like the camper comments in the bottom left as well as for pulling in the categorically organized pictures in the menu sidebar.

So, would you suggest to have a weblog for the top about us section that would contain all the information about the items listed above?  And then separate them out with categories for the second level navigation?

Thanks for looking at this with me!

Jesse

You’re talking “structure”, site-map type stuff. That’s more related to templates and what weblogs (data/content) those templates pull in That’s totally different than content.

Weglogs are content/data. The number of weblogs is determined by the content types. For instance, your About/Missionary Staff is a list of people… Name, Title/Job, Place, Children ... That content can be rendered as just static html but in a dynamic system like EE one would probably create a staff weblog with a custom field group with four fields, one for each item. Each person would be a single entry in that weblog. Contract Staff is similar but only uses two fields… Name, Job ... These two subsections could use the same weblog since they are so similar and the two types of staff can be distinguished by categories (Missionary, Contract). All staff content is similar (slight variations) and could be the same weblog with all the fields required for them as a whole. You’d leave some fields blank depending on which you need for the specific group.
Ok, that’s content/data (weblog).

The display of the above is handled by templates. The whole “staff” section could be one templateGroup with one template (index). The url could tell EE what to display…
example.com/index.php/staff/missionary/ (tells EE to display only the staff categorized as missionary)
example.com/index.php/staff/contract/ (tells EE to display only the staff categorized as contract)

Within that one template, you can use conditionals…the weblog:entries tag would be something like this…
{if segment_2 == "missionary"}
{exp:weblog:entries weblog="staff" category="1"}
]Fields to display
{/exp:weblog:entries}
{if:elseif segment_2 == "contract"}
{exp:weblog:entries weblog="staff" category="2"}
Fields to display
{/exp:weblog:entries}
[color=orange{/if}[/color]

You’d use conditionals for as many different staff pages you have.
Note: The conditionals could be less verbose but work and illustrate the process.

Ok, that’s staff. The facilities section could follow the same method, a “facilities” weblog with a custom field group… Place, Image, Description ... The various facilities could be the categories, Main Buildings (main category), Lakeview Center (subcategory to main), etc. You’d the same technique as above to display the various facilities.

The main point I’m trying to make/demonstrate is twofold… Data/weblogs are one side of the site, Display/Structure is the other. They might be directly related but not necessarily.

You seem to be thinking in “static” site mode, EE is dynamic so it’s a different mindset.
Any of that make sense or have I just confused things?

Any of that make sense or have I just confused things?

Yes, it makes very good sense.  I do understand the concept behind putting the content into the weblogs.  I guess that my biggest question is, how to deal with the organization of the data. 

The staff example is an easy concept.  Separate the data from the structure in a weblog…
But the spiderweb of different areas that similar content needs to be displayed is somewhat mind-boggling for me!

Many of the pages on the site are simple and would only require a basic field for the content.  But those are spread out throughout all the major sections of the site.  So would you suggest I have one weblog to contain all the basic pages?

Maybe I need to take some time and see if I can absorb all of this!  Thanks for taking the time to help!

Jesse

Maybe I need to take some time and see if I can absorb all of this!

I find I spend a fair amount of time up front analyzing/contemplating content and structure. Takes a bit to get a handle of it sometimes.

You might want to check out the Pages Module. It comes in handy for certain types of “static” content.