Thread

I’m curious why the developers of EE chose to make the template group part of the URI.  This unnecessarily welds the presentation to the semantic structure and limits the options for the directory structure of a website.

Here is an example.  Suppose I create a template for articles, and name it “articles”.  All of my articles will now be prefaced with this template uri: http://mysite.com/articles/

But what if I want to make a special template for a certain article, say the Halloween article?  If I make a new template for it, my Halloween article is now in a different “directory” based solely on the presentation, rather than the content.

It seems to me that was a major design blunder that should be fixed when you release your next big version of EE.

Woah ho ho! Prepare to get heavily criticized for those statements. Over here we all love the EE URL’s and we’re pretty confident it helps people design better websites.

And to solve your problem, if you install the “Pages” module, you can create a certain article and customize it’s URL to be precisely what you want it to be.

The footnote here being that you should really try using EE’s ways of creating URLs. It will help you, and it is NOT a major design blunder - it’s really one of the things that make EE unique.

Are you saying there is a way to set URL’s that does not require using the template name as part of the path?

Just think of the template groups as directories? Put your Halloween template in the articles template group…or rewrite the URL via htaccess.

Short of that, as Doggie says, check out the Pages module.

Subimpulse,

Believe me when I tell you that there are many ways to go about shaping the url of your site while keeping it easy for you to maintain your sanity. That’s actually the reason why I love ExpressoionEngine. There several ways to go about this, check it out!

I’m curious why the developers of EE chose to make the template group part of the URI.  This unnecessarily welds the presentation to the semantic structure and limits the options for the directory structure of a website.

Well, not necessarily so. You just have to figure out how to get your templates and weblogs to work together! It sounds like your fighting EE instead of letting it work for you.

Here is an example.  Suppose I create a template for articles, and name it “articles”.  All of my articles will now be prefaced with this template uri: http://mysite.com/articles/

But what if I want to make a special template for a certain article, say the Halloween article?  If I make a new template for it, my Halloween article is now in a different “directory” based solely on the presentation, rather than the content.

First, you would want a template group called “articles”. The you could create a template called “Halloween” inside of your “article group” to run all of the Halloween articles out of.

This would give you the url:

yoursite.com/articles/halloween/article_title.

In fact you could continue this trend if you want to, but it seems pretty cumbersome.

Once you understand how everything comes together, you aren’t limited at all! Honestly though, I’m not understanding why you’d create a template just for one article. Why not preface the title with the word “Halloween” in your entry? his would give you:

yoursite.com/articles/halloween_article_title.

Or you could just create a category to hold all of your Halloween stuff.

We’ve got your back man, so if you have any questions, anyone here would be happy to give you a hand! Seriously - the sky is the limit…