Thread

Hi,
I am an EE noob, and as I progress in the discover of the functionality and try to built my first site with it, I have one or two question about the best methodology.

I am not sure what to do with the template groups:
I plan to built a very simple site, portfolio-like, with only a few subsections/pages: projects, blog and contact.
I wonder if it is a good idea to make one template groupe for each of the subsections, with each time an “index” template, so that the URL will be mysite/my_template_group, or if it is better/simplier to make one single template group and a template for each page.

What is the better method?
Is it only a personnal preference?

Thanks in advance for your time and your organisational tips and advices :coolsmile:

Is it only a personal preference?

If your site is going to remain simple with only a little bit of content over the long run, I’d say yes.

If you expect it to grow over time, though, you’d want to take that into consideration and organize according to your ambitions, and I would advise setting up with the flexibility and expandability to accommodate as much growth as you reasonably expect. That would tend to suggest using multiple template groups.

My site is very simple, though the total content is pretty big. I’m running two separate blogs out of a single template group, with a couple of other template groups for pages to support those blogs or for other aspects of the overall site. I created the separate groups mainly because the number of supporting templates for the blogs in the main group got to be too long for my personal preference. 😉

If I had bigger ambitions I would have to put the site through a serious reorganization.

I’d recommend one template group per section of the site - even if you only use the index template in the group.

It sets you up better if the site does grow, and can also lead to nicer urls.

For example - if your portfolio has an index page showing multiple entries and a detail page showing just one project, with the one template group you might have urls of:

mysite.com/index.php/site/portfolio/
mysite.com/index.php/site/portfolio_detail/project_name/

But if you implemented a portfolio template group you might have:

mysite.com/index.php/portfolio/
mysite.com/index.php/portfolio/detail/project_name/

The early EE sites I did the former approach with all templates in one group - and I wish now I had done the latter.

Thanks for your answers, i’ll go with the multiples templates groups ^__^