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Hi everyone!

I’m very new to expression engine, in fact I started working with it for the first time today. I’m really enjoying it so far and the documentation is proving very helpful. However I need something explained to me as I seem to be confusing myself the more and more I read. I’m hoping this is the right area to put it in too, as I don’t view it as ‘Technical’ really.

Basically I’m trying to get my head around the structure of weblogs and how I should be using them. This is my navigation:

<ul>
<li>Home</li>
<li>The Team</li>
<li>Services</li>
<li>Products</li>
<li>Bits For Boats</li>
<li>Contact</li>
</ul>

Now, what is the best way to structure this in the weblogs end? Would I just have a weblog called ‘content_pages’ or something similar and add entries to that? If so what is the correct way to be pulling them into a page? Does the navigation just link to it and the EE dynamically generates it?

I know this all seems basic but I’m just trying to get my head around it after just using Pages in Wordpress.

Thanks a lot for your time. 😊

There’s no “set” way to structure, it depends on your content. Weblogs are just content containers. If all your content can use the same custom weblog fields, you may just use one weblog and classify it by using categories. But, in most cases, and In your case, the content will be different depending on the section of the site. For instance…

The Team is probably a custom field set… Name, Title, Bio
Products probably requires a different field set… Name, Features, Specs, Etc.

Since each of those sections requires a different field set, each would be a separate weblog.

Make sense?

Edit-Add: How you set up your content/data isn’t necessarily directly related to the structure. Weblogs= content/data. Templates = presentation/display/URL

I agree, the documentation, wiki and knowledge base are all very helpful.
But if you want a little more of a gentle push to achieving that brillian AHA! moment, I recommend you follow these tutorials:

http://www.boyink.com/splaat/comments/building-an-expressionengine-site-chapter-1/

http://www.train-ee.com/courseware/free_tutorials/comments/why-expressionengine-for-a-church-site/

I have been a member here on the forums for about two years now. I thought I knew a lot about how to use EE. It wasn’t until taking those tutorials that I really understood all the hidden ways of getting things done.

Try it, you won’t regret it!

One general rule I try to follow is: each section of a website (which you might call each top level nav item) gets its own weblog. I like to follow this rule because when I hand the site management off to a client, the weblogs are structured like the site navigation, and it makes it easier for them to find the entries that they want to edit. You can’t always set up your blogs exactly like your nav, but it helps to be close.

Also, these entries have been helpful to me, as they fill in some items missed in tutorials: http://expressionengine.com/blog/article_list/category/importance_of_semantics/

tantau, I do the same exact thing. There are all sorts of ways to organize your site (some more convoluted than others) on the backend, but I always try to do it with an eye towards client manageability. This generally means I rely less on using categories for structure (it gets very cumbersome extremely quickly) and try to be smart about grouping my content into weblogs (or “sections”, as I refer to them).

For content (like the About page, contact page) that don’t really warrant their own weblog, I create a catch-all weblog called “Site Pages” or some other descriptive name and use the Pages module to create that content. Again, I do this all keeping in mind the easiest way for the client to manage the site after I’ve moved on to a new project.

Thanks so far for all the help guys, I’m going to read through all those links and then go from there, but I think I get the weblog side of things now.  I’m still not 100% on how I pull all the correct information and generate the appropriate page but I’ll run through the links first and then if I still don’t get it I’ll post here.

Thanks again for the replies, appreciate it.

Oversimplifying, you use the weblog tag (or multiple weblog tags, each displaying content from a different weblog) to pull the information from the database for display on a given page (e.g., template). ‘Page’ has its own specific meaning in both Wordpress and EE, distinct from dynamic weblog-ish posts.

The specific data displayed for each weblog can be controlled by assigning appropriate weblog tag parameters to each individual weblog tag (for instance, how many posts to display, in which order, etc).

Each web-displayed page (which can have multiple weblogs assembled within it) is generated by one template within a template group. Put another way, you ‘tell’ that template which weblogs to generate (using weblog tag(s)) and how to display the data from each weblog by assigning weblog parameters with the weblog tags.

Then, you can go template-bonkers by embedding (pieces of) templates within other templates. Save that for tomorrow ....

@russlipton - surprisingly embedding templates inside other templates is something I got instantly and am already using. Probably because I use php includes all the time so yeah.

Thanks for all your help guys, I think I’ve pretty much got it sussed now, apart from one little thing. So I have my the_team weblog which for me is viewable at http://localhost:8888/YHT001/index.php/the_team/ - which is all cool. Now lets say I have a list of people on this page: Name One, Name Two etc, and when you click these I want to go to a full blown profile page. What’s the best way to go about it?

Ideally I want the client to be able to Publish a ‘new person’ and it automatically get added to the_team page and when they’re clicked it automatically generates the page with the content in it. So click Name One which takes you to /the_team/name_one/ with all the content. Would you do this the same way you write posts then click read more to get the full article?

Thanks again for your time.

You’d need to have the name links on that multi-entry page specify which single entry you want linked/displayed…
http://www.example.com/index.php/templateGroup/template/entryID/
That last segment could be the url_title instead of ID.

That tells EE you want to display just that particular entry using the specified templateGroup/template.

Does that help?

That makes sense thanks, alright I think I’ve covered most of my questions. Lets see how this goes!

Thanks everyone.

I should add, the templateGroup/template might be the same one as the multi-entry or a different one entirely. A lot depends on what’s in your templates. In the typical “blog” you’d have the multi-entry (summary) template and a different one for the single entry with comments.

OK, next question! I decided to keep the question in this thread for now rather than spamming topics for each of my questions. What’s the best way to force an image size?

I made a custom field where the image needs to go (staff list), but when I add an image through Publish it has the width/height that I specified but also the width/height of the image. Is there a way to make it so it just uses my height and width and resizes the image if necessary?

FYI - You’re probably better off starting a new thread with a proper title, you get more responses that way.
——-

Do you have an example of what it’s inserting?

Have you set up image resizing in the file upload preferences?
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