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Hello all,

Following a recent discussion at: http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/92807/P18/

At CP Home ›  Templates ›  Template Management, do you have a template group for each section of your site?

For example. if you have 3 main sections: Home, Contact and About. Do you have 3 template groups called home, contact and about each with their own index?

The url would look like: http://www.sitename.com/index.php/home/—> for home page
The url would look like: http://www.sitename.com/index.php/about/—> for about page

Or do you put everything in a general template group, say: ‘site’

http://www.sitename.com/index.php/site/—> to display the home page
http://www.sitename.com/index.php/site/about/—> to display the about page
http://www.sitename.com/index.php/site/contact/—> to display the contact page

In my opinion, the first method makes the url look cleaner. The second method has ‘site’ in every url

http://www.boyink.com/splaat/weblog/category/building-an-expressionengine-site/ Seems to have everything in a general template group name. In this tutorial at least

It’s a pure matter of personal preference. Don’t forget the Pages module, too.

http://veerle.duoh.com/ is using the second method.

Ingmar, which method are you using? Just curious

I have used both. As I’ve said, it depends.

in the past I put everything into one template group. However the last site I made (my first client) I used seperate groups for each section of the site. I think it makes for some nice url structure.

I may shift to ‘General’ as it’s more theory than tech really.

I personally prefer the second method.  It’s faster and I don’t think losing a segment in the url is all that important.  But if the client is worried about it, I tend to use pages now.  But as Ingmar depends- just depends on the site and personal preferences.

Which is easier to manage? I guess that is what I am looking for?

I may shift to ‘General’ as it’s more theory than tech really.

By the way, what do you mean by more theory than tech?

More “general” than tech, would be my guess 😊 Not really a tech support issue per se, and I agree.

Ahh, i thought when he mentioned ‘general’, it was in pertinence to the general template group name. i.e. site

Which is easier to manage? I guess that is what I am looking for?

Generally, it’s easier to manage multiple categories inside a single template group, than it is to manage multiple template groups as sections of the site. That said, it all depends on what you want to accomplish. A single template group is an elegant solution with not much replication or complexity. However, if each “section” of the site has a different look and feel, different layout, then multiple template groups works, too.

There’s a slight advantage to keyword/URL string density for search engines with multiple template groups (assuming the name is relevant to the content). Maybe barely slight.

I’ve done it both ways—single template group, multiple template groups—and the former is easier to manage, in most cases, than the latter. Often it’s a matter of how much you can remember.

Funny - for me multiple template groups is easier to manage.  I started with the all in one group approach but always use one template group per site section now.

It makes more sense the more templates you have for a given section of a site.  As you indicate - with the one template group you’d lose a segment and are able to have shorter individual template names, which I like.

Hi Boyink. I am going to give the single template per group a shot.

Thanks all for the feedback so far