Get Channel Entries for URL Title

Just to recap:

• Your URL is: http://yoursite.com/index.php/about/missions-vision

• You have a template group named /about (case sensitivity is important here)

• The about/index template has:

{exp:channel:entries channel="about"}
{title}
{other_fields}
{/exp:channel:entries}

• The short name of the About channel is “about” (again, case sensitivity here).

• You have an entry in the About channel with the url_title of missions-vision that is set to an Open status, has no expiration date, and a publish date not set in the future.

If all of those are true the content should load.

If it doesn’t load there is something goofy about the install, or there are HTACCESS rules still in place, or possibly a Template Route has been setup that is getting in the way.

Let’s get this to load before worrying about additional content (and again, there is no such thing as a “subpage” in EE-speak, just another entry that has to appear at a deeper URL).

When I use mysite.com/index.php/about and

{exp:channel:entries channel="about"}
...
{/exp:channel:entries}

It tries to load both ‘about’ then ‘mission-vision’. i.e. it loops through all ‘about’ channel entries.

Yep - that’s how EE works. You aren’t being any more specific by the URL so the entries tag doesn’t know which entry you want and returns everything. If you add /about or “/mission-vision” to the URL it should only return that entry.

That doesn’t help, I need subpages of the channel to show up with content…that’s where Structure helped.

Again, set aside the subpages idea for now. You need to get past thinking about sites as a collection of pages in order to fully get the value of EE. We can get there without using Structure but you are trying to run before you walk.

Does the specific content come up when you add the url-title to the URL?

Yes, about/about and about/mission-vision work perfectly. Do I just use segment_1, segment_2, etc…?

OK - from here to get deeper URLS you have a number of options, but you need to understand that you’ll be working a bit outside of EE’s default way of handling URLs/

1 - Use dynamic=”no” url_title=”{last_segment}” as parameters (but understand this may open up the ability to have junk urls in segments before the last one).

2 - Use the 1st party Pages module to create a specific URL for specific entry and map it to a template.

3 - Use same-channel relationships to create hierarchy and navigation (I have an example of this in my book).

4 - Look at 3rd party nav-building tools like Nav-ee or Taxonomy that allow you to create a hierarchy and then map each node to a template and content entry.

All of these methods are less intrusive than Structure.

Which one to use might depend on the rest of the site and URL requirements found in those other areas. I try to be as native as possible with my builds because the more 3rd party addons you use the harder it is to update a build when EE updates.

Thank you so much for your help. The Pages module looks like it will work fine.

Can you build navigation from the Pages module? I have just included a PHP file with an array that echoes the navigation based on the array.

https://ellislab.com/expressionengine/user-guide/add-ons/channel/channel_entries.html#show-pages