Blog Category List Template and Specified URL Structure
How Do I?
Working on my first EE site and I’m stuck on how to structure my templates for the blog categories that results in a clean URL structure. Here’s what I’m trying to achieve (note: index page is my blog roll):
- Each blog post has multiple category tags. When clicking on a category I want to display a filtered blog roll related only to that category.
- I’d like that template to have the freedom to adjust the layout some as I might add some additional sidebar info related to that category down the road. So is that a separate template entirely or the same template as the main blog roll but utilizing conditional statements to adjust the layout if we’re on a single category page?
- I’d like the URL structure for the category page to be the first segment after my domain. So the URL would be “site-domain/category”.
- URL structure for each post is currently “site-domain/post/post-title” as I have a template group called “post” with an index limiting the channel entries to 1. This works fine, I’m just noting it in case it’s helpful in describing my setup.
- Right now my index with the blog roll has working categories but the links use {path='site'} in the href which outputs this URL structure: “site-domain/site/category/design”. I came across this solution via an article on how to build a blog in EE, so while it works it’s not the structure I want. A friend of mine who knows EE better than I do (I’m a beginner) says I might have to add some plugins to get this to work, so I have no idea what that entails and where to look.
I’ve heard that it’s tricky trying to manage segment 1 urls, so not sure if I need to forego this whole idea and stick with more native urls.
I’m happy to continue to chase down solutions if I can be pointed in the right direction. Also, I can paste in some template code or answer questions about how I have EE configured if needed. I appreciate anyone’s time with this, thanks!
Welcome to the forums
Is your site primarily a blog? If it is you could use your default template group index file to list category data.
In your index template you can do something like this:
{if segment_1 == ""}
Home page content
{/if}
{if segment_1 == "catgeory"}
Category content
{/if}That will give you a category URL like example.com/category/my-category
Another approach is to use a template group called /blog and use that index template so you have a category URL like example.com/blog/category/my-category
Another approach is to use Template routes - https://docs.expressionengine.com/latest/templates/routes.html - these allow you to create custom URL’s that bypass the normal /template-group/template method.
All good ideas Rob, thank you for sharing some options. My site is primarily a blog so I see how I could use conditional statements to structure the index template. I’m going to dig into routes as well to see how they could work.
I was able to work up a solution which doesn’t give me originally what I wanted but it functionally works. I essentially opted for a template group called “category” and use that index to render a filtered list of posts based on the category. That nice thing about this solution is it cleanly separates my templates so I can better manage the main index and the category index.
Ah good thinking about a “category” template group - I’ve never used that approach but it’ll work.
As you learn you’ll find EE often has many ways to do the same thing 😊