Channels and template groups

Hi Claus,

You can think of Templates as the physical “html” pages of your site. Channels are the groupings of dynamic content that goes into the templates.

You COULD build a site with just Templates, and no channels, but you cannot build a site with Channels and no templates.

You can technically create a template group for each page of your site and then hard code html content into it & EE would serve that up just fine, However, since this is a content manager, we create “Channels” for our content that can easily be updated in the Control panel and then call that content into the template through {exp:channel:entries} tags.

If you did not install the demo site when you installed EE, I would suggest doing so just so that you can pull apart those pages, compare them to the content & see the relationship.

Hopefully that helps.

Hi Russ,

many thanks. Where do I get this demo site? I found this website, but I can’t download it.

Claus

When you install ExpressionEngine, there should have been an option a the bottom of the installer window (where you entered your Database Credentials) to install them. I forget if it is referred to as “demo” or “default” site. It has been some years since I installed them.

Hi Russ,

I had to install ExpressionEngine anew, but now the demo site is there alright. I will look into it.

Claus

While the video is dated… it might be worth take a quick peek at the following 10 min primer video.

While longer, this is a pretty solid video series on getting up and running with EE as well.

Cheers!

-Tom Jaeger

Hi Tom & Russ,

many thanks for your recommendations. One question, though: Where in the default site are the style sheets (CSS)? I couldn’t find them. I mean, where in the backend? I thought that they should be available under templates, but they aren’t there.

Claus

For the frontend default site, check in the themes folder- themes/user/site/assets/ - all the js, css and even image folders will be there.

With the system and themes folders, all the ‘user’ stuff that EE won’t touch during an upgrade will be in a ‘user’ folder. So all of the ‘unique to you’ stuff? That’ll be in either system/user or themes/user.

Hi Claus, If you are asking about the default site, then Robin’s answer above is the one…. however, If you are meaning your own stylesheets and Javascript for your site,…

You CAN create those in the templates directory and set the File type appropriately. However, My preference (and I think that of many others) is to keep that independent of the CMS. For instance, I create an “Assets” directory at the root level and inside of that I have a folder for my ‘css’, ‘js’, ‘images’, etc… I then link to that relative path in my HTML head of my page.

NOTE: Ignore the images below… they didn’t post correctly

Hi Robin & Russ,

many thanks. I found the style sheets. One cannot access them via the backend, but I used my file browser, and there they were. 😊

Claus

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