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I am about to step away from this computer for a little bit but I have a few questions regarding EE as I am developing my first site on this platform so let me begin.

I understand templates are basically pages, so I have created a template called Page_Layout and I use it as a base for all my main pages, i.e about us, contact, company info, etc. This appears to work fine for me being the site admin but there will be someone else doing minor updates to the site from time to time, like updated company news and there will be a blog. I am a little confused how I would set that up. It sounds like I would setup a weblog for just news and then one that will be a dedicated blog.

Then I would like to pull entries from both and list them on the homepage along with some static content from the template.

Can someone give me some direction to this

Next is a member list, the site lists companies in various markets like advertising and communications, I want each company to have their own page but I want that page to belong in a category like advertising so if someone is looking for such a company they can click the name advertising and it list all the companies. Any suggestions on setting that up?

Like I said this is my first site with EE and I hope I havent bitten off too much to begin, thanks so much for any suggestions you all may have.

Hello David,

Most of these things are done quite easy in ExpressionEngine. Are you wanting to let your contributor post directly from your website or through the back-end administration of EE? Asides from that, when you try and imagine content, think of how ExpressionEngine stores it as being very abstract. Your content layer is essentially just the content, whatever way you want to display it on your site, is relatively simple by using the {exp:weblog:entries} tag.

I’d recommend you check out the Boyink or Train-EE articles and it will greatly help you understand what to do. Furthermore, there are some screencasts available from PragProg.com from Ryan Irelan that are great as well. The screencasts in particular, has actually shown me quite a bit of things I have no idea about.

I have a site running right now that I built almost 3 years ago that seems to match your member list issue. You can see it at http://www.industrialcouncil.org, with the member listing pages at http://www.industrialcouncil.org/membership/directory. I have a weblog setup for companies, and then a weblog for company reps. The reps have a relationship field that ties them to their company from the company weblog entries. It works quite nicely.

David, have you seen Michael Boyink’s tutorial? You should definitely take a look.

http://www.train-ee.com/courseware/blog/category/building-a-church-site/P15/

For the Member/Company list I would use a weblog with categories and definitely use the “category name in URL” feature.

Weblog Categories Tag
Global Weblog Preferences