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ExpressionEngine - organising your content

In my previous ExpressionEngine post I skimmed over the main features of ExpressionEngine CMS. In this new series of articles I’ll talk about your content and how you can organise it.

With Expression Engine, and most other Content Management Systems, you have to eliminate all thoughts of web pages and think more about items of content.

Each item of content can be a group of anything, text, images, videos, file downloads, or web links. ExpressionEngine then assembles pages in real time to display your content items in pretty much any way you want - the possibilities are endless!

But first, your site needs some sort of site structure using ExpressionEngine’s methods…

Weblogs

First off get the word “blog” out of your mind, think of Weblogs as different Sections of your site. For example you might have a Section on your site for news and another for a photo gallery, as the type of content is quite different - one is mainly text and the other is mainly images - it would be an option to keep them separated.

You don’t have to use multiple Weblogs to structure your content at all, but if you have lots of content types then keeping them in logical areas makes sense, either for management needs or presentational requirements.

Categories

With ExpressionEngine you can categorise anything - articles, products, links, hobbies, photos, videos, news items… you get the idea! Typical uses would be for product catalogues, articles/news, job listings, event listings or whatever else you can think of.

Going a step further you can even share Categories between “Weblogs”, this allows you to associate different types of content, for instance in your news item you may want to display an image that shares the same category.

Entries

An “Entry” refers to a group of content, the parts of which can be used anywhere on site in whole or part.

Each Entry has a title and any sort of data associated width it such as a text, video/audio file, and image(s), in fact any sort of information you can think of. You can then display your Entries or parts of your Entries on any page. For instance, you might want to show just your news headlines on your home page and the full story on another page, or display a list of the most 10 recent entries showing the Headline, summary, author and photo.

Combine Categories with Entries and you start to get many more possibilities. Let’s say you want to categorise your news items - World news, Local news and Sport - you can now separate your information into more finely tuned areas just like all the big news sites do.

Dates

ExpressionEngines built in dating system allows you to assign publication and expiry dates dates to your items of content. This adds a new dimension to Weblogs, Categories and Entries allowing you to do things like hiding future news entries, creating date dependant entries such as a list of new products, or just simply display the publish date.

EE’s calendar functionality allows you to filter your content by specific days, weeks or months making it ideal for things like event listings, tour schedules, or even a blog!

Comments

Getting feedback from your customers is always a good thing and the Comments facility can be adapted for many uses. Of course the basic use is for leaving a message on a news or blog article but it can just as easily be used for client testimonials.

Confused?

There isn’t a right or wrong way to set up ExpressionEngine but the sheer number of possibilities it presents does require some thought and planning, and that’s probably best left to the web designer to recommend as he/she will know the system well enough.

I’d have to say that ExpressionEngine is like a box of Lego, you can built pretty much anything!