Read the previous posts in the series:
Start your ExpressionEngines!
ExpressionEngine Day 1
ExpressionEngine Day 2

Another day with ExpressionEngine and things seem much like they did yesterday—positive. I think that EE is very powerful and I am starting to like there interface. They have some nice eye candy that grabs peoples attention like the Google Analytics addon I spoke about yesterday. I previewed that you a few people that they loved it!

Now as I begin to thoroughly test it out and think about how I would implement it with client projects I ran into one issue.

The way that EE seems to be set up is that when you would like create a section of page you create your template for that page, followed by creating the Channel then publishing content.

But the way that I work with a lot of my websites is I will have a “Default” or “Page” template that many of the pages on the website are based off of. Yes there will always be custom templates for specific pages but I think it is fare to say that when a site is built the majority of pages can use the same template. This seems to be a sticky point for ExpressionEngine.

But fear not, Structure is here to save the day. To quote viget.com Structure allows the following “Entries [to be] linked to templates, and not vice versa.” EE’s issue is that templates are linked to pages. So when you want to create a new page, you need to create a new template. When you use Structure, pages become linked to templates. So you can create 1 template and build make Pages or “Entries” as you wish. Structure is a plugin I will most definitely be using.

Easy Content Management with Structure

It also allows for easy content management, presenting your website content in a tree view allow you to see all the pages and parent – child relations and allowing you to easily re-order/re-organize it.

Navigation

It also provides us a few navigational benefits. In EE we cannot simply spit out a list of navigation. You can only do this with a particular Channel or Categories. Structure allows you to use a tag to dynamically generate a navigation menu. It will also provide you with handy breadcrumbs with different parameters like “Include Home link”. It also will handle submenus making it ideal for dropdown and flyout menu systems.

Conclusion

I only touched on a few benefits of Structure today but I urge you to check it out—it will save you time for sure. Structure also has other features which I am sure you can utilize.

I am still enjoying ExpressionEngine, here are a few other handy Addons I found today:

SEO Lite – a SEO addon.
Sitemap Generator – a handy sitemap generating that pings search engines.
Contact Manager – allows you to drop a contact form anywhere you want.
CKEditor – use the CKEditor WYSIWYG instead of the default plain text editor.
CP Analytics – integrate your Google Analytics stats right into your dashboard.

Note all of these add ons are compatible for ExpressionEngine 2.0.