Organizational Advice

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I'm still fairly new with c5, building my first full site. I was wondering if a few of you might offer some advice as to how I might structure the lower-level pages of my site. It's really not a complex structure. It will look something like this:

- Centers
- Southwest Center
- Videos
- Faculty
- Etc.
-West Center
- Videos
- Faculty
- Etc.

And so on, for eight different centers. My question is regarding the use of Page Types and Blocks vs Stacks, and how those things operate throughout a given site.

My initial thought would be to have a single page type for the individual Center Pages. These pages share one element with all pages on the site, which is a main nav bar, constructed with several autoNav blocks. Let's say I make that nav bar a stack, adding it to all Page Types, will it consistently mark the current page in the navigation with "nav-current" class, or whatever?

Each of the Center pages also has a secondary sidebar navigation that lists all child pages (Videos, Faculty, Etc). This is where my second question comes in. With each of these pages, the only thing that really changes is the main content area, along with a new list item in the sidebar nav becoming "current." The most obvious way to do this in my mind would be to have each page as Page Type "Center Page," each with a content area where the sidebar nav goes. Then I could create 8 different Stacks with autoNav's featuring each of the Center's pages, then add the appropriate stack to the sidebar nav content area on each page.

Not ever having used the framework before, I'm just wondering if anyone has thoughts as to whether or not this approach makes sense. I know it's a long post, so if anyone makes it to the end, thanks for reading!

Philip

 
Mnkras replied on at Permalink Reply
Mnkras
Stacks are used when you want to have information that is on multiple pages and can be easily changed on all pages at once. Stacks are made up of blocks.

For your autonav thing, you can place the exact same block on all the pages, just as one of the options, choose Below this page.

I personally use different pagetypes when there are different layouts (2 columns, 3 columns etc) or, If I have something like events, where I want all "Event" pages setup in the same way.

The best way to figure out what is best for you is to just play with concrete5 and experiment.

Sorry for jumping all around ;)

Mike
madyogi replied on at Permalink Reply
Thanks for the thoughts, Mike. I know I need to just do something and see if it works to my liking, but I don't want to have to re-think too much along the way. Better to have the best plan possible going in.

Conceptually speaking, I want to make sure I am understanding the following items correctly:

1) You say, "For your autonav thing, you can place the exact same block on all the pages." With this approach, each individual page has a block that is controlled at the page level, meaning that changes to the autoNav on one page do not effect any other pages?

2) A stack can contain an autoNav block. A stack can be added to a content area on any page, just like a block. When the stack is edited from the dashboard, the stack updates everywhere it is deployed across the site.

3) Let's say I have two themes with a Content Area in default.php called ancilliaryContent. My home page uses default.php. Now, if I add a block to the ancillaryContent area while one theme is active, will that block automatically show up on my other theme's home page in the ancillaryContent area?

Thanks a bunch!