ExpressionEngine - I'm a beginner, have I set up my Channels correctly?

Question

I'm a beginner at ExpressionEngine, so I'm wondering if this is actually the right way to do things. Here's how my site is laid out:

• Construction
  • List of Construction case studies
    • Case Study 1
    • Case Study 2
    • etc.
• Hydrology
  • List of Hydrology case studies
    • Case Study 1
    • Case Study 2
    • etc.
• Sustainability
  • List of Sustainability case studies
    • Case Study 1
    • Case Study 2
    • etc.

What I have done is set up a Channel called "Home" for my homepage, and a channel called "Case Studies", along with corresponding Channel Field Groups for both.

In terms of Templates, I have created a Template Group called "Home", and a Template Group called "Case Studies".

All is fine with the "Home" group. This is where I'm getting confused - with "Case Studies" Template Group, I have two Templates - "index", and "case_study".

What I would like is:

• From the homepage, users can click through to a list of all Case Studies within a Category
• From the list of Case Studies, users can click through to see an individual Case Study

I have gotten the list of all Case Studies working, but I cannot find a way to filter it by category (via the URL or otherwise). Is such a thing possible in EE, or am I using it in the 'right' way?

I have tried accessing http://mysite.com/case_studies/index/hydrology to try to only show the Hydrology-categorised case studies, but they are all appearing.

Answer 1

If I'm interpreting your setup correctly, Jack, it seems you have the right basic setup and it may just be a couple of small edits you need to make to your setup to have the links work the way you intend.

First, go into Admin > Channel Administration > Global Preferences and ensure that you set "Use Category URL Titles In Links?" to yes (otherwise, rather than a category name, EE with us the category ID number). You can also set your "Category URL Indicator" to "cat" or "category" - whatever you prefer to see in your URL.

In your case-studies/index template, you would then have a sidebar that would list your categories. Basic example:

{exp:channel:categories channel="case_studies" style="nested"}
<a href="{path='case-studies'}">{category_name}</a>
{/exp:channel:categories}

You can add other parameters as needed, such as show_empty="no" etc. This will link each category back to a filtered view of the main index page at case-studies/index with a url like mysite.com/case-studies/category/hydrology

In the index, you can add the category heading tag pair to dynamically add the category name, description or other custom category fields to the top of the filtered list, if needed.

Hope this helps!

FYI - there's a dedicated ExpressionEngine community setup in StackExchange at expressionengine.stackexchange.com that'll help you get responses more quickly.