Building a Church Site

This post in the Building a Church Site on ExpressionEngine will cover how to use the weblog/index template for weblog, category, and archive views.  In order to do that I use several new-to-the-series EE tags, do some in-depth URL analysis, and then put EE segment variables and conditionals to work.

Weblogs can be a great communication vehicle for churches - allowing the church to keep a steady flow of news and updates to the site.  The weblog can also be a place where the pastor can minister to the church members during the week.  In this chapter of the Building a Church Site Series I’ll cover implementing the backend components necessary for the weblog section of the church site I’m building on ExpressionEngine.

In this chapter of the Building a Church Site series I’ll begin the ExpressionEngine integration, starting with the home page.  I’ll cover creating a new weblog and a new field group.  Then I’ll create some new content in the weblog, and add the necessary EE tags the template to pull that new content back from the weblog back to the Home Page.

In this installment the remaining unique content styles from the purchased template set are brought into ExpressionEngine templates and some additional coding tweaks are applied for better page structure, search engine optimization and accessibility.

Embedded templates in ExpressionEngine are great for centralizing the storage of certain snippets of code; but sometimes - like with a Page Title - they need to display things that are unique to the page where they are being viewed.  I’ve included the title tags in the embedded html_header template, which is great for centralizing our doctype and stylesheet link; but, I still want unique page titles for SEO & Bookmarks.  How to have both?  By using Embed Variables for the Embedded Template.