Do you use more than one template per site?

Hi All

I am still learning Modx and I am just starting my third website using Modx. I wanted to know if you all used different templates for different designs on a site.

My portfolio site is www.adaptwebdesign.com. I have the structure and I am look to put more emphasis on my portfolio and update it. I want to achieve something like http://rhdesigns-ltd.com/ to bring focus to my portfolio.

As i have my basic two column structure, I would have to use a different template for my homepage content section.

Let me know your thoughts or how I could achieve this affect by not changing my existing template.

Thanks in advance.

Phil

Phil
I have sites that use many templates. It’s the easiest way to make it easy for clients to organize content. And I definitely use a different home page template on most sites.

Example: one client is an artist. He has a blog and a store. The store template includes lots of Template Variables for his products - image, price, size, etc - while the blog template includes comments and has a different menu.

Welcome aboard!

You can use as many templates as you feel comfortable with. Sometimes I’ll play a game of seeing how much I can twist a single template into different forms using TVs and TV-specified CSS files, but it’s usually more trouble than it’s worth.

A good idea is to make judicious use of chunks to contain the bulk of your template <head>...<head> section, as well as the footer. That way you don’t have to duplicate any changes to those parts, just editing the chunk will change it for both templates.

I have seen designs where the template was nothing but a handful of chunk tags, but I find that very difficult to deal with since you can’t see what the basic structure of the template is that way. I prefer to have the "skeleton" HTML tags, with the content of those tags in chunks where it seems appropriate. I do try to never have the text that will be in the final page in the template, just the HTML structure. Everything else is some kind of MODx tag, either site or document variable tags ([(site_name)] and [*pagetitle*] for example), chunks, TVs or snippets.

Depends on the requirement of each of the pages, and who’ll use it.
If it’s only for your own, do what ever you like.

But if it is for your client, I suggest you always use templates to hide snippets and chunks from the [*content*] area.
http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,43872.0.html
More different snippets/chunks, more templates you should make.
Always provide your client an empty text-area.

I don’t think I’ve ever used more than 2 templates, but I can imagine sites where you would. Bob’s Guides has a single template, but it’s a fairly simple site, design-wise.

I use many templates for each site...
I use them to change the layout of a section or
just to have all section TVs in one template, otherwise
I will have to play a lot with ManagerManager to hide
the TVs for each section for each type of user.

One template per section makes it to manage the TVs, layout,
content and security easier for me...

I’m using 12 templates on the site I’m currently working on. I probably don’t need quite that many, but it makes it easy if you have a lot of different sections.

I normally have 1 for the home page and 1 for content. Sharing what code I can between each of them. I then like to have a TV to specify any slight amends, for example say a drop down TV to specify if it’s one or two columns.

I’ve also like to give the body and ID to specify what css is used on the page.

Absolutely. On the last site I built I used 28 templates, of which 7 were data templates (never seen by the user but used to make the admin editing interface simple for particular content types e.g. testimonials) and the rest were page templates with varying designs and TVs attached.

yes, i often have 2 template (home, page) minimum..

here is a trix to reduce the amount of template:

i load an external html with @FILE for my template. ( with this plugin from heliotrope)

if i need another template then i duplicate the template (in the manager, not in the filesystem).

So i get multiples templates in manager (for tv associations eg.) but only ONE html source .


Then i use PHx to show/hide different part of the template .