Is this bad template practice?

When I build a site in Revo, I tend to have 2 just templates.

1 A homepage template (lots of TVs and lots of work)
2 An ’innerpage’ template for all other pages (usually just 1 TV)

Because the homepage often has a lot of different areas that
need updating by the client, I used to chop these up into Template
Variables.

Mostly they were simply rich text areas but what I’ve found is that

1. It takes a while to TV up the homepage and make sure the TV names
in Dreamweaver match the TV names in ModX.
2. When A client wants a new TV area on the homepage, I quickly end
up with a lot of TVs and am not even sure which ones are still used etc

New Solution
Instead of creating lots of TVs, I now create a folder and create a resource
for what would have been a TV.
By using the GetResourceField snippet, I can pull content from Resource Field
into each template area. Clients just need to know that a Folder called
Home Feeds contains the resources they need to update the homepage
IE
HomeNews
Home intro text
Home image
Home Services list
Home Services intro text
etc etc etc

So what I was wondering was if I am saving time but doing something that might
be considered bad practice or even break during future Revo upgrades?

It’s odd, but I don’t think it will break in future versions and if the page load times are OK and your site won’t grow too big over time, it may work for you, especially if you’re just using it for the home page. Resources carry quite a lot of overhead that you don’t need (pub_date, unpub_date, publishedby, editedby, deletedby, etc., etc.) and it seems kind of funky from an MVC standpoint.

Normally, that kind of stuff would go in chunks, but I don’t think rich text is available there at this point (I could be wrong). One option would be to use chunks and have the users edit them with the "It’s All Text" Firefox addon, which lets you use any editor (I think DreamWeaver would work).

I’ve done this with Evo sites so the user can easily use QM on the front-end to edit such common blocks as the footer. Using resource/Ditto pairs with the inline editing capability of QM, I’ve cut way down on the contacts from clients wanting to change their phone number or address in the footer!

I actually really like to use TV’s...
As long as you use a nice category structure all looks very manageable:

Quote from: sottwell at May 04, 2011, 01:37 AM

I’ve done this with Evo sites so the user can easily use QM on the front-end to edit such common blocks as the footer. Using resource/Ditto pairs with the inline editing capability of QM, I’ve cut way down on the contacts from clients wanting to change their phone number or address in the footer!

I think this could be done in Revo with NewsPublisher and multiple NpEditThisButton tags, but I haven’t tried it.

I think the bottom line here is that there really isn’t much that is a "bad" practice as far as templating goes. About the only bad practice you can get involved with is poor coding security habits. Anything else, if it works, it’s just the MODx way.