What will be the URLs of my expressionengine site, when using stash

Question

I´m trying to understand how the use of the stash plugin will affect the URls of my site. The traditional way: I have a template group called site. Within the TG site I have the templates articles, about_us, etc. The URl will for a single entry be

www.mysite.com/index.php/site/articles/title_of_respective_article

URL for the About-us-page:

www.mysite.com/index.php/site/about_us

Both will reflect the template_group/template structure and thus be SEO-friendly and give users a hint where they are on the site.

But when I use stash I will have 2 wrappers (one for the homepage and one for the rest of the site. Partials will be used for header, main content and footer. As far as I understand it, I´ll use the template_groups layout for the wrappers and partials for the main content.

The templating look like

Two wrappers build the TG "layout" Both are hidden, since they should´nt be called directly.

layout
   .homepage
   .site

Three partials in the TG partials

partials
    header
    main_content    
    footer

And by the way shouldn´t those not also be hidden, since they aren´t complete HTML-pages either.

This is what confuses me. How do I get my nice URLs back? A URL like

www.mysite.com/index.php/site/about_us

will not match the TG/T concept anymore.

Any help?

just letting you know about our proposal for an EE specific site here (if you already are supporting it, you need to link your account so your reputation counts towards it) http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/46387/expressionengine — Adrian Macneil, Oct 25 '12 at 20:41

score 5 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 25 '12 at 18:07

To expand on both their answers above, and just to be specific to your www.mysite.com/index.php/site/about_us request:

You'd create a template group called "site" and then you may alternatively have something like this code in the /index template

{embed="layout/.site"}

            {exp:channel:entries limit="1" disable="categories|member_data|pagination"}

            {exp:stash:set name='title'}{title}{/exp:stash:set}
            {exp:stash:set name='maincontent'}
            <section>
                <h1>{title}</h1>
                <article>{content}</article>
            </section
            {/exp:stash:set}

            {/exp:channel:entries}

The embed calls the .site layout and the interior simply pulls your specific channel:entries data.

As you can see, it's still using the traditional templategroup/template ways of building URLs, it's just pulling data differently.

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 25 '12 at 12:38

When using Stash and the template partials approach (which I don't use personally), the files you mention are all embedded. You still use the same template groups and template files as before.

The Stash-based approach is simply a different way of doing things within your existing templates - not a replacement for them.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 25 '12 at 14:39

Exactly as Derek says. The way to think about it is this - with the template partials approach, your templates contain mostly (if not only) the entries logic (channel entries loop, its parameters, what custom fields are in play for that channel, etc). The outcome of the logic gets stores as stash variables. The stash variables then get called upon by your embedded layout templates to display the content you've stashed. So your URL structure remains the same, but you have considerably less duplication of effort since the more you constrain your templates to logic (i.e. very little if any formatting/display markup) the cleaner they are and the easier it then is to manage your templates.

What will be the URLs of my expressionengine site, when using stash

3 Answers3