Building Campaign Monitor Part 2 - ExpressionEngine Template Groups

This second article in the series should be all the template group therapy you need.

Templates are the presentation layer for ExpressionEngine sites. All of the front-end code, including XHTML and ExpressionEngine tags go in a template, and all of those templates, go in a template group (which is a kind of virtual folder). Template groups are the focus of this post, and we’ll cover individual templates in the next one (that’s if I’ve not been executed for pun-crimes against humanity in the meantime).

A bit about URLs

Templates and template groups are integral to ExpressionEngine, because they determine how ExpressionEngine constructs its URLs and ultimately renders its pages.

In a default install, ExpressionEngine constructs its URLs like so:

http://www.yoursite.com/index.php/template-group/template-name/

Most of the URLs in the Campaign Monitor site work this way, but with a couple of minor differences.

Firstly, we remove the index.php bit with some Apache magic, skillfully performed by LG .htaccess Generator. There’s no requirement to do this however, and the only reason it’s done in most cases is to tidy up the URL.

Removing ‘index.php’ turns our URL into this:

http://www.yoursite.com/template-group/template-name/

Doing so for us is purely an aesthetic thing, but in Campaign Monitor’s case it was vital. The old Campaign Monitor site didn’t have index.php in any of it’s URLs, which meant we needed to match the URLs from the new site exactly so that search engines didn’t get confused and users didn’t end up with a bunch of broken bookmarks.

Secondly, not all of the URLs in the site conform to the /template_group/template_name/ structure due to the Pages Module. Occasionally Freshview (creators of Campaign Monitor) like to shorten their URLs so they’re a bit more user-friendly, and in these cases they use the Pages Module to define a custom Page URI. Custom URIs are exactly that, which means the /template_group/template_name/ structure is completely bypassed and obfuscated, as demonstrated here.

Template Groups

If you’re following on from the previous post in this series, you’ll probably notice that the list of template groups closely matches the list of weblogs. This is a fairly common occurrence, due mainly to the fact that discrete weblogs often require discrete templates.

It should be noted that every template group has an index template by default, but these templates are not used in all cases. When they are used, we’ll provide a short overview of how we used them.

Big list of template groups

Global Groups

You’ll notice that the first three groups in the list above all start with an underscore. We do this for two reasons: the list is alphabetical so groups with an underscore appear at the top of the list, and they also indicate our global groups. Essentially, if a template is used in many places in a site, it goes in one of these global groups. The site header and footer includes (which live in the _includes group) are good examples. This approach isn’t a requirement, but it works well for us so we’ve stuck with it.

The majority of the templates in these global groups are named .template-name. The period at the beginning of the file name stops the template from being browsed directly, as it effectively makes the template invisible on the server (much like .htaccess files).

Template Group: _components

This group is for templates which may be used in several places throughout a site, but are not necessarily global. The main template that goes in there (and the only template in Campaign Monitor’s case) is the ExpressionEngine comments loop.