EE Insider

Template Partials using Stash

The standard approach to EE templates has been to have a rough equivalence between a template and a page, or a template and a content type. Templates include a header and footer, which are usually done as snippets or embeds, and some content (possibly inline, possibly using more snippets and/or embeds).

The language of “template partials” is from the Ruby on Rails world, but the concept is solid for any framework in any language. In a nutshell, the idea is this: you have one wrapper template that has containers in it, and then you fill in those containers later. The wrapper template doesn’t care what’s in the containers, and the containers don’t care about the wrapper.

“But,” you may say, “my templates are all wrappers with containers for stuff! The stuff is all different, that’s why we have to have different templates!” It’s true that the “stuff” is all different–but are the containers all different? Take a look at a typical site you’ve built–I bet that you have at most two or three markup patterns for the whole thing.

If you’re used to the typical way of working with ExpressionEngine templates, you’ll see as we go on that the template partials pattern requires thinking “inside-out” for a while. However, there are some huge benefits to switching to this way of thinking.

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Creating Aside Content

Say you’re building a site for a small business with the following sections: Home, News, About Us and Contact. Each of these sections contains its own static content, blog or a combination of both. But each section also contains so-called “aside” content, with things like quotes, testimonials, call to actions and so on. Aside content is so ubiquitous nowadays, HTML5 has even given it its own HTML tag!

But how do you manage aside content in ExpressionEngine? Here’s one way of doing it using categories and the Low Seg2Cat extension.

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