User Guide

Creating Template Groups in eeSiteKit

You may not need to do this step. Template Groups are typically created when you are Creating Channels, but not always. If you are creating a new template group for a multilingual site, please see the other instructions over here.

Creating a Template Group

You will be creating one template group for each Channel of your site.

In this example, we’re creating a new Template Group for the Channel called “About Us”.

Site Name ›  Templates ›  Template Management

  1. From the Template Management area of ExpressionEngine’s control panel, click on the big green “Create a New Template Group” button (top right-hand corner).
  2. Template Group Name: about-us (we use all lowercase letters and dashes as this will show up in /segment_1/ of the site’s URIs)
  3. Duplicate an Existing Template Group?: Do not duplicate a group
  4. Make the index template in this group your site’s home page?: No, do not check the box
  5. Click Submit
  6. Select your new Template Group from the list in the first column of the page so that the “index” page of the new group shows up in the right-hand column
  7. Click on the index template so that you can edit it
  8. Place a custom embed tag like this one into the index template
    {embed='kit_language/english_usa' template='kit_system/index' weblog='about-us'}
    In our example tag, we’ve set the language file that will be used as “english_usa” and the Channel name as “about-us”.
  9. Tip: If you or your client are not 100% certain of the final Channel Names for the site just yet, you can use this: weblog=’&#123segment_1&#125’ and then you won’t have to remember to update the index file’s embed tag if you end up renaming the Template Group later.
  10. Click Submit

If you ever rename a Channel, you must rename the associated Template Groups also, and update the custom embed tag in the index templates of the group with the new Channel name. If you forget to update these you’ll start seeing a 404 page when you don’t expect to.

We find it helpful to reorder the Template Groups once the are all created. We find that having these groups in the top five, and in the following order, helps speed development for us.

*kit_display
kit_system
kit_css
kit_forums
kit_language

You may change the template group order by clicking on the “Edit Group Order” near the top of the Template Management area.