Working with Structure & Multiple Pagetypes

Question

I have a site that's mostly 'static' content pages, with a few dynamic & more complicated pages mixed in. To make editing & setting up the navigation easy, I started by creating a Structure that holds all the entries in my Pages section. Let's say that structure looks something like this -

• About
  • People
  • History
• Products
  • Product A
  • Product B

It's more complicated, but just a longer version of that. This structure is used to generate my navigation for the site, and everything is working as expected.

Now, all my content pages are in place and I need to add the 1-offs. The first is a contact page, which is going to live @ /about/contact. I'd like to place it within the structure because otherwise my navigation becomes a lot more complicated.

The problem is, it draws from a different template than my normal content pages, and a structure can only pull from a single template regardless of what sections are listed in it. Ok, I thought, I could put the entry into that structure and then use a route to direct that page to the template I want to use. That doesn't work, however, because page URI's are processed before routes.

So, the question is - what am I missing about doing this? Is there a better way to set up what I'm doing?

Answer 1

Assuming that those pages are working off of different entry types, you should check out this great help article...

How can I give each Entry Type its own template?

Basically, you let a parent template decide which child template to load, based on the current entry type.

Answer 2

Entry types is probably the way to go but you could also check advanced routing - http://buildwithcraft.com/docs/routing#advanced-routing