Which way to start? A template for page o few templates with HTML text area?

[pandaman]

Sorry for the long title, but it explains well my doubt: for a corporate site, with all the pages looking the same, like the Skyscrapers demo, i know how to work.

But usually i did simple sites for little clients (with 1 or 2 languages), where creativity is most important of the content. I moved to Processwire, from Wordpress, because maintining is a time-consuming operation and i wanted something "easier", especially when clients ask for new functionalities to integrate.

Something like this site http://kl-webmedia.com/demo/owkey/index.html

I worked with WP for years, sometimes i used third-party templates, and i started to work writing the HTML code in the body of the posts/pages. That was the way, more or less, in Wordpress.

Now i'm using Processwire, and i used the same method. I created some fields, based on a textarea (not the body one used in the demo, because i don't need the text editor), inside a main template. So, the main content is managed inside PW pages backend.

if you have to do the same site i linked, do you  use the same method, or do you put the html in a template php file, and create inside PW a template for each page?
Because every page have a lot of different tags and divs, with parallax, containers, big photo, fancy graphics, and i don't undestand if is easier managing the code inside PW, or outside in the php files (making all the text a translatable string).

It's a simple question, with  a lot of different answers, all correct
 

[abdus]

For user generated content, I use textarea fields with Parsedown (a flavor of Markdown) module in tandem with this module for images. This provides a simple syntax for semantic HTML (accepts raw HTML as well).

For the parts that that are not open to user modification, I simply write HTML inside PHP files, and sprinkle PHP echo (<?= $var ?>), foreach, if constructs etc here and there.

While starting out, I put everything in one PHP file, and as I build the layout and styles, I gradually refactor some parts into their own partial templates.

I heavily utilize partial templates with wireRenderFile() and region() functions (you'll need to enable Functions API inside config.php as $config->useFunctionsAPI = true). I renamed wireRenderFile as partial(), (you can go even shorter with p()) like this.

<?php
/**
 * Renders partial with given data and returns generated markup
 *
 * @param string $template template to use. must be located in templates/partial
 * @param array $data associative array to pass to template
 * @return bool|string generated markup
 */
function partial(string $template, $data = [])
{
    return wireRenderFile($template, $data, [
        'defaultPath' => paths()->templates . 'partial'
    ]);
}

and employ it inside template files and other partial templates as 

<?php
// /site/templates/blog.php
$posts = pages("template=post, parent=$page, sort=-published");
region('header+', partial('page-header', ['class' => 'header--large wrap']));
region('content+', partial('post-list', ['posts' => $posts]));
include_once('layouts/basic.php');

For navigation, I use a custom template called nav, which only has a YAML field like this, and switch to other navigations (specified using other pages with nav template) on different contexts.

- title: Blog
  url: /blog/
- title: Somewhere
  url: https://google.com
  external: true