Say you’re building a comprehensive site for a large church, where each ministry has activities, each activity holds events, and photos are taken at each event. You have a weblog each for ministries, activities, events and photos. Photos have a relationship field linking to events, events to activities, and activities to ministries. You don’t want to enter redundant data, relating the photos to the ministry, because the system should already know that. But how does it? On the ministry homepage, how do you display the five latest photos from across that ministry’s events?
With difficulty, I learned was the answer. It requires either a series of embedded templates or a long SQL query in your template. But now with the Tied Entries plugin it’s easy—you can span the relationships and reverse relationships among fields and weblogs every which way using EE-style tags:
The plugin sounds really interesting. Would be great to give this one a go but I just registered on your site and then checked my e-mail and haven’t received the activation code as of yet.
Just wondering if I’m one of the first 10 downloaders though?
Mark, thanks for trying it. Registration should work—I’m getting the emails when test registering—but maybe email from my server is being blocked by yours.
At any rate, I’ve activated your member account.
You’re not only among the first ten, you’re the first!
Mark, thanks for trying it. Registration should work—I’m getting the emails when test registering—but maybe email from my server is being blocked by yours.
At any rate, I’ve activated your member account.
You’re not only among the first ten, you’re the first!
Hi Adam,
Thanks. Just got the e-mail now and have downloaded the file. Will give this a try out as soon as I can.
So, you’ve continued down this path… I’ll register and see how you put it into a plug-in to execute all the relationships/embeds. Have you used it on a live site yet?
I haven’t tried it yet but looks like a great plugin ! I took a look at the docs and I’m not sure about something…
In Expression Engine we can do single relationships, but we can have multiple reverse relationships. Does this mean that with the plugin’s selectors (’<’, ‘>’) it brings some kind of a multi-relationships logic in Expression Engine ?
I haven’t tried it yet but looks like a great plugin ! I took a look at the docs and I’m not sure about something…
In Expression Engine we can do single relationships, but we can have multiple reverse relationships. Does this mean that with the plugin’s selectors (’<’, ‘>’) it brings some kind of a multi-relationships logic in Expression Engine ?
Benjamin,
There can and usually are multiple entries in a single reverse relationship, but there can’t be multiple reverse relationships—that is, in templates there’s no nesting of related_entries nor of reverse_related_entries tags.
The plugin accomplishes the same thing as these would, if they worked:
Adam, this looks absolutely amazing! And I think it may address the issue I’m currently searching on. I’m currently working on big project in which weblog relationships are what will drive how data is displayed.
weblog 2 - campaigns are assigned a relationship to weblog 1 - countries
and
weblog 3 - news is assigned a relationship to weblog 2 - a campaign entry
So with your plugin, I’m assuming (hoping) I can from weblog 3 (a news entry) traverse thru the relationships weblog 3 > weblog 2 > weblog 1 and display data from weblog 1?
So with your plugin, I’m assuming (hoping) I can from weblog 3 (a news entry) traverse thru the relationships weblog 3 > weblog 2 > weblog 1 and display data from weblog 1?
Do you have plans on porting over to 2.0?
Yep, it’ll do that! And yes, it’ll be ported over to 2.0 sometime before Dec 1st.
I’m finally getting around to using your plugin. I gotta say thus far, it’s been a lifesaver. Ever tried to organize reverse related results by category? OMG what a pain.
Tied Entries to the rescue! It seems that I can apply the “category” parameter to your tied entries tag, define a reverse relationship and spit out the results I’m looking for.
My man…I gotta give you your props! Thank you!
Got a question, is there a way to evaluate for and/or display category information?
For instance, currently my tied entries loop looks like:
Very pleased to hear that the plugin’s being useful. I hadn’t thought of using it to get around the lack of category filter in the related_entries and reverse_related_entries tags.
hothousegraphix - 04 December 2009 07:02 PM
Adam,
I’m hoping I can replace the {tied:title} varialbe with my entry’s {category_name}.
I have tested the standard usage of {categories}{category_name}{/categories} not really expecting it to work - and it didn’t.
Any advice?
That’ll take a bit of doing, variable pairs, but I see a way through to how it could be done. Will put it on the roadmap, but I wouldn’t expect it to be done within the next couple of weeks.
But it can be done meanwhile by passing the entry_id to an embedded template:
