Cheat Sheet for Custom Fields, Short Names, IDs, etc | ExpressionEngine Community Forums

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Do you think a Cheat Sheet like the one described below would be a useful addition to the Admin Panel?
Yes, I would love this!	21
No, I don�t think it would be useful!	2
Not for me personally, but I can see how it�d be useful for others!	1
Total Votes: 24	You must be a logged-in member to vote

Cheat Sheet for Custom Fields, Short Names, IDs, etc

Sasha

Posted: 25 August 2005 09:31 AM

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Joined 11-04-2002

This is just a random idea I had today, and possibly something that can be done in a template without needing it built into the backend, but I figured I’d mention it here anyway in case someone else finds it a good idea too.

I find that when I am editing/creating templates, I have to look up a lot of stuff. Most notable the short names for all my custom fields, the short names for all my weblogs, and sometimes also the weblog IDs and category IDs.

Right now, I have to open a new tab in Firefox for this every time, and go into Admin and then into the page that lists the bit of information I am looking for. It would be really handy for me to have a link to a popup or a new page at the top of the screen (like, next to User Guide, maybe) that points to a page that automatically lists all of those things on one page.

I am envisioning something with the show/hide script that is used all throughout the admin panel, that will allow you to show/hide a list of all Custom Fields with their short name, a list of all Weblogs with their short names and ID, and a list of all Categories with their ID numbers. It would certainly make the template-modification process a bit easier for me if there was an easier way to quickly look up these bits of data!

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Lisa Wess

Posted: 25 August 2005 09:39 AM

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I’m so used to this it never occurred to me that there might be a way to output all this in a simple fashion. A template could be the wayto do it though, I don’t see any reason to have it core (heck, I’d use it in firefox’s sidebar, I think - an ff extension would totally rock for this;) ). Plus, if you did it in a template you could lay it out in a way that makes sense to you.

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Sasha

Posted: 25 August 2005 10:41 AM

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OK, while I was at it, I figured out how to do this in a template. It doesn’t use the fancy show/hide from the EE control panel (although I guess that’d be easy enough to build in if you’d want it), but it does basically what I outlined above.

For easy copy&pasting I formatted the data to be laid out into three small tables. You can find it at the wiki here:
http://www.eewiki.com/wiki/Cheat_Sheet

Here is the code I am using in my own cheat sheet template at the moment:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

<html>
<head>
<title>Quick Cheat Sheet</title>

<style type="text/css">
<!-- 
body{
        background:#eee;
        color:#333;
        font: 11px Arial, sans-serif;
} 
table {
        float:left;
        margin:5px;
        border:1px solid #ccc;
}
.heading{
        background:#ddd;
}
-->
</style>
</head>
<body>

<table summary="Weblog IDs" cellpadding="5">
<tr class="heading">
<td><b>Full Weblog Name</b></td>
<td><b>Short Name</b></td>
<td><b>Weblog ID</b></td>
</tr>
{exp:query sql="SELECT weblog_id, blog_name, blog_title, blog_url FROM exp_weblogs ORDER BY blog_title"}
<tr>
<td>{blog_title}</td>
<td>{blog_name}</td>
<td>{weblog_id}</td>
</tr>
{/exp:query}
</table>

<table summary="Custom Field IDs" cellpadding="5">
<tr class="heading">
<td><b>Full Field Name</b></td>
<td><b>Short Name</b></td>
<td><b>Field Type</b></td>
</tr>
{exp:query sql="SELECT group_id, field_name, field_label, field_type FROM exp_weblog_fields ORDER BY field_name"}
<tr>
<td>{field_label}</td>
<td>{field_name}</td>
<td>{field_type}</td>
</tr>
{/exp:query}</table>

<table summary="Category IDs" cellpadding="5">
<tr class="heading">
<td><b>Full Category Name</b></td>
<td><b>Category ID</b></td>
</tr>
{exp:query sql="SELECT cat_name, cat_id, group_id FROM exp_categories ORDER BY group_id"}
<tr>
<td>{cat_name}</td>
<td>{cat_id}</td>
</tr>
{/exp:query}</table>

</body>
</html> 

All you need to do is create a new blank template, and copy&paste the code from the wiki into it. That’s all. Feel free to improve on my code if you can think of anything else useful to add!

And here is the basic query code I used for it (in case you want to build your own without having to strip my formatting first):

{exp:query sql="SELECT weblog_id, blog_name, blog_title, blog_url FROM exp_weblogs ORDER BY blog_title"}
{blog_title}
{blog_name}
{weblog_id}
{/exp:query}

{exp:query sql="SELECT group_id, field_name, field_label, field_type FROM exp_weblog_fields ORDER BY field_name"}
{field_label}
{field_name}
{field_type}
{/exp:query}

{exp:query sql="SELECT cat_name, cat_id, group_id FROM exp_categories ORDER BY group_id"}
{cat_name}
{cat_id}
{/exp:query} 

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Sue Crocker

Posted: 25 August 2005 04:15 PM

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Ya need some <br />s in the code, otherwise everything runs together.

But other than that, it works well.

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Sasha

Posted: 26 August 2005 03:20 AM

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Well that’s what the formatted version of the code is for, see the Wiki. That’s fully formatted as an HTML page that you only need to copy&paste into a new template. The code I posted above is only the queries I used, in case people want to format their own page and don’t want to have to delete all my formatting first.

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PXLated

Posted: 26 August 2005 12:35 PM

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Wonderful…had been doing it the hard way and hadn’t thought about this…Thanks!

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wondermonkey

Posted: 13 September 2005 03:53 AM

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I added this in case anyone needs custom member fields:

<table summary="Custom Member fields" cellpadding="5">
<tr class="heading">
<td><b>m_field_id</b></td>
<td><b>m_field_name</b></td>
<td><b>m_field_label</b></td>
<td><b>m_field_type</b></td>
<td><b>m_field_list_items</b></td>
</tr>
{exp:query sql="SELECT m_field_id,m_field_name,m_field_label,m_field_type,m_field_list_items FROM exp_member_fields ORDER BY m_field_name"}
<tr>
<td>{m_field_id}</td>
<td>{m_field_name}</td>
<td>{m_field_label}</td>
<td>{m_field_type}</td>
<td>{m_field_list_items}</td>
</tr>
{/exp:query}</table> 

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Kernon

Posted: 13 September 2005 06:55 AM

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Great idea, Sasha. I don’t always remember which weblog the custom field IDs belong to, so I added the weblog short name to your second table. I also restricted access to the template.

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JohnD

Posted: 15 October 2007 12:00 PM

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Has anyone done an update for the Quick Cheat Sheet which shows the relationships of Sites to Weblogs, Categories and Fields?

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Lisa Wess

Posted: 15 October 2007 12:07 PM

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How about the Developer Plugin?

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JohnD

Posted: 15 October 2007 12:56 PM

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How about the Developer Plugin?

1. It does not appear to deal with relationships between Sites, Blogs, Categories and Fields.
2. Even if it does, I don’t really like the idea of having to put the tags into all my old templates, just to deal with a temporary problem I have (see below.) I can see that it would be useful for new development though.
3. My initial skirmish with the plug-in was not very successful due to conflicts between my CSS and the pi’s CSS, and as a result I could not really make anything useful out of the info. Again, this can be solved, but I don’t have the time now.

I have run into an issue whereby one can have trouble with third party plug-ins/ modules which do not take account of the fact that you can have duplicate weblog names, duplicate field names, duplicate category names etc across different sites. Indeed the MSM system assumes this when “extracting” blogs. (Example: Form Helper Plug-in cannot handle this because it grabs the first name it comes across to get the field IDs without taking account of the site/blog relationship)
I have coded a workaround for Form Helper, but I need to find a quick way to check my other third party codes.

EE proper has no difficulty with this because it differentiates between duplicates by tracking the site ID, and when one clones a set of blogs using the MSM, new ids are assigned to the old names.

Since I have a need to clone some (but not all) weblogs with all their fields, categories, templates etc intact, it is important to me for site maintenance reasons across a number of sites, to not have to change the field names, category names etc.

The reason I am looking for a cheatsheet that does this is so I can quickly survey my pre-MSM code to look for the relationships between sites, blogs, fields etc so I will know where my third-party code may run into trouble and need corrective action. I suppose I will have to do my own ... hint hint.

I emphasize, this is strictly a problem with third party code, not with EE.

Any other suggestions welcome

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viewcreative

Posted: 02 September 2008 09:06 AM

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4 years later… This is awesome!

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