I’ve been working on a site design for a client, with a kinda complex portfolio of her work. I’m 85% sure that I’m going to be doing this in Expression Engine, but want to ask some questions, first, before I get her to commit to EE. It has mostly to do with custom fields.

The portfolio will be built from four different EEWeblogs/Sections, using custom fields.

Weblogs A, B, & C setup kinda larger categories of her work (by project, by location, and by custom object type). Weblog D is for The Individual Thing that is shown in a Photo. I wish for Weblog D to have three pop-up menus, each of which come from a text entry field in Weblog A, B and C, respectively: (brown items are entities that are shared in WeblogD) 

Weblog A:
text: Project Name
text: project style
other descriptive info

Weblog B:
text: Location Area
other stuff

Weblog C:
text: Custom Item Type
descriptive info text field

Weblog D:
name of image
[upload image]
textarea: image description
select Project Name [from A] from pop-up menu (all images will do this)
select Location Area [from B] from pop-up menu (most images will do this)
Is this image a custom item?
—no
—yes. If yes, select Custom Item Type [from C] from pop-up menu.

————————————-

My question(s):

I saw a Future Features in EE 1.4 thread that has pre-populating drop down menus in one weblog with content from other weblogs. So my guess is the answer to the question “Can I do this in Expression Engine” is No, Not Yet.

Is there some kind of current hacky way to do that in 1.3, while awaiting 1.4?
Or, let me ask the forbidden question (!!!): Is 1.4 coming soon enough that I can include this promised functionality in the plan?

“Can I do this in Expression Engine” is No, Not Yet.

  Correct.  Sort of.  You can actually do it pretty easily if you use the Standalone Edit Form- I do.  You just end up hard coding the custom fields rather than using the tags- that makes it easy to create dropdowns and populate them using queries.

To do it on the backend would currently require a hack- something I wouldn’t recommend, particularly with 1.4 on the horizon.

Yes, it looks as tho 1.4 is on the very near horizon. Like before end of year. Which may make this moot, actually. But it’s a good mental exercise to figure out how I’d do it, so here we go.

So, re: Standalone Entry Form… when you say “hard coding rather than using tags”, you’re referring to a technique that’s NOT what the example given in the docs, right? That is, the docs tell how to do it using tags.

snippet from docs:

But instead, hard-coding would be… 

So I guess I’d say, use the regular control panel to work with weblogs A, B and C, and then the StandAlone Entry Form for Weblog D.

Which means, at the rate things are going, this being the beginning of December (I leave later today for Thanksgiving holiday), that I can build all the other stuff and save the SAEF for last, by which time 1.4 will be out (I’m not fast at this EE stuff. yet. So that’s a realistic timeframe for me)

You nailed it- that’s exactly what I’d do.  And once 1.4 is out, you probably won’t need to mess about with the SAEF anyway!

Right. Of course, figuring out how to do the custom query is a whole ‘nother thing, but this answers my question “Can I do it in EE?” for now.

No wait, there are a couple more things.

I want to create 4 separate tag clouds to navigate into the content.
Project style (from weblogA)
Location Area (from weblog B)
Business by Project Name (from weblog A, if item is business, i.e., not residential)
Custom Item Type (from weblog C)

I hear rumors that this kinda thing will be easier in 1.4. Or, hmmm…  maybe I can do it with ExpressionEngineer’s Keyword Module

There’s another item I want to ask about, but that’ll hafta wait.

The Keyword module might do the trick, could you please explain the tag clouds a bit deeper?

:: andy

Thanks for inquiring!!

there will be an entry page to the portfolio, with four main ways to navigate it. In each category, there will be a set of tags (think flickr).

Residential by Projects
The tag cloud will have a list of styles. The styles are entered in Weblog A (see first post in thread). They’re probably one or two-word entries, so I plan to have text field for that.
So there will be tags such as Modern, Southwestern, Spanish Colonial, Craftsman.
The result of clicking a link will be to go to a page that displays a project that has that tag/field.
The page will have a set of photos for that project, one large (with text description) and the other in thumbnails. The page will also have a “view next project of [Southwestern] style” which will lead to another project.

Residential by Location
With a tag list of rooms in house (Kitchen, living room, entry, bedroom, etc.)
So, you click a tag, say bedroom, and view a page that shows one enlarged image of bedroom and other thumbnails.

Commercial by Project
Tag lists project names of all Commercial Projects.
(Project Names is a text field for Weblog A, and Weblog A also has a field: Residential or Commercial?  List all projects that are commercial)
Clicking Commercial Project name goes to page for that project

Custom Item
Some portion of any project may be a custom item. This is a way to view just custom-designed and built items.
Weblog C is where Custom Item Type is created.
Example tags: Furniture, Tile, Rugs, Lighting
result of clicking that link will take viewer to page with items of that kind of Custom Item Type.

I hope this illuminates things. It may be that your module will require a bit of adaptation for “keyword type” which I’ll use to sort stuff. I am just now getting on the road for a 4-hour drive and won’t be checking the web for quite some time. (and am using a different computer; I hope I remember my pmachine forums login info)

This sounds like a perfect thing for the Keyword Module,
you would setup one layer for each of your “tag sets” and fill it with keywords.

If I’m understanding you properly you will be able to do exactly what you invision with the Keyword Module.

:: andy

happy happy joy joy! This is very good news. More to be thankful for this thanksgiving!

Okay. A picture is worth a thousand words, right? New question re: images and galleries. Because I want to display images inside the portfolio.

Attached is a GIF image showing a couple of rough wireframes for what I want the portfolio to contain.

What I want portfolio pages in the site to contain

Main Image: Enlarged. Has text description.

Thumbnail images: Main Image thumbnail and a set of sibling thumbnails are displayed (for that given set of images, a group, or whatever)

In EEweblog terms, I’m thinking Single Entry All The Way, if that’s any help.

Things I’ve noticed so far about how EE works with images in weblog posts and gallery images

Uploading images to galleries creates small and medium thumbnails effortlessly. I like that.

Uploading images to a weblog entry is confusing. No effortless thumbnail creation. Sure, I can figure it out, but I’m thinking about my client. Automatic is better. Don’t want to have to manually specify size each and every time and make sure to select whatever “make a copy” thing.

Theories (how-to) and questions

First off, I want to answer the question, Can EE do the kinda thing I want to do? (Remember, I haven’t had my client commit to buying software yet.) Assuming that the answer is “yes” (which I suspect it is), how would I do it?

I want to use the Gallery for easy image upload and Thumbnail display.

Don’t want to display gallery *at all* like default install (yes, more study of {exp:gallery:etc} tags are in order).

Want to display gallery thumbnails in a weblog post.

I’m aware of this discussion thread (Assemblies of God example, FrankJohnson is the thread-starter) and skimmed it. Perked up at the matter of including {exp:weblog} and {exp:gallery} tags on the same page. Whither placing {exp:gallery} within {exp:weblog} tags is a matter I’d like to know more about.

I’ll be using lots of custom fields for this portfolio, too. And maybe even keywords (see posts upthread) to dynamically organize portfolio content. Should I have matched sets of categories for main weblog and gallery in order to make the right stuff appear at the right time?

Is it possible to do custom fields (or pull from custom fields) in a gallery?

Common directory? If gallery images are uploaded to the common directory for file uploads, does that mean that a weblog entry can pull images from that directory?

Thanks for any wisdom and insight about this. I know that it’s a definite two-stager: answering YES it can be done. And then later rolling up sleeves to actually MAKE it happen.

As far as displaying images the way you want, much of that is going to depend on how you structure your gallery, either within the gallery or weblog module.  You may find that the weblog module is more flexible and therefore preferable for this.  But a combination thereof certainly may work.  To your other questions.

Uploading images to a weblog definitely has thumbnail creation as part of the wizard. 

As for how you’d do it.  There are a few ways to do it.  But first, you’d have to seriously examine the two modules and decide which you want to use - then you can look at the “how” - I don’t think that can be broached yet, as far as code examples, etc.

The gallery has no custom fields, and each image can belong to only one category.  The keyword module doesn’t yet handle images, though ExpressionEngineer has mentioned that the next revision will have the ability to keyword anything in the database - which would cover the gallery.

Matching category sets from the weblog and gallery will not really net you any advantages, as far as I’m aware.  Possibly in 1.4 with relational fields - but I don’t know.

Yes, if you set your file upload directories to the gallery directory you can use the file manager to include images from there.  Sue, I believe,  has talked about doing this on a few sites.

I hope that helps. =)

You may be interested in this thread on phpThumb…takes the pain out of worrying about clients and thumbnails. I don’t use the gallery module (too limiting in my estimation), am using the main weblog module for all galleries/portfolios.
Gallery… Here
Portfolio… Here

Thanks, Lisa and PXLated, for both your replies. Will mull it over, but for now I’ll take it as a YES.

BTW, Mr Geise, that’s a very nice looking site you have. Is it new? Uh, never mind, see that it’s Mono Splat. I welcome all the how-dunnits. But of that, more later. Beleive it or not, I gotta go play with a WordPress site for a while tonight.