A few of the sites I have created have needed content to be ‘editorially selected’, ie, the weblog entries are arbitrarily ordered - not by date.

The Selected Items module/extension allows you to create ordered lists of weblog entries.

Each list can be arbitrarily ordered or ranked, and entries can exist in more than one selection (in different orders).

Any feedback would be appreciated - particularly on the Control Panel interface.

Edit: Please see the Selected Items page to download current version

Hi Andrew,

I installed and (quickly) tried the module and it seems to work well!
I’m looking forward to take some time and have a peek at your code.

Wondering how the extension does it’s magic

Thanks for another great addition to EE.
I’ll share my thoughts after testing it more thoroughly.

Cheers!

Thanks for testing…

The module handles the Control Panel interface, and creates a variable {selecteditems_id} which contains a list of the selected entry_ids (eg, 123|321|888 ). The {exp:weblog:entries} tag uses this to select the appropriate entries using the entry_id= parameter.

The extension handles then takes care of the ordering.

Because SQL has no (easy) way of arbitrarily ordering the items it returns, the extension, rather than dumping output straight out, puts the weblog entries into a PHP array and reorders and displays them at the end.

Great stuff, Andrew. Thanks for your hard work on this. No complaints or feature requests yet. Seems to do everything I need it to do so far.

I’ve been using the shlocky custom field method (“Yes, Mr. Client, you have to use 010 and 011 to get them in the right order.” No more!) for my last half-dozen sites. Great to have this to use now.

Hi Andrew,

Massive thanks from here as well. Just downloaded this and it works great! I was just wondering if there is anyway of showing more than the 150 entries though as I have a site which is going to have probably many many hundreds of entries and I would need to be able to select from them all but if it is limited to 150 then this could cause a problem.

If I am missing something (I usually do!! ) and there is a way for all the entries to show then please let me know as I do often miss the simplest things!! Not enough sleep!!

Thanks again for an excellent addition to EE though.

Best wishes,

Mark

You’re right - there is no way of showing more than 150 results at the moment (the problem was my lack of sleep, not your’s).

I’ve got an updated version in production at the moment. I’ll fix this and post it asap.

Cheers, Andrew

Hi Andrew,

Please don’t apologize as I know exactly what it can be like. EE is like a drug to all of us and keeps us all up WAAAAYYY too long!!

Perhaps we should put in feature requests for a developers rest time module to stop us from overworking?!!

Looking forward to the updated version, thanks for that.

Best wishes and don’t work too hard!!

Mark

I’m going to download this in the hopes that it can help me with the sorting issue I was dealing with in this thread: Is it possible for one entry to have multiple custom sort orders?

Thanks for your efforts on this!

Thanks Ryan. Let me know how you get on.

A new version - with some interface/workflow improvements - should be finished shortly.

Is there any immediately obvious reason that Selected Items might not be grabbing the entries? Clicking “Get Entries” doesn’t populate the leftmost select area. And yes, I’ve enabled the extension and the module!

I’m going to see if another extension might be interfering with this one.

Hi Andrew - Just FYI, I’ve installed this on two sites and I can’t get any entries to show in the left hand box on either install. Has anyone else had this issue? This really seems like something I could use on a few sites!

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for reporting this. Are you getting any javascript errors?

Andrew

It looks like it might be choking on an ampersand in the XML file? I opened the Javascript console in Firefox and clicked the “Get Entries” button (the box isn’t populating initially). Clicking the button produces a “not well formed” error (see attached pic) and clicking the error takes me to this line:

<option value=“173”>News & Notes</option>

I’m wondering if the other site I put this on has an entry with an ampersand in there as well.

Maybe some sort of entity conversion needs to happen? Thanks for looking into this.

Thanks - that is the problem - I’ve just reproduced it on my system.

Until I get the new version finished replace the helper.selecteditems.php file with the attached version to fix it.

Thanks Andrew. I modified that very line myself before you posted - and I still couldn’t get it to fly! So I changed the name of that one post - and that field still isn’t populating. I uninstalled and reinstalled the module/plugin, and that didn’t do anything either. All I can think of is that there is a conflict with another extension or something like that.

mdesign - 25 June 2007 06:55 AM

All I can think of is that there is a conflict with another extension or something like that.

Sure enough, I have an extension called “Live Search” installed, and disabling that allowed the Selected Items extension to work. I was using 1.0.3 of Live Search, but I see it’s been updated to 1.0.5. I’ll try using that. Otherwise, I could always disable the Live Search extension to set up my Selected Item lists, then re-enable it.

When I get a moment I’ll download Live Search and see if I can make my module play nicely with it.

Thanks for looking into this.

I think the problem might be that both extensions use a similar function name in or for the Javascript. Thanks for loking into it though…I think your extension will be very useful to me.

I was just coming here to post that it seemed that this module and Huot’s LiveSearch didn’t play nicely together. So, I guess count this as just a confirmation post.