Thread

Hi,

Have used EE a little in developing sites but no sites actually live – other things always get in the way!

However, we’re currently looking at using EE for a site and I have a few questions just to make sure it’s feasible before buying the necessary licenses.

Sites / MSM

We will use the MSM and will have 2 sites. Site A and Site B.

For Site A we will have Blog A. There will be no other blog (at this stage). At launch there will be c. 3,000 entries in Blog A and this is unlikely to move much (+/- 2% max over time). Each entry will be updated 1 or 2 times per year.

Site A is where people can visit and download files.

Site B is where people can sign up and follow entries (they can follow them via Site A as well) but it’s a site targeted at a different type of user.

As such, we want Site B to use Blog A and essentially display a list of all entries from Blog A with the option to add as a favourite (Solspace’s Favourites module). If someone is on Site B, beside each entry will be a link to view the entry in full in Site A.

If someone signs up at Site B they would be able to login at Site A and vice versa.

Is this possible?

Related Entries

Within each entry we will have a custom field that will be a description. There will be 10-30 entries (possibly more) with the same description.

When viewing an entry at the bottom we would like to be able to show 10 random entries which have the description. Is this possible?

Stylesheets

We will have people visiting us from other sites and will have various stylesheets set up so we can alter the logos/colour scheme depending where they visit from. Is this possible in EE and is it possible to retain the same style throughout their visit? (Branding to a certain extent).

Favourites

We want users to be able to follow entries they are interested in so that we can email them when we update that entry. We are looking at using Solspace’s Favourites module. I appreciate you may not know if this works using MSM. Are they any other alternatives to doing this?

Thanks for your assistance, if you have any questions please let me know.

Regards,
Euan

Hi, Euan - yes, the Sites / MSM question you brought up is possible as you can cross-reference your data using site variables and parameters.

Yes, you can output random entries using orderby=“random” in your weblog entries tag.

As for Stylesheets - that, like a static site, is something you’ll need to custom create in your templates.  Yes it can be done, but there is not an out of the box feature for it.

Favourites is the only pre-made solution that I am aware of for this.

Hope that helps!

Lisa,

Thanks for the response.

Sites/MSM - that’s good to know. I thought that was the case but just wanted to check.

Related Entries - so it is possibly on an ‘entries’ template to displayed other entries that match the same ‘description field’ as the entry being displayed but using the orderby=“random” tag. If thats the case then that’s ideal.

Stylesheets - just wanted to know it could be done.

Favourites - thought that was the case and that’s fine.

Thanks,
Euan

Euan - I’m not 100% sure what you’re after with the related entries.  You can use relationships, relate by category, or even use the Tag module.  So there are a variety of approaches.

I would create a custom field which would be a drop down option (for example. cds, dvds, games).

When someone viewed an entry and the custom field was set to ‘dvds’ I would like at the bottom of the page to show 10/15 entries at random which also have a custom field of ‘dvds’.

Well you can use the search: parameter with orderby, but passing the variable from the weblog entries tag may require some PHP or embedding.  Ultimately you can do this but you’ll need to think through exactly how to doit.

Thanks Lisa.

Will give it some consideration as to the easiest method.

Would it be easier to achieve through the Tag module?

The Tag module does let you relate entries by tag, so it depends if your work-flow and methods would make sense as tags rather than descriptions, or both.