Thread

I’m trying to create a website for a non-profit that has 14 chapters with their own websites. We’re bringing them all in together on Expression Engine so they can share content etc.

Each chapter will have their own campaigns, blog posts, news articles and publications.

Each blog post, news article and publication will need to be tied to a certain campaign from a certain chapter.

Everything will be aggregated on the national site.

So the question is, how do I best go about structuring this in EE?

The problems I’ve found so far are:

Relationship fields can’t bring in things from multiple channels.

Categories have to be used for one thing only; either campaigns or chapter sites. (This is a personal preference to keep it easy for chapters to maintain)

Is multi-site the answer? Is there a better way?

Thanks for any help.

Not that I don’t have an opinion to the many questions you have in site structure, but you as the developer knows the company and the structure of the site. It’s a matter of putting the pieces together using EE. Boyinks screencast has helped me tremendously in structuring an EE site.

Relationship fields can’t bring in things from multiple channels.

Have you looked into the EE addon titled Playa?

Categories have to be used for one thing only; either campaigns or chapter sites. (This is a personal preference to keep it easy for chapters to maintain).

Create two category groups for your sanity. A weblog/channel can be assigned to more than one.

If you’re looking at multiple domain names for each chapter, I would go MSM. If not, then I would create a weblog/channel called “Chapter”. Within each “Chapter” weblog entry I would assign the appropriate category.

Thanks for the reply. 😊

Relationship fields can’t bring in things from multiple channels.

Have you looked into the EE addon titled Playa?

Yes and I haven’t been able to tell if it can do that. There’s a surprising lack of information about the things the plugin can do; I just keep hearing it’s “very powerful”.

I was going to send the developer an email. Do you offhand know if it can do something like that? Create a relationship between many things in different channels?

Cheers,
Matt

With playa you can related a single channel with multiple channels.

http://pixelandtonic.com/playa

Another thing to keep in mind is user login / member management.  Member groups map nicely to weblogs/channels so that might be a factor in your decisions.

And - EE’s native relationship fields can’t store multiple relationships, but you can setup multiple relationship fields.  For example, you could put a relationship field in your blog field group, your news field group, and your publication field group.  All of these relationship fields can point back to the same campaign. 

Then when displaying the campaign content you can use the reverse_related_entries tag pair to find all other content with a relationship to that campaign.

That said, with different sites and different content admins I’d certainly be looking at MSM pretty seriously.

(and thanks for the comment Bransin..😊