Thread

I am building a portfolio site. The ‘Projects’ section will have an overall listings page, listing out ALL projects. Within this pool of projects there are three different categories (let’s say photo, web and motion). The projects on the listing page will each have the same attributes (a title and a thumbnail).

Clicking a project on the listing page will take you to the “Project Detail” page. Here is the problem: I need to provide a totally different layout and set of custom fields for each of the three project types.

What would be the best way to structure my templates and url structure to accommodate three different types of projects? It seems I’ll need three different channels. Should I have one template that detects the type of project (and uses conditionals to handle the different layouts) or three different templates… one for each project type?

Thanks for any advice.

How different are the three sets of custom fields?

You could use one channel and have all fields available for all project entries, then use the details template only to show fields that have associated data. To change layout style one way would be to allow the user to choose a style then feed that information into your template as a conditional, then write CSS for each layout type based on what the user chooses.

The other option, as you say, is to have three channels and three custom field groups. You could then have a separate template and CSS for each channel/layout type. This is probably the easiest option! NB if using 3 separate Channels you could still use one custom field group and use publish page customisation to show/hide fields as you needed for each Channel.

I’d recommend the simplest approach, which in mind would be using three different Channels for the three different types of projects. Especially if you need to have drastically different custom fields for each. If these items are inherently very different, then they should be managed and organized independently.