Thread

I’m kind of at a loss on this one. My client asked me to develop an area on there site where clients can access video/audio/image files based on member groups. Originally they just needed one level of categories to assign to there entries. They really like the matrix field entry function. It allows them to create one project and add files to those projects very easily. Instead of repeatedly creating one entry per file and relating the files to a project entry.

But then I was thrown a curve ball. They would like to be able to nest categories in order to organize the entries better? Attached is a screenshot of the channel entry page that I created as described above. Any thoughts on how to make this possible

Categories are created on-the-fly and will be different for each project (yeah, that makes it even better)

I don’t think i would even get close to using categories in the traditional EE sense. These categories would probably have project codes that may never be used again. So my thought is to use plain text to enter category names and use the url to sort my matrix fields

Example:

Image
-Main Category 1
—sub level 1
—sub level 1
-Main Category 2
—sub level 1
—sub level 1
-Main Category 3
—sub level 1
—sub level 1
-Main Category 4
—sub level 1
—sub level 1

you ever figure this out? I am in a similar situation.

I did actually. But I ended up buying Pixel & Tonics “Assets” plugin. What i did was the following.

Channel Fields were as follows

1. Main_Category (text field) - This is where I put the Main “Category” text field
2. Entry_title (text field) - This functioned as a second grouping title which I could use to sort the matrix
3. File_URL (Assets field) - This is the cool part. You can actually set up Assets to allow you to attach multiple files to the field type. You can list them as thumbnails or a list. Also each file you can click on and give it a description, captions etc. (check out p&t’s website).

So that gave me a way to group fields w/ customizable titles (see attachment). I was also able to use a little php to organize the output of these fields into a tabbed interface. Let me know if you need any additional help.

Check out the docs for matrix too. there you’ll find info on the search, sort and orderby parameters of the matrix tags. Hope this helps

o wow. Great! I checked out assets but didn’t even think of using it within Matrix. Thanks so much!

Assets is definitely worth it. EE’s new file manager has been really strong and I’m using it on other sites just fine, but the nice thing about Assets is that it will automatically recognize new images/files that are uploaded into the specified folder without a manual sync. In addition you can create sub-folders to organize your content.

one question before buying it, is do you know of a way to add additional information about each file this way, like a custom title or any other custom fields to the files within the assets field type that is inside of matrix?

Unfortunately it just ships with the general file fields. I was thinking that would be a great feature. I need a “movie length” field for it to be perfect, but I just use the description field.