Hi all,
Apologies in advance for the long-winded post)
I’ve had a very short time to get up to speed with EE and I’m doing ok so far but I find its fine for a very (very!) simple brochure type sites but I find when trying to do anything a little more complex I’m hitting a brick wall every time.
I’m a designer with very limited php experience (I can code html and css) so I’m getting totally lost on the templating system..
I’m currently working on a site where the structure is quite complex
eg: some sections have a menu which also has child/sub menus, on the items which have child/sub menus I need to display an “overview” type page which basically lists the child items of that particular section.
I’ve set this up as a channel called “wholesalers”, most items are basic channel entries however with the “wholesalers” channel there are sub-sections..so when the user clicks a menu item which is just a channel entry they’re sent to the channel groups index page, when they click an item with subsections their sent to an overview.php page.
I’ve structured this with categories so the items with no children/sub nav are just channel entries whereas the items with children/sub nav are categories, the problem is each entry has a “summary” custom field (like a blog “excerpt”) but if I use the channel:categories tag to display the entries in that category I cant use the
{summary}
custom field (because its available to the channel:entries and NOT the channel:categories tag!!!!????
(Yes I could just use the category image and category description but the client who wants to edit the site themselves is not very tech savvy, so having to go admin/channel administration/categories etc etc is way too complicated, thats why I put the summary custom field into the main channels custom fields)
This to me seems like something relatively simple to do but I cant for the life of me figure it out (or maybe I’m approaching this from the wrong angle altogether!!!)...so how would you guys do this?
basically my menu structure is something like:
Wholesalers——-Parent category this displays an “overview” page which should display all the entries in this category and the entry custom field called “summary”
Sales and support contacts—-a simple channel entry
Product demonstrations—Parent category this displays an “overview” page which should display all the entries in this category and the entry custom field called “summary”
etc etc
sorry for the length of the post
thanks in advance