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Hi EE Community,

I was hoping to get a little feedback from some people, if anyone has some extra time and wants to give the brain a little exercise.  I don’t necessarily have a Technical Support issue, but I am a new EE user and I am trying to figure out the best way to leverage EE.  So far I am really happy with the software!

I am working on a project for a travel company that provides trips to high school students.  They operate in about 20 different countries and have about 130 trips / programs in total, each of these programs has anywhere from 1 to 10 sessions or departure dates.

Existing Company Website: http://www.rusticpathways.com
EE Dev Site: http://ee.rusticpathways.com/index.php/programs

I have the following structure setup:

Country (Channel)
Program (Channel)
Session (Channel)

County is the Parent of Program (using Playa).  And right now I have Session setup as the Parent of Program (also using Playa) as this seemed like the easiest way to administer the Sessions.  Sessions all have associated Statuses (Open, Limited Availability, Very Limited Availability, Sold Out, Canceled).  But this still isn’t very user friendly.  Any thoughts on how to make this easier to administer from within EE?

Australia
- Awesome Aussie Service Adventure
—June 12
—June 19
—June 26
—Etc…
- Aussie Surf and Service
—June 19
—June 26
—July 3
—Etc..
- 6 Other Programs…

Burma
- Amazing Burma
—July 27
—Etc…
- Golden Triangle Adventure
—July 19
- 3 Other Programs…

Thailand
- Golden Triangle Adventure (same trip as above)
—July 19
- 15 Other Programs…

Right now, I have 1 template group setup and 1 template.  Programs and programs/index.  To continue down this route, I’d have to create a template for each country, ex: programs/australia, programs/burma, etc… and then the code to distinguish between the “country page” layout and a “program page” layout.

The other idea was to create a template group for each country and then two templates, one for the country page layout and the other for the program page layout.  Ex: australia/index, australia/program, burma/index, burma/program, etc… I would embed a template from higher up on each of these templates so as to not repeat the code 20 times.

I guess my main questions are:

1) Any ideas on how to better handle the relationships between Country, Program, and Session?
2) Any ideas on how to make the UI experience friendlier for managing Session information?
3) Does one template group schema make more sense than the other?

Thanks for your help and for tolerating the somewhat non-typical nature of this question in the support forum.  If you need to remove it or move it, I understand.

Cheers,
Ryan

There are a dozen ways to do something like this, my take is as follows:

Country (Channel)
Program (Channel)
Session (Channel)

Country custom fields
- Title
- Description, images + geneic fields for country level data

Program custom fields
- Title
- Description, images + geneic fields for program level data
- Related Country (ie which Country entry does this Program belong to?)

Session custom fields
- Title
- Description, images + geneic fields for session level data
- Related Program (ie which Program entry does this Session belong to?)

What you have then is a cascade of relationships, each entry being related to it’s parent (except countries!)

You could also feasably use one template to show the 3 data levels, using your default site/index template, something like this using a few conditionals:

{!-- home page --}
{if segment_1 == ""}
  Home page content
{/if}

{!-- country page --}
{if segment_2 == ""}
  View country eg <a href="http://www.site.com/australia">http://www.site.com/australia</a>
{/if}

{!-- programmes and sessions pages --}
{if segment_2 == "programmes"}

  {!-- programmes --}
  {if segment_3 == ""}
    View programs eg <a href="http://www.site.com/australia/programmes">http://www.site.com/australia/programmes</a> 
  {/if}

  {!-- session --}
  {if segment_3 == "session"}
    View programs eg <a href="http://www.site.com/australia/programmes/session/session_entry">http://www.site.com/australia/programmes/session/session_entry</a> 
  {/if}

{/if}

Hello Ryan Gibbons,

I am glad to see that Rob was able to give you some suggestions and insight.

I am going to move this over to the Community Help Forum which is better suited for these kinds of questions. The community is awesome with these kinds of questions.

Cheers,