Thread

Hi,

I am trying to create a timeline with EE.  This is my first EE project so I want to make sure my plan sounds reasonable.

This google doc drawing shows what I’m trying to accomplish:

https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1DjI66vxnl9FZQcxTPjpIkePTLSnatIx_yjSoJWcbiJQ/edit

I’ll have an Event channel, and clicking on an image brings the user to a separate page where they can see Event details.

My plan is to make a Years category and each term in the category would be a group of years, “1900-1910”, “1910-1920”. etc.

From what I understand, there isn’t an easy way to display channel entries grouped by category, though I have found an add-on that looks like it does this (http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/category-sorted-entries).

To get around this, for now I’ll just explicitly cycle through the Events channel like this:

view_all.html:

{exp:channel:entries channel="events" category="1900-1910"}
 <stuff>
{/exp:channel:entries}

{exp:channel:entries channel="events" category="1910-1920"}
 <stuff>
{/exp:channel:entries}

When a user clicks on the timeline menu they should only see Events in that category.  I’ll just do this by showing/hiding divs with javascript.

Am I doing this in a non-idiotic way?

Thanks for any input

Sounds like your thinking will work, but you might find that the add-on saves you overhead and results in faster page loads, depending on the number of categories and entries looped through per page. Also you might consider if the amount of javascript hidden content will affect SEO, and if so consider separate pages for each year block / category.

Thanks for your input Travis.  I had the same concerns after I did some more research on how the channel tag actually works.