Thread

Ok, I’m running music site where we have album reviews, live reports and interviews. I’m thinking if I should start using EE for that.

But there are problems that I would like to have answered:

Let’s take an festival report for an example. It is about many bands, it can be written by many editors and it should be found from many genres.

So I have one article - that must be found from under Rock category - but also under many bands (I can choose a band and click (“Show all reviews from Wilco” -> and this should give all reported festivals also where Wilco has been).

I also need functionality like “All articles written by Lerva” -> gives also reports where have been other editors too.

So it’s a little bit complicated - I’m not sure about those genres ‘cause putting music to different genres is a mess… But then there should be at least categories like “reviews” “lives” and “interviews” -> but those are easy ones.

And one more question: I have my current site running on mysql. Of course tables are different, but I’m thinking of how easy it is to transfer material from one site to other? Let’s say I have only this information now in my articles table: title, band_name, body, date, user_id

As you can see that my old system doesn’t support all the features I wanted (like multiple editors for one article, because of that one to many table relationship - it should be many to many).

Or is this a little bit complicated? Or can I do this with EE 1.6?

I’m also considering rolling my own system, but it takes more time and cannot never compete with good cms like EE.

Thanks in advance and sorry for my English 😉

My thoughts are is that its mostly all doable, but how you structure the site—data wise—will be important. For example, while pulling reports/articles by author is readily handled, pulling reports/articles by editor is not. So you would need a custom field for editors, and do a custom query. Additionally, something like handling of festivals would need to be carefully planned. I’d use a relationship field, and a separate weblog, meaning, I’d create one webog called festivals—so that new festivals and festival details can be added at any time; then have the festival names display as a related field, in the normal music reviews, interviews, etc. publishing form.  That way, when someone’s adding an article:  Elisa Amazes Huntsborough Fest one of the fields to complete is Related Festival, and you just select the Festival name (assuming its been priorly created.

There are a number of ways, that it could be done; and others may have their favored method. Same for how to handle bands—do they get their own weblog, or do you use a custom field with custom queries? It’s all about the site infrastructure—how you break out the relationship of data to weblog/sections, categories, custom fields, and relationships.

Thanks for your reply. I have playing with core version and getting used to EE.

I have been thinking that data structure, and I have own weblogs for live reviews, record reviews and interviews. My only problems is editors.. One article may have many editors - how should I handle them? Just a custom text input?

Can I then make queries, where I look like this (pseudo):

All weblogREVIEWS where EDITOR includes “John Doe”

It must be “includes”, not “is”, because I wanna show all reviews written by John Doe in one page. And there can be multiple editors in one review, so that editor text field may have things like “John Doe, Eric Example” etc…

I hope I’m making some sense here 😊

It would be LIKE, not INCLUDES. So the query would be something like

<h3>Publications Edited by {editor}</h3>
<p><ol>{exp:query sql="SELECT t.entry_id, t.title AS publication, t.url_title AS link_url FROM exp_weblog_data d JOIN exp_weblog_titles t ON d.entry_id=t.entry_id WHERE d.field_id_6 LIKE '%{editor}%' ORDER BY t.title ASC"}</p>

<p><li>♦   <a href="http://{path=publications/article}{link_url}">{publication}</a></li></p>

<p>{/exp:query}</ol>

Obviously, the code would be adjusted, but basically, this assumes that there is a text field in all publications for editors, in which data is entered like Stephen King, Patricia Cronwell, etc.. Based on that, when pulling a record for Stephen King, and wishing to see all articles that he has edited, then this query works.

I should also mention that this query works within the {exp:weblog:entries} tag which is why title, url_link, and other fields need to be renamed so they don’t conflict.

Ah, I didn’t realize that I can run custom sql queries :wow:

They work in core too?

Thanks for your reply allgood2! I have some knowledge in databases and sql, so that actually made sense to me 😊

I’m not certain if custom queries work in EE Core. I’ve never used EE Core. Was this post in the Core forums?? I can never remember what’s in core or not, but there use to be a great little chart on the EE site, that went from feature to feature with a comparison.  I always use the nonprofit or commercial license.

Well.. this is pre-sales forum, so probably many people use core here.

That is not a big problem, since I most probably will buy a copy of a commercial license (I need commercial, because I have ads on my page, right?).

I look for that chart if I can find it.

Queries don’t work with EECore.

lerva, if your site is a personal site (not used to support a business) and you are running ads to help recoup some of your costs, you can still get a personal license.

I found the chart: http://expressionengine.com/overview/pricing/

@Sue: well.. it’s more like a community. Bunch of music lovers to write music. It’s registered as a club or society (I don’t know the right word in English), it’s not run by any company.

Most of the money goes to paying bills to internet service provider - any extra money will be used to buy beer and concert tickets.

That would be a question for Leslie.

HowTo Contact the EE Sales Team

One more question about this one - how does EE handle images?

I don’t want to put images along the body (well, that too), but I have more special needs. Each record review needs cover image, so how I should handle it? Ideal way would be just a “Upload image” button, where editor could upload one image to review. I need to position that one cover image in special place in my template.

Is that possible? There is “Upload file” function - what does that actually do? Can I modify it to only accept images and automatically put uploaded image to that specific entry?

Same for how to handle bands—do they get their own weblog, or do you use a custom field with custom queries? It’s all about the site infrastructure—how you break out the relationship of data to weblog/sections, categories, custom fields, and relationships.

I have played a much more with EE now. I have tried both of these technique (custom field with custom queries and own weblog for bands).

First one works fine, but I have problems when bands have special characters in their names. Url goes like a mess when I have url like index.php/reviews/bänd_näme/album_title

And I would love to have that band name in url (for seo and to show all reviews for one band: index.php/band_name/).

How I can use something like php’s urlencode? Is there something similar in EE or should I go with PHP?

Using different weblog for bands would sort this out (creates permatitle automatically), but then I will have more complicated import… But it would be better, if we want to tell other info about the band too (description, homepage, images etc).

One more question about this one - how does EE handle images?

I don’t want to put images along the body (well, that too), but I have more special needs. Each record review needs cover image, so how I should handle it? Ideal way would be just a “Upload image” button, where editor could upload one image to review. I need to position that one cover image in special place in my template.

Is that possible? There is “Upload file” function - what does that actually do? Can I modify it to only accept images and automatically put uploaded image to that specific entry?

And to quote myself: I made new custom field “cover” which takes image name. And images for body I installed tinyMCE extension. I have used tinyMCE before and I love it. I think EE could have something similar by default.

I’ve always liked bands/artist to be self-contained in their own weblog, myself. (1) I think it provides more flexibility for the future, but… (2) It means I can start of lazy, and grow increasingly more specific in the future. For example, when I started to do music reviews on my website (nothing nearly as extensive as yours), I decided to create a separate artist table. When it started, it had nothing more than name, genre, and a brief summary field. Now it contains things like home town, band mates, bio, genre, sub-genre, and style information, and an image file, etc.  I don’t always fill everything out, but, it allows me to go back and add stuff as I feel like, and more important relate the artist/band to my current playlists, reviews (mine), reviews (external).  I like that power, not to mention, it sucks to have to rewrite a brief summary of an artist for every song or album you want to mention; and the separate weblog solves that.

As for images, I typically have three custom fields: artist_image; album_image; song_banner. The artist_image is any image that I want to use for the band/artist. Often a publicity shot, but not always. Album_image is more specific. The song_banner is typically my creation. Sometimes it’s directly from the single or the album, but often, I’ll take clips from a music video, concert, or elsewhere to create a 195x45 banner.  I use a series of if elseif statements for display purposes. For example, if I’ve created a banner, I want the banner to display, but if I haven’t then I want the song or album art to display. The artist image always displays next to the brief artist profile, which I have set-up to pull from the artist data.  Any other image, I want to use, I just code into the review.

I use the upload file function for uploading images (unless I’m doing a number of them at a time, then I FTP. But typically, I’ve set-up specific directories for various image types, and then name the directories specifically.  So my upload options are: music, artist, album, song, banner.  The folders are typically subfolders of the folder   /images/music/  that way my templates use the file path with a custom field like:

<a href="http://www.mysite.org/images/music/artist/{artist_image}">http://www.mysite.org/images/music/artist/{artist_image}</a>

  I know that EE can also handle that, I just prefer to see the url written in the code, so I’m not guessing where the file is.

allgood2, big thanks! That explains many things I have had in my mind.

Yes, database wise different weblog for bands is way to go. I was just a kid when I started my site, and now I have much more knowledge. It makes me laugh (in a warm way) to look those old things I did (and that database structure). But well, I started about 10 years ago, then tools and web in general was a little bit different 😊