Thread

Hello,
we are currently considering expression engine as our main CMS for our on-line magazine hridanos.gr.
It is written in Greek and it’s content is mostly related to cultural issues worldwide.
We have the following questions:

1. We group our articles in issues (issue 01, issue 02 etc.) and in each issue we have 7-8 main sections (theater, cinema, visual arts etc.) When a visitor cliks on an artile to read it’s content in full view want expression engine to present him:
a. the content of the article
b. the articles that belong to the same section as the article selected AND the same issue only (eg. if the user cliks on a theater review show him articles about theater only in issue 12)
c. a link of the first article in each section of the issue that the article selected belongs to.
Is that possible in expression engine?

2. We would like to be able to customize the search queries in order to search for variations of a given word in Greek.

thank you in advance for your time and effort.

Panagiotis Spiliotis

#1 is definitely possible- I’ve done something similar.  That said, it wasn’t purely ‘out of the box’.  There are a couple of decisions you’ll need to make- largely with regard to how you indicate an ‘issue’ and how you break up your sections (as different categories or as different weblogs- might see this wiki entry on the topic.  I ended up putting each section in its own weblog and using categories to designate the issues.  But that will depend a LOT on the individual site.  And I still debate other ways I could have handled it.  You could use two category groups- one for section, one for issue- no reason that wouldn’t work given your above requirements.

For your single entry pages- a. is no problem; b. could be handled with a weblog tag and the related categories mode- with a wee bit of tweaking, depending on whether sections are weblogs or categories- and assuming issues are categories.  I believe I did that part with a query, as I was also pulling in a keyword section and wanted to avoid duplication.  c. is a bit trickier- I’d just do it with a query- either the query module or php.  However- IF the first entry in a section is somehow special?  It might make sense to have a special status for it- such as ‘featured’- in which case you could simply use the weblog module and the status parameter to always link back to the ‘featured’ article in a given category/issue (you’d limit the category parameter to the current issue.)

In short- it’s definitely possible but it may not be a purely ‘out of the box’ solution.  Nothing really difficult to work around, though.  And there are variations on how you might want to approach it.

2.- is more problematic.  In part- I’m not dead sure what you need it to do, but I suspect it may take some custom coding for that one.  But if you can elaborate on how you need it to work, we might could give you some tips.

If you haven’t already, I’d definitely suggest giving one of the trial versions a test- it’s the best way to get a feel for what EE can do.

If you have specific words that you want to trigger search results, you can include them in a custom field, set it to searchable and just not display it in your templates.  I have a client that does this for variations on author names.

Oh- that’s a slick approach.  Hadn’t thought about that one.  Was thinking along the lines of the acronym module- but something like a custom field would be much simpler.

Thank you for your reply.
It’s definitely good to know 1 is possible despite the tweaking involved to get there. 1c is essentially our navigation around each issue.

I forgot to mention that in most issues the number of sections won’t be the same. Each issue will have one or two extra sections not included in any other issue. Using two categories (one for each issue and one for each section) is 1c still possible? If not is possible at all?

Regarding 2, I think custom hidden search fields is a good solution.

best regards,
Panos Spiliotis

Panos,

I just completed an online magazine site for a client, and EE was amazingly simple to use and the support from the forums has been excellent thus far.  I’m very pleased with everything!

Previously, I had considered Drupal for the CMS, but EE won out because of its simplicity in the theming/templating phase, and the admin was a little easier for the client to understand than Drupal’s was.

Good luck with whatever you decide!