Thread

Developing a site to help out a family friend who is entering the real-estate business.  I’ve been looking for and affordable platform to manage the website and in terms of price EE does the trick.  I’ve started playing with the free core download and I have hit a few stumbling block along the way.  So before I invest in a license and commit this as the software I will work with I have a few questions.

1. I know that EE will let me create custom fields which is great, and assign field groups to blogs and so on.  So if I plan on using 2 blogs, one for property listings and one for open houses.  So in my example if the realtor starts a new open houses entry could he have a drop down in that entries publish window that would be populated with the entries available in property listings blog and reference a link to a property listings post? (this is not a deal breaker if it can’t do this, just a nice feature.)

2. Can you sort an archive of entries by a custom field?  A realtor would benefit from sorting their archive by price field that used a numberic value to sort be that descending or ascending.

3. Can I assign a specific index page and archive page to a specific blog.  So, using the same example of blogs as in question 1.  I want to publish property listingsto http://www.mydomain.com/property_listings/  and open houses to http://www.mydomain.com/open_houses/ so that a visit to either folder would first present an archive list of all posted entries and a clickthrough would take the viewer to full details.  I’ve personaly tried working with the custom template, template groups and the EE tag set.  I have had success in displaying one or the other blog by setting the “my_weblog” and “my_template_group” vars but I cannot seem to get the output of these templates correct or to get both blogs publishing to a specific folder or both at the same time and am wondering if this is a locked out feature in the free core and I am just SOL…

4. Last question I promise. If the question in 2 & 3 can be met with success my last question is regarding sorting.  Would it be possible to resort dynamicaly using conditionals and a drop down menu so allow visitors to resort by city instead of price.  If not dynamicaly could it be done by publishing several archives and using a jump-to menu to load another archive which sorts by a different custom field?

These are my primary concerns I need to address before I spend any more time in the software or pay the commercial license to deploy it. 

Thank you in Advance.

Paul.

1: Sure, look into related entries. Essentialy when you create the custom field you can choose the relationship type and choose a weblog to pull entries from.

2: You can definately sort a list of entries by custom field. I can’t remember if this hiccups on numerics though since all custom fields are stored as strings in the database. (Sorry, I’ll have to look that up, but I have a feeling it doesn’t like it so well)

3: This is basic EE functionality, sorry didn’t mean for that to sound rude in anyway. You might try reading up on Lisa Wess’ “Dissecting the Default Templates” series of blog entries - sort of tutorials she’s written up to help out the beginners 😊

4: Yes, you can sort (and pretty much any other weblog entries parameter) dynamically using post variables. So mocking up a simple form to target the same template as your entries tag will allow you to do this quite easily. Look at the dynamic_parameters parameter, where you list the parameters you wish to be dynamic.

Thank you for both the quick and clear reply.

Quick question because I can easily misconstrued. Regarding point 3 “This is basic EE functionality”, are you saying that assigning specific (read different) archive and index template to individuals blogs is the basic funtionality, or EE’s use of one archive & index template is the basic funtionality. 

Cheers,

Paul

Paul,

I think the_butcher means that EE makes no assumptions regarding the relationship between a weblog and a template. This means you can mix and match weblogs with templates any way you choose, hence “basic functionality”. You could 1 archive page for all your weblogs, an archive for each one, or many, many other variations.

Leslie

Thank you for the quick clarification.

Cheers,

Paul