Thread

Hello,

This is what I would ike to achieve:

A user visits a microsite, and is presented with several questions regarding the type of adventure holiday he would like. These include the type of activity (rock climbing, cycling etc.), the style of adventure (events, family, advanced), the region (by UK area), and the month they would like to go. They are then presented with a list of possible adventures that best match their criteria. For each adventure, the site presents further information about each adventure, reccommended accommodation, and reccommended equipment. This information will be supplied by several partner sites. This is not however a booking system or an e-commerce site and the results will link to the partner sites for the user to purchase etc. It has to be a CMS controlled site, with each partner having access to just their own content.

So basically I have several tables with relationships and it is just a case of firing some sql queries to obtain results. What I am finding with other CMS solutions is they are geared towards users specifying what apears on screen. I guess what I really need is a non-technical version of phpmyadmin, which controls the content in the database, not on screen.

I think EE is capable of handling this, but what I don’t want to do is to try and force something that is not suitable for this into what I want. If there is a better solution that does what I need, then it would be nice to know.

At the moment in EE I have setup some weblogs such as activity, equipment, accommodation. Categories then represent the activity types, and I have then used relationships as I would do in a relational database design, but have become a bit stuck, and not sure if it the right way to do things. Can I just have a form, and then use PHP to create an sql query based on the information to generate the activities that match for that user?

Another concern is the administration system terminology may confuse the end user as it is geared more towards blogging, but maybe this is just a case of user training.

Any suggestions, help would be grateful. I still feel this is better than Joomla etc which seem to be inflexible.

You could do it with your own form- only real negatives are- pagination is a bear; some of the data can be very complex.  If I want to pull in standard weblog data?  Doing so with a query is cake.  If I want category data in there as well?  Presentation becomes ‘not cake’ and I generally avoid doing it via query.

I’d probably be using categories for the main ‘filters’- quite possibly multiple category groups.  You can ‘stack’ cats to get only ‘family’ adventures in ‘London’ via category=“1&2;” in the weblog tag parameter.  The relationship setup itself seems reasonable- as long as the data entry makes sense to the partners.  And you can change the use of ‘weblog’ in the control panel to a more suitable word- via ‘System Prefs- General Config’ in ‘Section Designation Word’.

But- I suspect there are a lot of different ways to approach this one.  Probably why it’s proving difficult to settle on the best method.  (For example- with 1.6.1, you can now filter the weblog tag based on custom field content- see the search parameter- that might be a good way to go for some of this.)  Want me to shift you down to ‘How to’ for some brainstorming?  We’re starting to wander pretty far from pre-sales.

That would be great, thanks Robin. I have been playing with search parameters in weblog tags, but I like your idea of having stacked categories. I was having nightmares about many-many relationships (i.e a piece of equipment can be accociated with more than one activity type, and vice-versa. Having matching categories could act as a ‘tagging’ system. Ideally I would like to use Expression Engine for all of our projects because I see it as a lot more flexible that other CMS solutions out there.

So moved!  And yep- a lot of ways to set things up.  I’m making use of Solspace’s tagging module for the first time, and have to say, it provides another nice way to associate entries.  Of course- that just adds to the difficulty of picking WHICH way to associate entries in a given circumstance!