Thread

My questions are in regards to the control panel publish & edit area when using a new weblog made up of custom fields.

I will be creating a Customer Relations solution for a web design and hosting company which will manage the basic client information like company name, address, contact info, phone numbers, email addresses, websites, etc.

1. Considering my needs, do I have to use the “Title” field on the publish form? Is it a required field? In my paticular case would you duplicate the company name into the title field? If not, what would I use the title field for? What about the Summary, Body and extended text fields. It seems they would not serve any purpose for my needs, is that correct?

2. Looking at the Edit weblog entries on the demo I see that entries are listed with certain field headings - Title, Comments, Trackbacks, etc. If I am using a weblog with custom fields will the edit weblog entries area then show the headings of my custom fields instead? Can I choose what appears there?

3. Will the Edit weblog entries area allow me to filter results based on my custom fields? In my case I might want to show only clients that reside in a specific zip code area for example or display them based on a different custom field.

I tried to learn using the demo but it will not allow me to experiment with custom fields. Since I want to buy today, any quick feedback is appreciated.

Thanks!

Hi, inventive!

1. Yes, the title field is required, it is used in lots of important places -most notably, the Edit screen.  Why not use the Title field for the Company Name?

2. You can use an extension (one already exists) to remove certain columns there.

3.  You would need a custom field for this.

The demo should let you experiment with custom fields.  What demo did you use?

To add a little…
1) The base custom field group has body, summary, etc. but you don’t need to use those or that set. You can create a new field group with the fields you want and formatted the way you need. The only two fields that are always included in a group are title and url_title that are core to some EE areas/display. Beyond that, everything is customizable.
2) I’m not aware of anything that shows your custom fields in the main Edit area. Actually, there is no way to really do that as you’ll probably have more than one weblog and each with it’s own field group.

Hi Lisa,

I am using:
http://expressionengine.com/cp_demo/

When trying to create a new Custom field in the default field group, I get:
“Sorry, you are not allowed to use this feature in the CP Demo”

Ok so the Title field is required and in my case I would not create a “Company Name” field, I would use the “Title” field instead. Do you see any harm in having both feilds (Title and Company Name) contain the same info?

What about the Summary, Body and extended text fields - are they required? If not can they be made invisible in the publish form. I would only want my custom fields to appear there of course.

You mention an extension to remove certain columns in the Edit weblog entries - what extension is that and where can I read more on it.

In my example I would want to quickly locate a specific company in the edit weblog area so I could edit/add to their information. I may want to locate that company by their name, address or phone and so forth. Also I would want to display those entries in the edit weblog entries with the headings of my choice based on the custom fields. For example I might want the headings to be:
Title(Company Name) - Phone - Fax - Email - Website

I would also like to filter and/or sort through my entries based on the custom fields not the default settings.

Could you address these specific needs?

Hi, inventive!

1. Yes, the title field is required, it is used in lots of important places -most notably, the Edit screen.  Why not use the Title field for the Company Name?

2. You can use an extension (one already exists) to remove certain columns there.

3.  You would need a custom field for this.

The demo should let you experiment with custom fields.  What demo did you use?

The CP demo is intended purely to see how the CP works - it is highly restricted and not appropriate for testing.  I would recommend the 30-day hosted demo or EECore (http://expressionengine.com/sales/try) for a proper trial.

What about the Summary, Body and extended text fields - are they required?

No, they can be deleted, renamed, or whatever you want.

For the search, it would be easiest to add a front-end search and include an edit link so that you could quickly edit those details.

For the extension, you want the Simplify Edit Table extension =)

Ahhh…the CP demo…that’s very limited as it’s just to show what the CP is like. You might want to either download the Core version (free but limited in what modules it contains), or try the Hosted Demo which is fairly full-function.
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I’ll let Liza respond to the others… Edit-Add: She was lurking 😊

So basically your saying to create a template that would access and edit the data “outside” of the control panel - do I understand correctly? Can you point me to the documentation on this?

Thanks for all your help.

For the search, it would be easiest to add a front-end search and include an edit link so that you could quickly edit those details.

For the extension, you want the Simplify Edit Table extension =)

I would say to create a search template for searching, that would lead to your entries, where each individual entry would include an Edit Link so that your authors could easily edit those entries.

That is not the ideal way, but it’s the easiest way without a custom extension for the edit page. =)

Ok, understood.

Can you still point me to the documentaion that will help me understand more about creating templates that access and edit the weblogs “outside” of the control panel. Its looking more like this will be a better solution for me so I can highly customize the way the data is presented.

Thanks

I would say to create a search template for searching, that would lead to your entries, where each individual entry would include an Edit Link so that your authors could easily edit those entries.

That is not the ideal way, but it’s the easiest way without a custom extension for the edit page. =)

Hi, inventive - those templates are basically the crux of ExpressionEngine.  Have you gone through the Getting Started resources, and video tutorials in the documentation?  Both linked from the front page of the docs.

Also see this tutorial =)

Thank you Lisa and PXLated for your help.