Thread

I’m building a directory of charitable organisations for a client currently. It’s a categorised directory of about 1000 organisations/groups/charities which serve different geographic areas and interests.

I’ve built it as a weblog with each entry being a single organisation. There’s 20+ fields in each entry such as description, contact address and some private stuff about funding, employee count etc that only admins see. I used a weblog entry as the member profile just wasn’t customizable enough for me.

Now comes the hard bit. My client now wants to be able to selectively search the directory eg. all organisations in one area, one category or having more than 10 employees. AND then wants to send a newsletter/email out to the results.

How would I go about adding the ‘hard bit’ ?

Is it possible to create on-the-fly mailing lists for the Communicate tab?

You have access to EE’s Email class.  So, you can send emails on the fly.  I don’t know about saving a copy in the Communicate tab or any of that.

As far as the searching, you can do the category searching with the native advanced search tag.  The ‘hard’ part is really the number of employees thing.  That will take custom coding because EE saves all values of custom fields as text (i.e. as text strings) and therefore any mathematical evaluations you want to make can’t be done with things like the search parameter, etc…

The ‘> 10 Employees’ field is actually a radio button (Field Frame extension) so no need for maths.

Advanced Search will work for categories by keywords but I was thinking more of a custom form that built a filter set than searching, then take the results and construct an email using the contact email address in each entry.

The Communicate tab would be handy if you could get at it from the result set, passing in those email addresses. I suppose I could just construct a mailto: from the results but it seems I’d be missing out on a useful bit of admin functionality.