Thread

With a bit of time on my hands, I’ve volunteered my services to my sons high school and agreed to build a team site for their Football team.

So, in thinking about how best to approach this so that what they end up with will be useful for more than just a year or two, I’ve found myself confronted with the all to familiar dilemma, categories or relationships.

The site will revolve around “Teams”; whether weblog or category every year/season there will be 4 teams:
Freshman A
Freshman B
Sophomore
Varsity
In addition to “Teams”, there will be a “Player Info” weblog and a “Coach Profile” weblog, as well as “Schedule”.

My initial thought was to use “Categories” by defining 2 Category Groups; Teams and Year/Season, and assigning each to all of the weblogs mentioned above.

However, I’m not sure that this is the easiest approach. An alternative to the above approach might be to, rather than establishing “Teams” as a category, would be to create a weblog “Teams” which I would relate to the “Players”, “Coaches”, and “Schedule” weblogs. Then through reverse relationships I should be able to display all of the data as it relates to any team in the system.

This is the option I’m now leaning towards but I was wondering if someone else might have a different take on this situation.

(?)

Thanks for taking the time to look at this!

If you are going to use relationships then Playa is a must.
Using categories would work as well if you don’t mind twisting some of the URLs down the line to show parent-child kind of a structure. In my mind categories are subdivisions of weblogs so I prefer weblogs when content has to be broken down…not to mention being able to assign rights per weblog.
Never linked the word ‘category’ in URL unless we are talking sub-division of weblog content.

site.com/index.php/site/teams/Lakers
vs.
site.com/index.php/site/category/lakers

year/season…well this distinction can be done through date fields 😊

Since it is easier maybe first try out with cats and see how it feels from user perspective although my initial vote goes out to weblogs-relationships and that way users maintain content vs. structure (categories) 😉
...And you can ‘grow into’ weblogs (add more teams, players, event) a lot easier than categories.

Hey, thanks for chiming in! I think you’ve convinced me that weblogs/relationships is the way to go.

It might be advantageous to also establish two more weblogs; “Roster” and “Coaching Staff” which is where I’d deal with dates/year/season, and these will also be related to my “team” weblog entries.

I’m wondering though if this is over-thinking the situation?

If I step back and think about how the client will manage data for above suggestion this approach would necessitate just 4 team weblog entries each of which would serve as the catalyst for delivering related data.

Interesting thought.   

Maybe though simply establishing a team entry for every season; e.g. 2010 Varsity, 2011 Varsity, etc. management makes more sense. Certainly that approach is pretty straight forward; that is, unless I allow the “year” within the “title” to be dynamic. Then I create a situation within the system where the only way for the client to distinguish between entries is the “date”. Probably not ideal.

Just thinking out load - so to type!

😊

Sure, that is what forums are about…doesn’t have to always be a technical issue 😊

Another thing you might want to give a thought (when it comes to ‘staff’) is that you can use member groups to cut down on weblogs. You do get member profile search and ‘member page’ with custom fields. If you don’t want to relate weblog entries you can always ‘relate’ members to content by assigning an author to an entry. You can ‘hack’ the language for CP and have it read “staff” or “coach” instead of “author”. This will allow ‘1-to-many’ relationships 😉 and then you can filter/search weblog entries per “coach/author”. To take it even further into member perspective there is Solspace and their member plugin to build upon native EE membership pages.

As far as ‘seasons’ you can always use calender and archives tags…again renaming word archive into ‘seasons’ or just hard code search terms for each team under specific period.
Many options to get this done as always with EE.
If you are going to use CP for entries vs. SAEF might also bee a reason to make some unorthodox decisions for weblog setups as well…ultimately whatever the end user of the system likes - you can work around the presenting data through your templates by using a query module if the EE tags don’t cover it.
All the best with the project.