Thread

I’m looking into various ways to organize different entry “types” in a single channel, similar to the way Tumblr organizes content. For example, my site has a few channels already, and one of them will have various types of entries, like videos, photos, links and regular text based blog posts. Photos and videos would have a media item and a description, while links would have a url field and a description. Blog posts would have just a field for the main content.

The only ways I can think of accomplishing this are:

1. Create a channel for each entry type (photos, videos, links, entries, etc.) and create custom fields & groups as needed for each channel. Then display each channel together on the frontend using the channel entries tag, eg: {exp:channel:entries channel="photos|videos|links|entries"}.

2. Create a single channel and organize the entry types by category (photo, video, link, etc). Create all the required custom fields for each entry type and make them optional, and only fill out only the required field type (eg: media & description for photo/video, main content for blog). This could get complicated fast.

Ideally, I’d love to just be able to have one single channel, then select the entry type and all of the custom fields would appear on the publish form. However, I don’t know if it is possible to set up a channel this way.

Any suggestions? I’d love to be able to do this in a single channel, without having tons of custom fields, but I don’t know if that is possible.

I’m currently rebuilding my site as sort of a tumblr clone. I went the “separate channel for each type” route. I’m fairly new to expressionengine but I don’t see the benefit of using only one channel it seems like setting yourself up to use a series of hacks unnecessarily.

1. You still have to create the same amount of custom fields.
2. You will still have to create templates or snippets to accomodate the variations in markup required for each post type or put all of the variations in your main template.
3. Calling those post types might become more complicated than necessary.
4. I don’t like the idea of having all of those custom fields on one page when the majority of them will be blank for each post.

The separate channel method just seems far more flexible, extendable.
 
I have the following channels

Journal  
Links  
Photos  
Quotes    
Videos

I have a template group for each one in addition to a “site”/default template. Each one of those template groups has an index and a single view template. The “site/default” template has also has header, footer etc

I did this so mysite.com I display entries from all channels, links for each entry serve the single view

So when someone clicks a photo entry on the main page serves up mysite.com/photos/entry_title

I can view only photos at mysite.com/photos or just quotes at mysite.com/quotes all without using categories. You can do some really cool things when you throw categories and tags into the mix. With the single channel I think you start to limit yourself in that regard. I guess you could use the “custom category fields” to resolve some of that.

I didn’t mean to ramble on but that’s my relatively negligible opinion. Good luck.

Thanks for your input. I decided yesterday to go the route of using a channel for each post type. The implementation seems like it will be a lot simpler.

There’s a good demo for how to do this here:
http://shapingthepage.com/journal/how-to-build-a-simple-tumblr-blog-with-expressionengine
One thing that I’m not clear about is whether you can use multiple weblogs in 1.6.x as they demonstrate, since I have not yet been able to upgrade to 2.1. Anyone have knowledge about this?

It’s work properly on EE 1.6.X, just change

{exp:channel:entries channel="journal-entry|journal-link|journal-photo|journal-quote|journal-video" limit="20" orderby="date"}
...
{/exp:channel:entries}

to

{exp:weblog:entries weblog="journal-entry|journal-link|journal-photo|journal-quote|journal-video" limit="20" orderby="date"}
...
{/exp:weblog:entries}