Thread

I am developing a website with Expression Engine (or attempting) and I need some input on how I would go about making it less complicated for the end user.

I have about 26 different departments on the website. Some of these departments will have multiple pages dealing with their departments (as in sub categories) that they want to have on separate pages. I currently have the departments setup to have 26 different Channels, butttt, it seems to me I can’t get them to have sub pages unless they are all separate channels?

Is there a simpler, cleaner direction I could take to get this resolved?

I need some outside input as I’ve been working all weekend on this and still haven’t come to a clean solution.

Right now, I’m going to have to input them all via different channels based on which user is logged in they will be able to publish to them. (Which will work fine, I just think it’s a lot of fuss for something that I probably just made over complicated.)

Hi there,

Have you looked into using categories for this, or is there a reason that they would not work with your setup?

I have looked into using Categories, kind of. I guess I am vague on how they exactly work. Would that entail a lot of {if/then} statements implemented in the template file? (I’m really not opposed to that, just wonder how it would really function).

Depending on your set-up, you should be able to use the current url to get a category and use it’s ID to display relevant data in your template.

For instance, say one of your departments is called services. Your user will navigate to a page with segment_2 of the url being services.
With the help of this add-on (http://gotolow.com/addons/low-seg2cat/docs) you can then use the following code to display a list of entries that have been assigned to the services category.

{exp:channel:entries category="{segment_2_category_id}" dynamic="no" limit="10" orderby="title" sort="asc" paginate="bottom"}

<li><a href="http://{url_title}">{title}</a></li>

{paginate}Page {current_page} of {total_pages} pages {pagination_links}{/paginate}
{/exp:channel:entries}

Fusion Design, thank you for your input, it’s helped just having someone respond so I can look into options I hadn’t heard of/ran across.

I tried setting up the template to have the file as you directed, my issue now is that it is pulling it from every single channel. When I input a specific channel to pull from it is blank, so maybe I am not rendering the code correctly? Or it doesn’t work for channels? I only want a specific channel’s categories to show up, help? 😊

Thanks again,
Seth

Strange, you should be getting specific categories depending on the url.
Can you test this: change your variable from {segment_2_category_id} to {segment_2} and use the category id in the url in place of the category name.
Does this give the same results?

I may have been an idiot, I’m checking some things out. Thanks Fusion, you’ve been outstanding with your assistance. I’ll let you know if I was just preemptive when I wrote that last message!

Fantastic, I was just being stupid, I hadn’t explored the url setup far enough. I’m back on the road of figuring this out again! 😊
Thank you so much - you’ve been so very helpful! 😊
Seth

I’m glad you could get it sorted!
Let me know if you have any more questions.

Color-ize,

I’m so glad that Fusion Design was able to set you on the right path. I’m going to move this over to Community Help to keep the discussion open. Threads in Technical Support could eventually be closed, and you all are off to a fine discussion. I’ll stay subscribed in order to be notified if you have any further questions.

Thank you for choosing ExpressionEngine!

Cheers,

Fusion Design,

It seems I say this an awful lot, but thank you for your assistance!

Cheers!

Thanks Dan,

Glad to be of help!