Some questions Re: Expression Engine
Development and Programming
Hi!
Really enjoying learning EE and can definitely see the advantages of using such a powerful CMS.
I do have a couple of questions that I am hoping you guys will be able to help me with.
I am looking to setup a Products channel where each product has a set of retailers assigned. These retailers will have unique urls for each product which will be entered in the EE interface for Data admin users. Can this be achieved through EE or do I need a third party add on?
I have static modules (or parts of my page) where I would like to abstract my data from the template manager. Do I need to setup a channel for each of these modules or is there an easier way to achieve.
Please go easy on me as I am only just starting out learning this 😊
Neil
You don’t need to assign channels on a per-module basis. Modules can access data from any channel. What it sounds like you are trying to do is to setup a relationship between products and retailers, one to many. You can do this with the Relationship module (built in) or with Playa (third party).
Thank you for your reply.
I have already now built the relationship code for product to retailers.
In terms of organisation I think I will set up a channel for each separate page module so users of the admin system will be able to find the content quickly and easily. Do you think this will incur a performance hit?
Thanks again for your help on this.
Performance hit? Depends on how many channels you setup, and how well you optimize your tags and queries.
There may be better ways to organize your content that is more efficient, yet provides for user ease. You haven’t really given enough detail about how your site is going to function to give you more advice. But for instance, instead of assigning a new channel to each product page (I assume that is what you mean by “each separate page module”), you just use one channel, and assign a category. Then each user can just search for content on a channel by category.
While EE doesn’t require that its developers ascribe to good sql database theory, I’ve always found that at least some cursory database normalization can greatly simplify the solution for the developer and user. Here’s a quick link to some info about normalization. There’s a ton of other stuff out there, and whole books have been written on the subject:
http://databases.about.com/od/specificproducts/a/normalization.htm
Best to think through the database/channel/category structure before devoting a lot of time to coding. Locking yourself into a path (overuse of channels) that may cause great headaches down the road is definitely something to be avoided.
hope this helps
-jim