Thread

I’m looking at doing a Web development project in ExpressionEngine (a client requirement, in this case). I’ve dabbled with EE in the past, and been generally impressed with it.

However, the content model for this site is highly relational. Consider—

A Person is related to multiple Subject areas which are related to multiple Locations which are related to multiple other things. There are five or six conceptual objects, and each one is related to multiple of the others. So when I look at a Person, I need to see the Subjects, Locations, etc. that they’re related to.

This is the type of thing that would be done in a standard relational database with a table for each object and multiple interstitials between them.

This type of relational modeling can be tough to get in lower-end content management systems (price-wise, I mean—don’t take offense) without a lot of hacking or plug-in development. The interface considerations alone can be complicated (when looking at a Person, you need some interface to go find a related Subject, etc.).

How does EE stack up against this requirement?

Hi DeaneB,

EE does have a way to relate entries but what you describe is likely beyond the default feature set.

Can you get reverse relationships—so if A is related to B, can I discover than B is related to A?

Yes 😊

Can I have relationship to more than one blog?  So an entry in Blog A could have relationships to entries in Blog B and Blog C?

Hi, Deanne - yes you can, that is probably one of the more common ways to handle it.

Wouldn’t happen to be the Gadgetopia DeaneB would you? 😉

1:1 relationships and reverse relationships are doable.

Multiple 1:1 relationships and reverse relationships are doable.

It’s when you want to do 1:Many and Many:Many that things get more difficult.  There is an extension for the 1:Many but (last I checked, which was pre EE 1.6.1) it needed a change to EE code to work.  I’ve been able to setup a many:many approach using a connecting weblog (much like a join table) and some custom queries - and it works fine for content that is relatively static.  It’s not the quickest approach from a content entry point of view.

The query tag, which enables you to write MySQL directly in your templates, can do the work required for strings of relationships.

Combine this with Mark Huot’s Multi Relations extension, and you can get EE to do these things.

The extension doesn’t currently work however with v1.6.1 though Mark will probably fix that soon.