Auto templates

By keith_s - August 10, 2010

I purchased the Auto templates last week and have designed a website using them (with the CMS software).

We just launched the website, http://www.southwindford.com.

During the design, the website owner alerted me of a problem. The "listed by" field in the "listings.php"  and "ListingsDetail.php" files weren't pulling in the person's name that created the listing, but rather were pulling in the last person listed on the Home Pages editor (I've renamed my editor to "Staff").

Looking into the code, I saw that there was no mechanism that ties listings to staff, or even to the "user", on either of these pages.  I believe this is a flaw in the template. Can you please confirm this to me?

I believe that there needs to be some sort of modification, possibly to the "listings" table that allows the person making a new listing to select the desired person from the Home Pages (staff, in my case), table.

It will probably be somewhat simple for you guys to do, but for me, when "joins" are included in the mysql queries, I get lost.

I programmed some work-arounds for this, but am not completely happy with the way I "fixed" it.

Would you please look into this and if you confirm what I'm saying, let me know what the corrections are either by posting them here or sending updated files?

Thanks,
Keith D Sellars
WebGraffix Media Solutions, LLC

Re: [webgfx] Auto templates

By Jason - August 11, 2010

Hi Keith,

There are a couple of things we can do. Every record has a "Created By" system field associated with it. We can use this to get the user information of the person who create the record. If the record is being created by an admin, they can select a user from a drop down in CMS Builder for the "Created By" field.

If that doesn't do everything you want, we can also add a field to the page through the section editor. From the sounds of it, this would be a list field (drop down) that would have a list of users (from the "Staff" editor), where the person creating the record can select which staff the listing belongs to.

Let me know what you think of these options and let me know exactly what information you'll need to be retrieving on your listings.php page and I can help walk you through it.

Hope this helps.
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interactivetools.com

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Re: [Jason] Auto templates

By keith_s - August 11, 2010

Jason,

I actually had already implemented one of your solutions partially. I did indeed create a dropdown from the Staff page. However, the issue that I had was not all of the Staff members were set up as "users". As a result, what I wound up doing was setting up user accounts with the exact same name as what exists for the staff members. This was what I had to do in order to pull in the createdBy field as well as all of the information located on the staff page (name, phone, email, etc.).

I know what I did is not the truest way that it should be done, but it works. If I do another car dealership in the future, I would prefer to get you to help me get the code be the cleanest it can be. There are one or 2 things that I didn't do because of this issue, but they were minor things that didn't really matter.

Overall, I'm very pleased with the result - http://www.southwindford.com. My main reason for posting this was to let you guys know that I think the templates themselves need some slight modification so that they work completely as they should "out of the box".