Newbie: How to organize data

2 posts by 2 authors in: Forums > CMS Builder
Last Post: November 12, 2008   (RSS)

By ekcetera - November 12, 2008

I'm a new user and trying to wrap my head around CMS Builder and how the section editor menu types work. I'm doing a site for a property investment company. I want the info to display as follows:

User clicks on a menu button labeled Property Listings and displays a list of cities where the company has properties. The user can click on a city and view a list of properties in that city. User can click on a property and see detail about the property.

What is the best way to set this up? Do I create a section editor for the cities and one for the properties? Or, do I use a Category type menu style and put cities as the parent level and the properties beneath? What type of menu style do I use?

Thanks,

Kelly

Re: [ekcetera] Newbie: How to organize data

By Dave - November 12, 2008

Kelly, welcome to the CMS Builder forum!

Does the client need to ability to add and remove cities or are they fixed? If they're fixed then you can just create a hard coded city page that links to the property list page like this: propertyList.php?city=Vancouver

(Make sure you have a field called "city" in your property section and values (eg: Vancouver) that match).

This makes use of the build in search and filter features described here: http://www.interactivetools.com/docs/cmsbuilder/viewer_search.html

That's the simplest and I'd start with that. If you need something more you can create a multi-record section for cities with a single field "city" and use that to dynamically generate your city page.

You can also load values from that city section for your city pulldown in your Property section so you have the same values in both places.

Hope that makes sense. Let me know if you need more details about any of that.
Dave Edis - Senior Developer
interactivetools.com