Complex and unpredictable page structure

[spacemonkey95]

Hi,

Sorry for another 'noob' question. I've done a lot of reading and looking at tutorials to try to get my head around how PW works. I think I'm getting there but I'm struggling with a key part of my project design.

Essentially, my project is to create a site which holds tutorials for a game design software product. Here is an example of the kind of tutorial I am using:

http://www.clickteam.com/creation_materials/tutorials/faultyflap/en/step1.php

As you can see, the information there is quite unstructured. I want to make it more structured which will involve showing each 'Note' inside its own styled box. There may also be other types of information like Tips and Questions which should also have their own styles, and each tutorial page might have numerous different Notes, Tips, and Questions (or not) so I can't just run a simple loop.

So my question is this: how would I best do this in PW? It seems like I'd have to make a Page for each instance of each type of information and add them as children to a parent tutorial Page. This seems a laborious way to create each page (and I need to be able to allow other people to do this as well as me).

Any ideas of how I should go about this please?

[LostKobrakai]

Take a look at page-tables, repeaters (both not installed by default, but part of the core) or the commercial matrix fieldtype. 

[pwired]

https://processwire.com/talk/topic/6417-processwire-profields-table/?p=63119

 

[spacemonkey95]

Thanks, I had looked at those but I was struggling to understand how they work.

Could you explain how the page-table facility would accomplish what I need?

Also, I think the Repeaters facility could be a way of doing it. If I create a template which contains a field for Task Description, Note, Tips, Images and Questions and load that into the Repeater, can I just ignore each instance I don't use. So I might add 5 instances of the template, but maybe only 3 of them contain a Note, 4 of them contain Tips, etc... stuff like that? Will the PHP ignore empty fields if I tell it to?

[LostKobrakai]

It certainly can do that. But you could also go with PageTables, which can have different types of pages added to it. The most difficult question for you is probably, that you need to settle on some kind of structures blocks (one or more), which will later be pieced together to your tutorials. If you know how this might look like then this'll determine whats the best field to choose for the job.

[Robin S]

I think you'll find Repeater Matrix provides the best UI for what you want to do.

It gives you the flexibility of multiple page (block) types like PageTable but with the convenience of seeing all the block content together within Edit Page.

[spacemonkey95]

Thanks for the replies. I've looked at the details and Repeater Matrix seems perfect for what I need. It's a shame it's part of the ProFields package but having discovered just how good PW is I don't mind throwing some money towards it.

I'm really excited about how awesome this finished project is going to be now!