Dynamically Updated Home Page

[jmn817]

Hello everyone,

I'm new to Processwire and so far things are going very well. However, I'm having trouble with one thing that would help dynamically grow the website. Below is my code that will get the pages under the root directory and list the pages from the specified folder.

<ul id="trending">
    <?php
    $root = $pages->get("/politics/2017/01/17/");
    $children = $root->children("limit=5");
    $children->prepend($root);
    foreach($children as $child) {
        echo "<li><a href='{$child->url}'>{$child->title}</a></li>";
    }
    ?>
</ul>

Is there a way that I can have php automatically search for the newest folder under my directory, meaning the new date?

I go by the date (yyyy/mm/dd) when organizing my pages, and it would be helpful if php automatically got the newest folder (day) without me having to change the folder each day in php.

$root = $pages->get("/politics/2017/01/17/");

Thank you for the help,

Jesse

[Harmen]

I think you need to do this with Javascript. You can get the date, and set it to a var orso and implement it in your code

[rick]

Welcome to the forum Jesse!

Your code shows a hard-coded date (I assume for this example). Using the current date, limit the number of 'pages' to a quantity, and sort them by date. This will give you x number of pages in chronological order similar to a blog's recent post listing.

Sorry for a simplistic answer. I don't have access to topic listings at the moment. Someone will post here shortly.

Again, welcome aboard!

[kongondo]

Hi @jmn817,

Welcome to ProcessWire and the forums.

I am assuming all these are separate pages ('folders)': politics, 2017, 01 and 17? In other words, your tree looks like/will look like?

politics
	2017
            01// child of year
                 17// child of month
                 18
                 19
            02
                 01
                 02
                 // etc
    2018

If you 'day' pages are created chronologically, and not too much in advance (e.g. no day 21 before day 18), and if they have their own exclusive template, the following should achieve what you want I think.

<ul id="trending">
<?php
	//$root = $pages->get("/politics/2017/01/17/");
	// get the 'day' page that was created last. @note the -created. 
	$root = $pages->get('template=name-of-day-template, sort=-created');
	$children = $root->children("limit=5");
	$children->prepend($root);
	foreach($children as $child) {
		echo "<li><a href='{$child->url}'>{$child->title}</a></li>";
	}
?>
</ul>

 

[jmn817]

@kongondo That works perfectly, thanks!

[Robin S]

This is just an idea...

You could consider making the creation and maintenance of these articles easier for site editors by having a simpler structure in the page tree (just the categories as parent pages), entering the article date with a datetime field, and then creating the desired URL for the frontend using URL segments (enable this on the category template).

So your category template would look for the following URL segments:

• segment 1: year - sanitize to integer, throw 404 if out of range
• segment 2: month - sanitize to integer, throw 404 if out of range
• segment 3: day - sanitize to integer, throw 404 if out of range
• segment 4: article page name - throw 404 if no match for article page name

In terms of finding articles that match a given year, month or day you could convert to a timestamp range as Ryan shows here, but to make it easier (and considering you'll need the integers for building the article URLs) I would instead add 3 integer fields to your article template, set the field visibility to "Hidden (not shown in editor)" and then populate them with a saveReady hook.

// in /site/ready.php
$this->pages->addHookAfter('saveReady', function($event) {
    $page = $event->arguments('page');
    if($page->template->name === 'article' && $page->article_date) {
        $page->day = date('d', $page->article_date);
        $page->month = date('m', $page->article_date);
        $page->year = date('Y', $page->article_date);
    }
});

Now it's really easy to find articles, e.g.

$matches = $pages->find("template=article, year=2016, month=11, sort=sort");

For the question in your original post you'd do something like this:

$latest_article = $pages->get("template=article, parent=/politics/, sort=-article_date");
$recent_articles = $pages->find("template=article, parent=/politics/, article_date={$latest_article->article_date}, sort=sort, limit=5");
$day_link = "/politics/{$latest_article->year}/{$latest_article->month}/{$latest_article->day}"; // use this as the first link to the 'parent' page 

 

When you need to output the URL of an article you would build it like this:

$url = "{$article->parent->url}{$article->year}/{$article->month}/{$article->day}/{$article->name}/";

For convenience you'd probably make a simple function that returns this URL string.

In the backend, rather than browse through the page tree, if you want to list articles by day/month/year you can use the "Find" lister. Or better yet a dedicated Lister Pro instance for articles.

[jmn817]

@Robin S Don't know how I missed this suggestion, thanks!