Organising Posts Under Admin

[ridgedale]

Reference: PW 3.0.62 and uikit3 based site using the Regular-Master profile.

Please could someone advise what the process is to organise the blog posts under the admin login to avoid very long, random lists of posts.

My immediate thought is to have the posts listed in groups by year and month, but I cannot see how tit might be possible to do that.

[Robin S]

I like to use Lister (or Lister Pro) for this purpose. Rather than being limited to a single, static organisation of pages Lister allows you to view pages by any number of filters: date, author, field value, etc.

Lister Pro has a number of useful features, including that you can create dedicated listers for particular preset filters, and include some default empty filters within the lister.

But you can still achieve a lot with the core Lister using the Bookmarks feature.

[ridgedale]

Thanks for the reply once again, Robin S.

I'm not sure this is what I am after as the site in question will have potentially many contributors and potentially many hundreds, if not thousands, of blog-posts (News items).

A web search uncovered your experimental VirtualParents module which, at first glance, I thought might fit the bill exactly. The fact that it cannot be used for real children or on actual production websites precludes it from implementation.

In essence, if thousands of posts are listed ungrouped below Blog (News in this case) I'm very mindful of the potential that clicking on Blog (News) to display the list of posts would have a significant impact on the performance of the website from a contributor perspective.

What I'm hoping to achieve is for the posts to be returned automatically as collapsed groups by year or year/month and then when the group is clicked that the posts are listed in sort order by the custom field currently specfied using the Templates > News (blog) > Family (tab) > Children are sorted by option as follows:

News (blog)

    2017

        3rd Post Title

        2nd Post Title

        1st Post Title

    2016

    2015

    ....

or:

News (blog)

    2017

    2016

        12-December

        11-November

        10-October

            3rd Post Title

            2nd Post Title

            1st Post Title

        09-September

        08-August

        07-July

        06-June

        05-May

        04-April

        03-March

        02-February

        01-January

    2015

    ....

Is it possible to achieve such automatic page listing with Lister or ListerPro without requiring contributors to run filters?

[Robin S]

57 minutes ago, ridgedale said:

In essence, if thousands of posts are listed ungrouped below Blog (News in this case) I'm very mindful of the potential that clicking on Blog (News) to display the list of posts would have a significant impact on the performance of the website from a contributor perspective.

There's no performance issue with having any number of pages under a parent - the admin page list (and Lister) are ajax-driven and paginated for this very reason.

57 minutes ago, ridgedale said:

What I'm hoping to achieve is for the posts to be returned automatically as collapsed groups by year or year/month and then when the group is clicked that the posts are listed in sort order by the custom field currently specfied using the Templates > News (blog) > Family (tab) > Children are sorted by option

I'm not aware of any module that creates virtual folders of pages in this way. Rightly or wrongly, ProcessPageList doesn't really lend itself to being manipulated like this.

If you wanted to have the posts inside real year/month parents you could try the ProcessDateArchiver module. It's hasn't seen any updates in a while but maybe it doesn't need any (I haven't tried it).

Or, if you're keen to get your hands dirty in code you could make a custom Process module with selects for month and year, and a datatable that lists matching blog posts. @bernhard has written a great tutorial for getting started with Process modules.

[ridgedale]

Thanks for the feedback and pointers, once again.