Tutorial: Approaches to categorising site content

[kongondo 6,824]

This basic tutorial is primarily aimed at those new to PW. It could also serve as a reference to others more seasoned PW users. The question about how to categorise content comes up in the forums now and again. Hopefully with this post we’ll have a reference to guide us right here in the tutorials board.

Many times we need to organise our site content into various categories in order to make better sense of the data or to logically and easily access it. So, how do you organise your data when you need to use categories? Here are a few tips gathered from the PW forums on how to go about this. Using these tips will, hopefully, help you avoid repeating yourself in your code and site content and keep things simple. See the links at the end of this post to some useful discussion around the topic of categorisation.

Before making decisions about how to organise your site, you need to consider at least three questions:

• What items on my site are the main items of interest? These could be people or things (cars, plants, etc.). In most cases, these are the most important content on which all the other stuff point to.
• Where do items need to be grouped into categories? This is about where items need to “live”. It is about the attributes of the items of interest (e.g. responsibilities, job types, colour, etc.). Attributes can have sub-attributes (e.g. a category job type = driver could be further sub-classified as job type role = train driver).
• Can they live in more than one place? - This is about having multiple attributes.

There could be other issues such as the type of content your main items of interest are but that’s for another post. We’ll keep these examples simple. The main principles explained below still apply.

There are at least three possible ways in which you can organise your content depending on your answers to the above three questions. These are:

• Single category
• Simple multiple categories
• Complex multiple categories

These are illustrated below. Note that this is what I call them; these are not PW terms.

1. Single Category

Suppose you need to do a site for a company that’s made up of several Departments each with employees performing unique functions. These could include “Finance”; “Media Communications”; “Administration”; “Technicians”; “Human Resources”; “Logistics”.

We ask ourselves the following questions based on our 3 questions above:
 

1. Q: What items on my site are the main items of interest?

A: Employees.

 

2. Q: What attributes of our items of interests are we interested in?

A: Departments. (Single main category)

 

3. Do the Departments have sub-categories?

A: Yes. (Multiple sub-categories)

 

4.Can Employees belong to multiple sub-categories?

A: No. (Single sub-category)

We conclude that what we need is a Single Category model. Why? This is because, in Single Categories model, items of interest can only belong to 1 and only 1 main/parent category and within that only 1 sub-category

Employees in this company can only belong to one and only one department. Finance guys do their finance and Logistics guys do their stuff. Letting Techies do press conferences is probably not going to work; that we leave to the Media guys . Assuming the company has the following employees - James, John, Mary, Ahmed, Peter, Jason, Barbara etc., arranging our site content to fit this model could look like the following:

Items of interest = Employees
Categories = Departments

Adopting out strategy to keep it simple and logical, let us write down, hierarchically, our employee names against their departments to mimic the PW tree like this:
 

James

Finance

John

Finance

Mary

Technician

Ahmed

Logistics

Barbara

Media

Etc.

We notice, of course, that departments start repeating. It doesn't look like we are doing this very logically. If we think about this carefully, we will conclude that, naturally, the thing (attribute in this case) that keeps repeating should be the main criteria for our categorisation. This may seem obvious, but it is worth pointing out. Also, remember, that as per the responses to our questions, the categories (Finance, Logistics, etc.) do not have sub-categories. In this aspect, we are OK. Using this principle about repeating attributes, we find that Departments, rather than Employees, need to be the main categories. Hence, we categorise our PW site content by doing the following.

• Create a template for each Department. Hence, we have a template called Finance, Logistics, etc.
• Add the fields needed to those templates. This could be a text field for holding Employee phone numbers, email field for email, title field for their names, etc.
• Create top level pages for each Department and assign to them their respective templates. Give them appropriate titles, e.g., Finance, Media, etc.
• Create a page for each employee as a child page of the Department which they belong to. Give them appropriate titles, e.g. James, John, etc.

We end up with a tree that looks like this:
 

1. Finance (ex. main category)

a. James (ex. item of interest)

b. John

c. Shah

d. Anne

2. Logistics (ex. main category)

a. Ahmed

b. Matthew

c. Robert

d. Cynthia

3. Media

a. Barbara

b. Jason

c. Danita

4. Human Resources

a. Michael

b. Pedro

c. Sally

5. Technician

a. Mary

b. Oswald

c. Dmitri

d. Osiris

Since an employee can only belong to one Department, our work here is done. We can then use PW variables, e.g. $page->find, $pages->find with the appropriate selectors to find employees within a Department. This is a very basic example, of course, but you get the idea.

You have the choice of creating one template file for each category template as well. I prefer the method of using one main template file (see this thread). You could do that and have all Departments use different templates but a single template file. In the template file you can include code to pull in, for example, the file “technician.inc” to display the relevant content when pages using the template “Technician” are viewed.

Example code to access and show content in Single Categories model

$hr = $pages->find("template=human-resources, limit 50");
foreach ($hr as $h) {
echo "{$h->title}";
}

But sites do not always lend themselves to this model. Many times, items of interest will need to belong to multiple categories.

2. Simple Multiple Categories

Let’s say you were building a site for cars - red cars, blue cars, 2-seaters, 5-seaters, etc. Again, we ask ourselves our questions based on our initial three questions:
 

1. Q: What items on my site are the main items of interest?

A: Cars.

 

2. Q: What attributes of our items of interests are we interested in?

A: Colour, Number of seats, Models, Year of manufacture, Types. (Multiple categories)

 

3. Do these multiple attributes have sub-attributes?

A: Yes. e.g., the attribute Colour has several sub-categories - red, white, green, etc. (Multiple sub-categories)

 

4. Can Cars have multiple sub-attributes?

A: No. e.g., a yellow car cannot be a green car. (Single sub-categories)

We therefore conclude that what we need is a Simple Multiple Category model. Why? This is because, in Simple Multiple Categories, items of interest can belong to multiple parent categories. However, within those parent categories, they can only belong to one sub-category.

Assuming we have the following cars, manufactured between 2005 and 2008, as items of interest: Mercedes, Volvo, Ford, Subaru, Toyota, Nissan, Peugeot, Renault, Mazda, arranging our site content to fit this model could look like the following:

Items of interest = Cars
Categories = Model, Year, Colour, Number of seats, Type
Sub Categories = Model [Prius, etc.]; Year [2005, 2006, 2007, 2008]; Colour [Red, Silver, Black, White, Green]; Number of seats [2, 5, 7]; Types [sports, SUV, MPV].

Adopting out strategy to keep it simple and logical, if we wrote down our cars names against their attributes like this:
 

Mercedes

Model-Name:

Year: 2005

Colour: Silver

Seats: 2-seater

Type: Sports

Volvo

Model-Name:

Year: 2007

Colour: Green

Seats: 5-seater

Type: SUV

Ford

Model-Name:

Year: 2007

Colour: Red

Seats: 7-seater

Type: MPV

Etc

We notice, again, that car attributes start repeating. In order not to repeat ourselves, we want to avoid the situation where our child pages “names” keep repeating. For instance, in the above example tree, we want to avoid repeating year, colour, etc. within the tree. Of course in the frontend our output needs to look like the above where we can list our cars and their respective attributes. We just don’t need a tree that looks like this in the backend. Since we have multiple categories and sub-categories, we need to rethink our strategy for categorising our content as illustrated below. The strategy we used in the first category model will not work well here. Hence, these repeating attributes (year, colour, etc.) need to be the main criteria for our categorisation. We need to end up with a tree that looks like this:
 

1. Cars

a. Mercedes (ex. item of interest)

b. Volvo

c. Ford

d. Subaru

e. Toyota

f. Range Rover

g. Peugeot

h. Renault

i. Mazda

2. Model (ex. main category)

a. Fiesta (ex. sub-category)

b. Miata

c. Impreza

d. Matrix

e. Prius

f. E-Class

g. XC-90

h. Scenic

i. L322

j. 505

 

3. Year

a. 2005

b. 2006

c. 2007 (ex. sub-category)

d. 2008

4. Colour

a. Red

b. Silver

c. Black

d. White

e. Green

5. Number of Seats

a. 2

b. 5

c. 7

6. Type

a. MPV

b. Sports

c. SUV

d. Other

At the top of the tree, we have our main items of interest, Cars. They do not have to come first on top of the tree like that but it just makes sense to have them like this. Next, we have the Cars’ categories (attributes). The main categories are parent pages. Each main category has children which act as its sub-categories (cars’ sub-attributes). For instance, the main category colour has sub-categories “red”, “green”, etc. Grouping them under their main category like this makes better sense than having them dangling all over the tree as parent pages themselves.

Now that we know what we want to achieve, the next question is how do we go about relating our categories and sub-categories to our main items of interest, i.e., cars? Fields come to mind. OK, yes, but what about the sub-categories (2006, red, 5-seater, etc.)? Surely, we can’t keep typing those in text fields! Of course not; this is PW. We like to simplify tasks as much as we can.

What we need is a special type of field. Page Reference Fields or Page Fieldtypes add the ability to reference other pages, either single or multiple pages, within a page. For instance, we could have a Page Reference Field in the template that our Car pages use. Let’s call this “car-template”. When viewing Car pages, we would have the ability to select other pages on our site that we wish to reference, for instance, because they are related to the page we are viewing. In other cases, we could also wish to reference other pages that contain attributes/values of the page we are viewing. This is the situation with our Cars example above. Hence, the sub-categories/sub-attributes for our Cars will be pulled into our car pages using Page Reference Fields.

There are two types of Page Reference Fields; single page and multiple pages. What each do is obvious from their names. Single Page Reference Fields will only reference one page at a time. Multiple Page Reference Fields will reference multiple pages.

OK, let’s go back to the issue at hand. We need to categorise Cars by various attributes. Do we need to reference the main categories (Year, Type, etc.) in our Car pages? In fact, we don’t. What we need to reference are the sub-categories, i.e. 2005, red, SUV, etc. These will provide the actual attributes regarding the parent attribute of the Cars. We have said we do not wish to type these sub-categories/attributes all the time hence we use Page Reference Fields. Which type of Page Reference Field should we use? Remember that our Cars can have only one sub-category/sub-attribute. That’s our cue right there. In order to select one and only one sub-attribute per Car, we need to use the single Page Reference Field.

Hence, we categorise our Cars PW site by doing the following (you may follow a different order of tasks if you wish).

• Create a template to be used by the Car pages. Give it a name such as car-template
• Create a page for each of your cars and make them use the car-template
• Create one template to be used by all the main attribute/categories and their children (the sub-categories). We do not need a template for each of the categories/sub-categories. I name my template “car-attributes” Of course you can name yours differently if you wish.
• Add the fields needed to this template. You don’t need anything other than a title field for each actually.
• Create top level pages for each main category and assign to them the template car-attributes. As before, give your pages meaningful titles.
• Do the same respectively for their child pages. E.g., you should have the following child pages under the parent “Year” - 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008.
• Create the Page Reference Fields for each of your main categories/parent attributes. Using our example, you should end up with 5 Page Reference Fields (model, year, colour, seats and type). Each of these should be single Page Reference Fields. It’s a good idea, under the BASICS settings while editing the fields, to include some Description text to, include additional info about the field, e.g. instructions. In addition, you don’t want any page that doesn't belong to a particular attribute to be selectable using any of the Page Reference Fields. For instance, when referencing the year a car was manufactured, we want to be able to only select children of the page Year since that is where the year sub-categories are. We do not want to be able to select children of Colour (red, green, etc.) as the year a car was manufactured! How do we go about this? PW makes this very easy. Once you have created your Page Reference Fields, while still in the editing field mode, look under the settings INPUT. The fourth option down that page is “Selectable Pages”. Its first child option is “Parent of selectable page(s)”. Where it says “Select the parent of the pages that are selectable” click on change to change the parent. By now you know where I am going with this. For the Page Reference Field named Year, choose the page “Year” as the parent whose children will be selectable when using that Page Reference Field to select pages. Similarly, do this for the remaining 4 Page Reference Fields. Note that under this field settings INPUT you can change how you want your pages to be selectable. Be careful that you only select the types that match single Page Reference Fields, i.e. the ones WITHOUT *. For single Page Reference Fields, you have the choices:
  • Select - a drop down select
  • Radio buttons
  • PageListSelect
• Now edit the car-template to add all 5 of your Car Page Reference Fields.

We are now ready to roll. Go ahead and edit your Car pages. In each of them you will see your 5 Page Reference Fields. If you followed the instructions correctly, each of them should only have the relevant child pages/sub-attributes as selectable. Do your edits - select year when car was manufactured, its colour, type, number of seats, etc. and hit Save.

By the way, note that Page Reference Fields give you access to all the fields and properties of the page being referenced! You have access to the referenced page’s title, name, path, children, template name, page reference fields, etc. This is really useful when creating complex sites. I call it going down the rabbit hole! These properties of the referenced page are available to you on request. It does mean that you will have to specifically echo out the property you want from that page. Page Reference Fields are echoed out like any other field.

Example code to access and show content in Simple Multiple Categories model

$cars = $pages->find("template=car-template, limit=10, colour=red, year=2006, seats=5");
foreach ($cars as $car) {
echo $car->title;
echo $car->year;
echo $car->colour;
}

I have made the above verbose so you can easily follow what I'm trying to achieve. The above code will find 10 red 5-seater cars manufactured in 2006. Remember, colour, year and seats are the names of your custom Page Reference Fields that you created earlier.

Some sites will have content that belong to multiple categories and multiple sub-categories. We address this below.

3. Complex Multiple Categories

Suppose you are developing a site for a school. The school has teachers (duh!) some of whom teach more than one subject. Besides their classroom duties, some teachers are active in various clubs. On the administration side, some teachers are involved in various committees. You know the drill by now. Let’s deal with our basic questions.
 

1. Q: What items on my site are the main items of interest?

A: Teachers.

 

2. Q: What attributes of our items of interest are we interested in?

A: Subjects, Administration, Clubs (Multiple categories)

 

3. Do these multiple attributes have sub-attributes?

A: Yes. e.g., the attribute Subjects has several sub-categories - History, Maths, Chemistry, Physics, Geography, English, etc. (Multiple sub-categories)

 

4. Can Teachers have multiple sub-attributes?

A: Yes. e.g., a Teacher who teaches both maths and chemistry (Multiple sub-categories)

Apart from the response to the final question, the other responses are identical to our previous model, i.e. the Simple Multiple Categories. We already know how to deal with multiple categories so we’ll skip some of the steps we followed in the previous example. Since our items of interest (Teachers) can belong to more than one sub-category, we conclude that what we need is a Complex Multiple Category model. In Complex Multiple Categories, items of interest can belong to multiple parent categories and multiple sub-categories both within and without main/parent categories.

By now we should know what will be the main criteria for our categorisation. We need to end up with a tree that looks like this:
 

1. Teachers

a. Mr Smith (ex. item of interest)

b. Mrs Wesley

c. Ms Rodriguez

d. Mr Peres

e. Mr Jane

f. Mrs Potter

g. Ms Graham

h. Mrs Basket

i. Dr Cooper

2. Subjects (ex. main category)

a. History (ex. sub-category)

b. Maths

c. English

d. Physics

e. Chemistry

f. Geography

g. Religion

h. Biology

i. French

j. Music

3. Clubs

a. Basketball

b. Debate

c. Football

d. Scouts

e. Sailing

f. Writing

4. Administration

a. Discipline

b. Counselling

c. Exams board

d. Public relations

e. Education

We are ready to build our site. Which type of Page Reference Field should we use? Remember that our Teachers can teach more than one subject and can be involved in various sub-category activities. That’s our cue right there. In order to select multiple attributes/categories, we of course go for the multiple Page Reference Field.

• Similar to the previous example, create necessary templates and fields for the site. For our multiple Page Reference Fields, remember to select the correct input field types. These should match multiple Page Reference Fields and are marked with *. For multiple Page Reference Fields, the available choices are:
• Select Multiple*
• AsmSelect*
• Checkboxes*
• PageListSelectMultiple*
• PageAutoComplete*

Remember to add the multiple Page Reference Fields to the Teachers template. Go ahead and test different selectors, e.g. find Teachers that teach Maths and Chemistry and are involved in the Writing club. Whether you get results or not depends on whether there is actually that combination. An important point to remember is that your multiple Page Reference Fields will return an array of pages. You will need to traverse them using foreach (or similar).

Example code Complex Multiple Categories model

Find the subjects taught by the Teacher whose page we are currently viewing. You can use if statements to only show results if a result is found. In this case, of course we expect a result to be found; if a Teacher doesn't teach any subject, he/she has no business teaching! subjects is the name of one of your custom Multiple Page Reference Fields.
 

echo "<ul>";
foreach ($page->subjects as $x) {
echo "<li>{$x->title}</li>";
}
echo "</ul>";

There will be situations where you will need to use both Single and Multiple Page Reference Fields (independently, of course). For instance, in our Teachers example, we might be interested in the Gender of the Teacher. That would require a Single Page Reference Field.

Summary
What we have learnt:

• Categorising our site content need not be a nightmare if we carefully think it through. Of course not all sites will fit neatly into the 3 models discussed.
• By providing answers to a few simple key questions, we will be able to quickly arrive at a decision on how to categorise our content.
• There are at least 3 models we can adopt to categorise our content - single category; simple multiple category; and complex multiple category.
• In the latter two models, we make full use of PW’s powerful Page Reference Fields to mimic a relational database enabling us to roll out complex sites fast and easy.

Useful links:
http://processwire.com/talk/topic/3553-handling-categories-on-a-product-catalogue/
http://processwire.com/videos/create-new-page-references/
http://processwire.com/videos/page-fieldtype/
http://processwire.com/talk/topic/1041-raydale-multimedia-a-case-study/
http://processwire.com/talk/topic/683-page-content-within-another-page/
http://processwire.com/talk/topic/2780-displaying-products-category-wise/
http://processwire.com/talk/topic/1916-another-categories-question/
http://processwire.com/talk/topic/2802-how-would-you-build-a-daily-newspaper/
http://processwire.com/talk/topic/2519-nested-categories/
http://processwire.com/talk/topic/71-categorizingtagging-content/
http://processwire.com/talk/topic/2309-best-way-to-organize-categories-in-this-case/
http://processwire.com/talk/topic/2200-related-pages/
http://processwire.com/talk/topic/64-how-do-you-call-data-from-a-page-or-pages-into-another-page/

[Soma 6,602]

Are you gone crazy?

And even with colors!

[kongondo 6,824]

Are you gone crazy?

And even with colors!

That's exactly what I asked myself! Editing using the forum editor was a pain! And with such a long post, it was going all crazy on me! Next time I'll post on my site ...which I am starting soon anyway.

Edit: I've just seen a Word to BBCode macro...should have used that; would have saved me some pain!

Edited May 17, 2013 by kongondo

[diogo 4,704]

Now you can have some more fun converting everything to wiki, and putting it 

'''[http://wiki.processwire.com/ here]'''

 

[kongondo 6,824]

Now you can have some more fun converting everything to wiki, and putting it 

'''[http://wiki.processwire.com/ here]'''

 

Hehe..been avoiding the Wiki!

[RyanJ 78]

Kongondo, thanks very much for taking the time to make this post. It really puts the tree organization into perspective. It also goes the extra mile and walks you through the process of doing it and making it easy on the eyes.

Cheers!

[onjegolders 503]

Kudos for the sheer detail you've gone into here kongondo. Will be sure to give it a good readthrough soon.

[kongondo 6,824]

Thanks guys!

[ryan 17,304]

Awesome Kongondo! I haven't gone through the whole thing yet, but am printing out so I can read in more detail. But it's clear you've put a lot of great work and thinking into this, Thanks! I can't wait to read it in full. 

[RyanJ 78]

I am seeking some advise on option 2. Simple Multiple Categories for my structure.

Basically I have several locations that will list employees. Each location will have different employees.

Each employee will have at the minimum a First Name, Last Name, Title, Department, Age, Image, Year.

Employee Fields would be: First Name, Last Name, Title, Age and Image which will be unique to each employee.

Department: An employee may belong to one department and in rare cases maybe more. A department will have multiple employees, 

the departments will vary per location.

Year: Same as department

The most important part that I need to confirm is that on the front end, the user will need to be able to search the employees by first name, last name, department, year and a range of ages IE  Low____ High____. Ideally the first name and last name will need be input fields and the rest could be a drop down.

Location 1

  - Employee

     -- John Doe

     --Jane Doe

  - Department

    -- Confused Department

    --Even More Confused

   -Year

    -- 2013

    -- 2014

Location 2

    " "

Location 3

   " "

So my question is am I on the right track and is it possible to create the search functionality that I would need with the above layout? Thanks in advance for any tips, advise, recommendations or silence

[kongondo 6,824]

You are on the right track (looked at this quickly). In those "rare cases" you mention you will want to use multiple page reference fields, of course. As for search functionality, yes that can be done. Look at the Skyscrapers site/profile to get you started.

dl profile: http://mods.pw/3T

example: http://processwire.com/skyscrapers/

If you have more specific questions regarding "search", I'd suggest opening a new thread tailored to those questions so that they can be picked up quickly/easily.

Edit: Added useful links

http://processwire.com/talk/topic/3325-filter-results-via-multiple-dropdowns/

http://processwire.com/talk/topic/2491-skyscrapers-profile/

http://processwire.com/talk/topic/1526-selectors-get-architects-from-city-buildings/

http://processwire.com/talk/topic/571-simple-drop-down-search/

[videokid 45]

Funny.... I've been digging this forum like hell and I stumbled on this one... just after I finished a car site LOL.

Still interesting and it seems I was on the right track from the beginning....

Great TUT

[OrganizedFellow 417]

The absolutely MOST helpful post I have read in a long long long time.

Thank you Kongondo!

[mr-fan 940]

Crosslink to a interesting categorising post for products with extra options for pagefields:

https://processwire.com/talk/topic/10306-product-catalog-with-a-twist/#entry97847

(i like to keep such really good examples organized together somehow...)

regards mr-fan

[maniqui 14]

Should the pages created as categories and subcategories be configured/kept as unpublished or hidden (or perhaps both)? Or for this to work, should they be both published and viewable?

My main concern is that these categories (ie: Year, Model, Type, etc), being that are just PW Pages, all are directly children of  Home (root), and so, are at the same  level of depth than other PW Pages that may be "real" pages (ie. Cars, About, Contact).

Then, the "problem" would be: iterating over the children of Home ($page->children()), for example, to display a first-level nav, will eventually show the main categories, if those are unhidden. Right? 

PS: great tutorial, it really helps to clear up a lot of things for PW newcomers. It also helps to think better the relation between PW concepts (products as pages, categories as pages, etc) and general web design/development. Thanks for sharing.

[kongondo 6,824]

They don't have to be configured as hidden/unpublished. It all depends on your use case. You may want to show them (i.e.. Year, Model, etc) as menu sub-dividers for instance. Other than hiding them, If you don't want them to show up in menus, you could also remove them from the returned PageArray prior to outputting your menu. 

[szabesz 2,686]

This one is also worth reading:

URL Segments in category tree example:

http://wiki.processwire.com/index.php/URL_Segments_in_category_tree_example

[mel47 70]

Hi

I read and re-read this great tutorial to learn how to set-up my templates. However, I have no clue how to get url working correctly in the case of using pages field as category.

In forum's posts, I saw many times "kind-of" similar code using urlsegment, but I'm still not sure to understand the basics. Which of my template should be urlsegment activated? In which template I put this code?

I was wondering if this wiki page was an example step-by-step? Does someone have still access to this?

Quote

URL Segments in category tree example:

http://wiki.processwire.com/index.php/URL_Segments_in_category_tree_example

Thanks

[flydev 👊🏻 1,589]

Read this @mel47 :  https://processwire.com/docs/tutorials/how-to-use-url-segments/

 

And you can find the wiki url under archive.org :  https://web.archive.org/web/20150422040149/http://wiki.processwire.com/index.php/URL_Segments_in_category_tree_example

 

An interesting thread:  

 

Edited August 16, 2016 by flydev
Links

[SamC 724]

On 17/05/2013 at 2:55 AM, kongondo said:

Example code to access and show content in Simple Multiple Categories model

$cars = $pages->find("template=car-template, limit=10, colour=red, year=2006, seats=5");
foreach ($cars as $car) {
echo $car->title;
echo $car->year;
echo $car->colour;
}

 

This prints an ID of the page being referenced i.e.

<h1>Index of all cars</h1>

<?php

$cars = $pages->find("template=car-entry");
foreach ($cars as $car): ?>

<h2><?php echo $car->title; ?></h2>

<p>MAKE: <?php echo $car->make; ?></p>
<p>MODEL: <?php echo $car->model; ?></p>
<p>YEAR: <?php echo $car->year; ?></p>
<p>COLOUR: <?php echo $car->colour; ?></p>
<p>SEATS: <?php echo $car->seats; ?></p>
<p>TYPE: <?php echo $car->type; ?></p>

<?php endforeach; ?>

...prints...

Top of the range SUV

MAKE: 1069
MODEL: 1078
YEAR: 1079
COLOUR: 1054
SEATS: 1057
TYPE: 1061

Instead...

<h1>Index of all cars</h1>

<?php

$cars = $pages->find("template=car-entry");
foreach ($cars as $car): ?>

<h2><?php echo $car->title; ?></h2>

<p>MAKE: <?php echo $car->make->title; ?></p>
<p>MODEL: <?php echo $car->model->title; ?></p>
<p>YEAR: <?php echo $car->year->title; ?></p>
<p>COLOUR: <?php echo $car->colour->title; ?></p>
<p>SEATS: <?php echo $car->seats->title; ?></p>
<p>TYPE: <?php echo $car->type->title; ?></p>

<?php endforeach; ?>

prints...

Top of the range SUV

MAKE: Land Rover
MODEL: Range Rover
YEAR: 2015
COLOUR: White
SEATS: 5
TYPE: SUV

 

Great guide @kongondo has been very helpful indeed this morning  thanks.

[Nick Belane 2]

Thank you kongondo, very helpful!

In the first model (single Category) you create for each Department a different template. Why?
Isn't that a bit overkill if you have e.g. 30 Departments  (If any department-template have identical fields)?
Why not use one template for all departments and filter another way?

 

 

 

[mr-fan 940]

Well it is more a example of finding the right model to store things....if you would have 30 departments you would possible choose methode 2 or 3 for storing this kind of things...but

the first model describes the most simpel way to store 1:1 connections - one member : one department....

Another thing that is here important this models are all show the usage of the pagetree in ProcessWire so a editor with a "small" company with "normal" amounth of departments could easy and fast manage his content....and we could fast get the data on frontend.

On the Template side of life there you could read again on this from kongondo:

Quote

You have the choice of creating one template file for each category template as well. I prefer the method of using one main template file (see this thread). You could do that and have all Departments use different templates but a single template file. In the template file you can include code to pull in, for example, the file “technician.inc” to display the relevant content when pages using the template “Technician” are viewed.

These are just the basic examples for beginners - if you manage complex data and complex editing you could or better will use of ListerPro or even a own admin dashboard, hinding content from the pagetree that confuse the editors and make other strange but always possible things for managing complex content and at the same time give your users a good ui for editing this content.

regards mr-fan