Question

I’m building a site with approximately 5 different channels and five different field groups. The home page of the site has multiple “feature” areas that can feature any of the entries from any of those channels. I need a way to allow users to “flag” an entry as a feature for the home page, then for an admin to take that entry and place it in any one of the 5 feature areas of the home page.

I have the second part of this equation (the admin placing the feature) figured out — I’m using Low Variables and Playa for that and it’s amazing. It’s the first part (users flagging entries as features) that I haven’t been able to hammer down a great method for.

As I mentioned, any one of the 5 or so channels can have entries flagged as a feature, and each of those channels has a different field group. When flagging any entry as a feature there are a few required things:

1. Feature Image
2. Excerpt
3. Department

That goes for any entry in any channel. The tricky thing for me is the fact that I can’t have similarly titled fields in different field groups.

Any ideas on ways to pull this off so it’s not a convoluted process for the user?

Answer 1

I’d take a look at Flag Master for user flagging of entries. An add-on from mithra62 which you can see here as well:

http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/flag-master

The tricky thing for me is the fact that I can’t have similarly titled
fields in different field groups.

One route might be using Switchee with the {channel} variable inside the channel entries loop. The pseudo code might look like this:

{exp:channel:entries channel="news|someother"}

    {exp:switchee variable="{channel}" parse="inward"}

        {case value="someother"}
            someother channel tags
        {/case}

        {case value="news"}
            your news channel tags
        {/case}

        {case default="yes"}
            everything else etc.
        {/case}

    {/exp:switchee}

{/exp:channel:entries}

You could also probably do something with Stash and it’s match against params though, that might be a bit more complicated. Stash and Low Variables might come in handy for parsing tags early if you run into parse order issues which might be the case with my next suggestion.

Also, don’t forget you can prefix your custom fields with the channel shortname and set them up to use the native {channel} variable. For your custom fields give them a prefix which coincides with the channel short name. For example if it was a News channel textarea field for a description of some kind you might do news_textarea_description.

Then when calling said fields you could so something like this and it would build out the custom fields prefix for you:

{exp:channel:entries channel="news|someother"}

    {{channel}_textarea_description}

{/exp:channel:entries}

Also, you said you have the first part squared away though, this add-on might come in handy as well for others:

http://brandnewbox.co.uk/products/details/selected_items – Docs and Download