New Module: Structure - Uses entries to create a page hierarchy for static and listing pages

Never mind my above; I now see what’s going on.

An RSS update shows up with the creation date of the thread in question, apparently. That is, the item in question is the thread, not the message. Not as useful as one would hope, but better than nothing.

(This is an edited repost from the Structure tutorial comments, placed here for the record.)

I’ve been wishing for a couple of nav features, though not so deeply that I’ve thought through the consequences.

1. If the field group has a field “weblogname_menu”, use that instead of {title} in the menu. The reason is that a title needs to stand along, but a menu name is viewed in the context of the menu, and can often be shorter. For example, if I have a level named “Chimpanzee” with submenu names “Diet” and “Habitat”, I want the titles to be of the form “Chimpanzee Diet”, but I don’t need to repeat “Chimpanzee” in the “Diet” menu item; it’s already there in the parent.

2. A combined main/subnav with each ancestor and sibling and children of the current page expanded, something like this, where main 2 and sub 3 are ancestors of the current page, subsub 2, and are expanded. (Another way of looking at this is that it’s an abbreviated site map, expanded only along the path from the root to “here”. Still another way of looking at it is that it’s an expanded version of breadcrumbs, showing siblings at each level, plus immediate children.)

• main 1
• main 2
  • sub 1
  • sub 2
  • sub 3
    • subsub 1
    • subsub 2 (=Here)
      • subsubsub1
      • subsubsub2
    • subsub 3
  • sub 4
  • sub 5
• main 3
• main 4

@Kevin Yep, but at that point you might as well not use the module and just use entries, unless you need the “listing” feature.

@sillbeer I don’t think so because the nav_sub tag needs to read the current URL to know what to output.

@jlundell thanks for the feedback! 1) there are no plans to include that type of functionality 2) We’re working on more advanced options for the nav_sub tag, but no release date as of yet there’s a lot to do with it still.

Another question about the structure module. Is it still possible to access templates directly? I used to include scripts this way, for example {path='javascript/script.js'}, but this doesn’t seem to work anymore.

Thanks!

@NL Not sure why that wouldn’t still work for you as I believe those still work when using the Pages module and this is based on the same premise.

Hi Travis

Great looking extension/mod.

However, I’ve been trying to follow the tutorial on Jambor-ee and it all seems to work fine unless I remove the index.php from the site URLs (I’m using EE 1.6.7 on PHP5.2.5 and the LG .htaccess generator extension to remove the index). Standard EE template pages from any other blog seem OK but the Structure main nav/secondary nav/breadcrumbs fail unless I manually put the index.php back in the address. So for example if I create a new post in a weblog set up in Structure and say set a URI of ‘news’ and then navigate to http://siteurl/news/ the Structure nav tag produces a list of links but the ‘here’ class just reverts back to the home link and the breadcrumb doesn’t show. However if I manually insert the index.php so the page is called as http://siteurl/index.php/news/ then the breadcrumb shows up correctly and the main nav correctly sets the ‘here’ class on the list item.

Any ideas…

Thanks

Martin

PS if I put the index.php back into the site URL in system settings and disable the LG extension then it’s all fine and I can create the site structure and nav/breadcrumbs through Structure…

@Martin Luff I haven’t used the htaccess generator, so I’m not sure exactly how it’s doing it, but obviously it’s not compatible. I’d say try using a different htaccess rule without the generator, there are threads to help with that and several different methods. It may just not be compatible with the way Leevi’s is removing index.php.

Hi Travis,

I am trying to integrate a plugin called pi.live_search into my site. I am stumbling over a problem that is causing the live_search plugin to generate links in the site.com/weblog/entry format- and not the pages/structure format.

I posted something similar here: http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/86635/P36/

Using the regular EE search module, you can do this:

{if page_url != ""}
    <td width="30%" valign="top"><a href="{page_url}">{title}<a></td>
{if:else}
    <td width="30%" valign="top"><a href="{auto_path}">{title}<a></td>
{/if}

What I can’t figure out is how to get the {page_url} from within the pi.live_search code.

I started doing something like this:

$structureQuery = $DB->query("SELECT s.*, t.url_title FROM exp_structure as s, exp_weblog_titles as t WHERE entry_id = ".$row['entry_id']." AND s.parent_id = t.entry_id");

but then realized that some of my pages in Structure, have multiple parents.

Is there a way to access a Structure function to get the equivalent of the {page_url} value so I can use it in PHP and modify the live_search plugin?

many thanks,

rowan

Is there a way to access a Structure function to get the equivalent of the {page_url} value so I can use it in PHP and modify the live_search plugin?

You get it using the $PREFS class– $PREFS->ini(‘site_pages’) (make sure to do “global $PREFS;” first). That will return an array that uses entry_ids as keys, and the pages/structure URI as values.

Hi Travis

Thanks for the quick feedback. Yes, I think you may be right - I’ll take a look at the Wiki entry on the different methods for removing the index.php and see if I can remove it in a different way to Levi’s extension. I’ve noticed that each server seems to have it’s own little quirks so I’ll just have to experiment. The extension uses the ‘include list method’ - what do you normally use?

All the best

Martin

@Martin Luff We use something close to the “File and Directory Check” Method

Travis

OK thanks for the info. I disabled the LG .htaccess extension and manually set up the .htaccess using the exclude method and it’s looking promising. 😊 Feels pretty intuitive and I can see some clients being able to grasp this a lot quicker - will be interesting to do a site and see how all the content goes in this framework compared to the traditional EE way of working…

Yay! Some pretty cool stuff in there - I’m happily dragging pages from blog to blog and assigning templates on a per post basis if I need… Any ideas how it impacts the server compared with the normal model?

Thanks again - must have been a fair bit of work (much appreciated) - this could be fun - definitely in the spirit of EE.

Martin

So far I love this module, however, I just ran into an annoying road block. Each ‘listing’ page can be tied to 1 weblog, which is fine, but once I do that, I can’t tie any other ‘listing’ page to the same weblog. For instance, I have a Recipes page, which contains 3 listing pages, Main Dishes, Snacks, and Dips. I tied the Main Dishes to my Recipes weblog, thinking that all 3 of those pages could be tied to the Recipes weblog. From there I was hoping to enter a new Recipe, add it to the category of Main Dishes, then have it appear on the listing page. I suppose I could create a weblog for Main Dishes, Snacks, and Dips, but it’s more logical to just create a Recipe entry, and put it into a category.