Re-usable content chunks?

I was wondering if it is possible, in modx, to solve the following problem:

- there’s a public website and a product catalogue
- on the public website and in the catalogue, a lot of the content (but not all) is duplicate: e.g. general information, price, contact information

Ideally, information in the catalogue or website could be used to ’fill in the holes’ on the other ’side’. For example (fictional), say you have a product ’car tires’ and a text about ’car tires’, you could put that content in the website text at the appropriate location (structure could be exactly the same).

For example:
- catalogue (person X is responsible):
* What: ’Our car tires are very durable and typically last for up to 20 years’.
* Where: ’You can order them from the following stores: ...’
* Cost: ’Prices start as low as ^xx’
- website (person Y is responsible):
* Promotional text: ’You paid a lot of attention in buying your car, why not pay the same attention when buying your tires?’
* What (re-used from catalogue)
* Cost (re-used from catalogue)
* Find out more in our recent commercial

The idea being, that when someone updates text in one place, you can re-use that text for the other publication. And because the editors are not technical-savvy, editing and publishing should be as easy and user-friendly as possible.

One (of the few) ’weaknesses’ of modx I think modx has, is that you cannot use multiple content fields. For example [*content1*], [*content2*], [*content3*]. So I’m not sure about the best approach to the problem above.

Lets say your products are resources (they could also be records in custom-tables).

You would create Template-Variables for what, where, cost, promotional text and fill them out for each product.

Then on your website its easy to show boxes with getResources, which shows datas about your products.
you can create dynamical - listbox or checkbox-TVS to check, from which products you want to show infos on this page.

One (of the few) ’weaknesses’ of modx I think modx has, is that you cannot use multiple content fields. For example [*content1*], [*content2*], [*content3*].

just create richtext-Template Variables content2,content3 ... and you are creating as many content-fields as you want.

Sounds good.

What about setting up multiple websites and re-using the chunks over different websites, with different domain names.
And what about multi-language (although, as I understood it, Revolution made an effort to improve this compared to Evolution)?



Quote from: Bruno17 at Jun 17, 2011, 03:39 AM

Lets say your products are resources (they could also be records in custom-tables).

You would create Template-Variables for what, where, cost, promotional text and fill them out for each product.

Then on your website its easy to show boxes with getResources, which shows datas about your products.
you can create dynamical - listbox or checkbox-TVS to check, from which products you want to show infos on this page.

One (of the few) ’weaknesses’ of modx I think modx has, is that you cannot use multiple content fields. For example [*content1*], [*content2*], [*content3*].

just create richtext-Template Variables content2,content3 ... and you are creating as many content-fields as you want.

The easiest way to do this is create all TV and then have a settings page for each site where you can select what products you want to display.

Make a custom form on the settings page of each site where you can just use a list with yes or no to display them.

That is what I am going to be doing soon for about 50 sites we have that share the same products.