How do I reuse data?

Hiya All,
I am not even sure where to begin.
I have a website that is for a publishing company. We publish novels.

We have a page for each book containing: cover photo, book info, cover text and an exerpt.
We have a page for each Author containing: author photo and information, and cover photo/text for each book written as well as a link to the book page.

We have Genre pages which contain cover photos and cover text for each book in that genre with a link to the book page.
We have a Author’s page which contains an alphabetic list of authors with autor’s photo to each author’s page.
We have a book catalogue with all covers and book info alphbetic as well as link to book page.

Right now I have to put the data for each book in manually on every appropriate page...1hr+ per book

I would like 2 things:

1. I would like to put the data in only once and have it display in all appropriate pages.
2. Have a form for entering the data so that my wife could add a new book.

the documentation is overwhelming. Do I use a tv, chunk, ditto or combination? And how?

any help appreciated
Thanks

General rule of thumb...if the info is not going to change/static, e.g. a copyright notice in a footer, then, throw it in a chunk....on the other hand, if the info is going to change, e.g. on a page by page basis (e.g. author name), use a TV (hence the variable - it varies). Ditto is for aggregating the news/documents/etc. There might also be a scenario where you’d want to use a database if we are talking thousands of books . Sorry, I haven’t provided any direct answer to your questions....but am sure someone will (gotta run)...

cheers/k

If your information is mostly in the same way, have a look at the modx widgets
and http://wiki.modxcms.com/index.php/Template_Variable

a german source for db outout of data
http://www.modxcms.de/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=5

The way I’d tackle it would be something like this:

• Create a template for book pages, the template should use TV’s for each of the page elements i.e. cover photo, book info, cover text etc.
• Create a template for author pages, the template should use TV’s for each of the page elements i.e. author photo and information, and cover photo etc.
• Create genre pages as containers that hold individual book pages for each genere (if each book can belong to more then one genere then you will need to use TV as genere tags instead).
• Create an Author’s catalog page as containers that hold the all the individual author pages.
• Now add a lot of ditto magic on the container pages and book catalog to tie it all together.

Try viewing this as the general application layout, there are some additional minor things I’m skipping here and would be required in order to create a seamless user experience. Building this properly should be considered a big task and you will need to learn some advanced MODx stuff. It might seem a little daunting at first but I think you will find that even if you only implement the basics it’s still going to save you a lot of time (one hour per page sounds really excessive).

Hope this points you to the right direction,
erez

Thanks guys,
I think that is exacty what I needed to get started.
I am certain to have Ditto questions and TV questions, but now I can at least get started in the right direction.
Cheers!

Okay 1st big question.
I have created a template for books.
I have created TVs for the individual content.
I would now like to remove the "content" box from the editor so that the data goes into the TV boxes and not that content box.
Is that possible?

Thanks

Just install the Hide Editor plugin: http://modxcms.com/extras.html?view=package/view&package=200