Sorting pages by type

Just trying to get to grips with Ditto. I’m working on a fairly large site that has various information on a lot of subjects. I have categorised them by letter of the alphabet (ie I have made containers for a, b, c, d, etc and then placed the subjects that begin with the relevant letter in them) This makes it easier for me to manage.

So far I have managed to make Ditto display a list of articles nicely. For example if I click on the letter M in the website it takes me to a page that shows all articles beginning with that letter.

However I also want to give the user the ability to display a list of articles based on a type/keyword. For example if I want to have two different categories (for example "Tranquil" "Loud") how can I get Ditto to display the relevant pages? I want it so that if the user clicks on "Loud" as a category they get taken to a page that lists all pages that are relevant to that.

So far I have tried using keywords, but I can’t get them to work properly, and I’m not sure that they are right for what I want to do.

Okay, found out how to do it, I think.

One thing I think that the Ditto documentation lacks is some real world examples using the various functions. To a non-programmer like myself it can be pretty confusing looking through a list of parameters. Just a thought

http://ditto.modxcms.com/tutorials.html

Quote from: SimonMW at Jun 01, 2007, 02:01 PM

Okay, found out how to do it, I think.

One thing I think that the Ditto documentation lacks is some real world examples using the various functions. To a non-programmer like myself it can be pretty confusing looking through a list of parameters. Just a thought

Would be cool if you share with us how did you do it? ...

Would be cool if you share with us how did you do it?

With lots of headbanging!

I used the tutorials on the Ditto site. However I have found that those tutorials often use a lot of terminology that assumes that the reader already knows how it works. The Pagination tutorial in particular needs the language to be simplified. At least for me. I’m stupid!

I love the idea of the video tutorials. Although I couldn’t get the one shown to work (plus there was no explanation as to what the call [+tagLinks+] refers to). Perhaps that was key to why I couldn’t get it to work. But there was no explanation as to what that was in the tutorial.

Wiki is for you if you have something to share.

It is easy to mock me. But I’m sure I am not alone. The vast majority of Mod X documentation is excellent. But the Ditto ones need more clarification. and organisation. I had to work out how to use it by cross referencing various posts in this forum with what was said on the Ditto tutorial website.

Don’t get me wrong, I fully appreciate all the knowledge on these forums, and I love ModX. But I would appreciate it if I wasn’t mocked for making such suggestions (such as the "maybe Wiki is for you" comment implying that if I don’t like it, write one myself. I’m not knowledgable enough with Ditto to do that).

All the Ditto website really needs is a Quickstart for Dummies page that gets people up and running with it quickly without them having to trawl through it to find the basic functioning.

To be honest until I started to dig a little I wasn’t even sure exactly what Ditto did! I was using ListIndexer to list articles until now because I found Ditto to look a bit daunting. And not being sure if it would do what I wanted anyway made me doubly apprehensive. I thought it was purely some way of organising news. I didn’t know it could add thumbnails to article links etc. None of this is made clear from the beginning, when it should be.

I don’t think you’re being mocked. I think MotSmart was suggesting that you could post what you’ve learned about how to support pages by type on the wiki so that others could benefit from what you’ve managed to do. I would certainly like to learn it.

I’m not knowledgable enough with Ditto to do that

I disagree with your statement. You are obviously knowledgeable enough to figure out the problem you had. Which is more than I can say for myself at the moment.

I don’t think you were mocked, just an invitation to post your solution so that other can find it easily and learn.

I concur with Patrick and dev_cw; I don’t think you were being mocked. MotSmart was just saying since you figured out how to do it, share it so others in the same situation can benefit from your experience.

RE: "Quickstart for Dummies"
What do you think should be on said page?