Two parents for every child? Best approach . . .

I’m trying to come up with the most sensible and painless way to structure the site for a Regional Web Magazine I’m working on. I’m trying to create this site to be as accessible as possible, so I’d like to avoid the use of dropdown or flyout menus. Basically the approach I’ve come up with is that there are two "main" paths through the site (the Parents), though permutations within and between them could be almost infinite.

Main Path One: The Region is an area that I want to break down into sub regions. Each of those sub regions will have categories under them-- Events, People, Recreation, Shopping, Antiques, Dining, Lodging, etc.

Main Path Two: Have those categories-- Events, Recreation, etc. be the toplevel and have the regional breakdowns within each of them as subcats.

Could some of you more experienced ModX users suggest how you might approach this in templating and what the upside and downside of your method might be?

A couple other pieces of info-- this is going to be a multi member portal site and though there will be one "chief editor" there will be a lot of other cooks in the kitchen. I suspect this may mean, in some cases, slightly altered templates for different areas or levels of the site, though I’d like to avoid that if possible and try to keep it down to one. Also, the Region is a large one and encompasses much rural area as well as a fairly large city, so the site might grow quite large (which I know ModX can handle well.) I’m trying to create this from the beginning so I don’t have site structure headaches later on if that’s at all possible.

Thanks for any help you can offer.

Since the regional hierarchy is not likely to change could that be stored in a template variable, and then you could limit what is returned based on that variable.

Example: North America->US->California... is stored so all events can be queried based on that, or even use a few Variables, [Region (select), sub region(select based on region), city(based on sub region, ...etc.]

That way you could build your document hierarchy, and menus around your Events, People, etc.

I am planning a similar portfolio tool with some cross-reference and thought this approach might work but am not sure.

Quote from: romdg at Apr 30, 2006, 06:52 AM

Since the regional hierarchy is not likely to change could that be stored in a template variable, and then you could limit what is returned based on that variable.

Example: North America->US->California... is stored so all events can be queried based on that, or even use a few Variables, [Region (select), sub region(select based on region), city(based on sub region, ...etc.]

Yes you can do that, and I believe there is a special capability in Newslisting snippet to do just that using a specific TV filter. For more help and info on this, feel free to post in Newsletter thread. Mark and the other newslisting experts are able to assist you further in using this.

Thanks, Wendy! helpful as always . . .