Calling TV Gurus: "sidebar modules"

Hello all,

I am implementing a pattern that comes up pretty regularly for me, which is a sidebar where there are a number of positions at the side of a page where the content editor can choose what appears in each.

I am taking a different approach this time, and am looking for a second set or eyes to perhaps make the approach more elegant, but otherwise to fix a problem.

The sidebar content is contained in resources under a Sidebar parent in the resource tree. These just have a title and content defined.

Sidebar
- Sidebar-a
- Sidebar-b
- Sidebar-c
- Sidebar-etc

The sidebar content is flexible - could be anything,

The resources that support sidebars have three Resource TVs, which points to the Sidebar parent. So far so good, the content editor can select a sidebar resource via the TV. There are also three list-box TVs that define the class that will be used to style the sidebar element. So sidebar1 TV contains the resource to be displayed, and sidebar1-colour defines the class that styles it (red||green||blue for example).

The template contains this:


Note that there is a single template for displaying the sidebar elements, and it looks like this:



Now rather than only having one template per colour and hardcoding the id, I want to use the sidebar1-colour - like this:



The problem here is that that this can't work for all three sidebars without a separate template again.

It would need to look something like:



And then get sidebarid somehow passed through from getResources. I can't think of a way of doing this...

I know I could create a custom snippet and solve this fairly easily, however I wanted to see if I could get an out-of -the-box solution with just standard modx components.

Any suggestions would be welcome - sometimes with modx you need to think differently and I get the feeling I am missing a simpler approach.

Cheers,

Paul

[ed. note: paulkoan last edited this post 15 years, 1 month ago.]

At first glance, it seems wasteful to use getResources to get a single resource. It will do a lot of unnecessary processing. How about using this for the TV's value:

Unless you need the &tpl to display the resource. In that case, I'd use a simple snippet like this:


As for the color, I think I would create separate CSS rules and put the class name in the sidebar-colour TV.
[ed. note: BobRay last edited this post 15 years, 1 month ago.]

Thanks, yes I was thinking getResources was overkill, but at least is a "standard" snippet, which minimises maintenance.

However I can see that a custom snippet is trivial.

With the colour part of the sidebar module, it seemed tricky because there are three - but yes, I can put the div for each one into a chunk holding the three sidebars separate from tpl used for the snippet.

What I would really like is a tv / chunk solution that allowed any number of sidebar modules to be selectable rather than the artificial cap of three that my approach takes.

I think my idea would work for that if you created all the CSS rules:



One caveat is that the custom snippet will not respect permissions or published/deleted status unless you modify it to do so. This will take care of the published/deleted status: