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Sunday 10 October 2004 7:59:02 am
Okay, since I do not have anything better to do while waiting for my Sunday afternoon pizza, let me type up a simple/primitive suggestion: Create 2 custom content classes:
1) Artist
2) CD The artist class could be used as a collector (folder) inside which we put CD objects. A simple set of attributes would cover our needs:
1) Name (Name of band/artist)
2) Description (Description of band/artist)
3) Image (Image/photo of band/artist) The CD class will be used to store information about CDs. The following set of attributes would be more than sufficient for a very simple site:
1) Name (Title of album/single)
2) Date (Release date of CD)
3) Tracks (XML field containing track information)
4) Image (Image of CD cover) Using the custom classes described above (simply built using some basic datatypes that come with eZ publish) you could create a hierarchial tree/node structure that looks something like this:
Artists/Bands (Folder)
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|--a-ha (Artist)
| |-Headlines And Deadlines (CD)
| |-Minor Earth Major Sky (CD)
| |-Lifelines (CD)
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|--Bruce Springsteen (Artist)
| |-Born In The USA (CD)
| |-Greatest Hits (CD)
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|--Lene Marlin (Artist)
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|-Playing My Game (CD)
|-Another Day (CD)
The top level of your structure would be a folder called "Artists/Bands". Inside this folder you would create an "Artist" object for each artist that should exist on the site. Inside each "Artist" object you would put one or more "CD" objects. This structure will allow you to create an interface that lets the user drill down the tree and look for artists, CDs, tracks, etc. In addition, the user will also be able to search for everything that you've put into the CMS and have marked "searchable". Creating a fancy and easy-to-navigate interface on top of a content structure as the one outlined above would require minimum amount of work; simply because eZ publish offers a lot of out-of-the box features that you could use in this specific (and a bunch of other) case(s). In fact, the only things you would have to worry about are:
1) Installing/setting up eZ publish (making it work)
2) Setting up the content structure (classes, nodes, etc.)
3) Learning the template language (communicating with eZ publish from HTML)
4) Setting up a nice design (HTML/CSS skills) ..the rest is darn simple and you'd probably learn it within a week if you are a techical person who is familiar with HTML, CSS, editing configuration files and who has some degree of programming experience. Regarding an online demonstration of eZ publish set up with multiple languages: take a look at http://www.fast.no Hope this helps Balazs Halasy PS: Keep in mind that this was just a very simple suggestion that would allow the stuff you asked for. However, you could of course complicate things and make a much more powerful solution. The question is: how complicated should this site be?
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