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Adrian Ursu Dynamicweb Employee
Adrian Ursu
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Hi Guys,

I am working on a publishing project. More CMS less ecommerce.

The plan is to move a publishing site fron Drupal to DW. One of the features from Drupal that came up during the initial analysis is the Taxonomy..

Is there any way to create and use dictionaries of values?

It looks very much like a list of items but right now defining and using an item type or item type list in the attriobutes of an article is not exactly easy. I was hoping there will be another way of doing it.

And I am planning on using DW9.

Thanks,

Adrian


Replies

 
Kristian Kirkholt Dynamicweb Employee
Kristian Kirkholt
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Hi Adrian

From what you write here it sound like Items is the way forward here.

I think that we would need some kind of concrete example to guide you in a more specifik way.

Kind Regards
Kristian Kirkholt

 
Adrian Ursu Dynamicweb Employee
Adrian Ursu
Reply

Hi Kristian,

I would use items but I don't need pages for the items. And in order to make an Item available for a list, you have to make it available as a paragraph otherwise it is not available for select.

One other thing is that Taxonomy should be somehow available for editors.

For example I was thinking of adding a Taxonomy page in which I would create an Item list for each dictionary.

The problem then will move to how I use the Items in another Items. probably by Item Relation lists ,which gets me back to the issue above.

Another thing to consider is the way this item list is gonna be displayed in back-end. Sometimes this taxonomy has a lot of possible values. Displaying them in a dropdown or a checkbox/radio box makes it hard to search and select a specific value. I know I have posted some featrure requests on this issue a while ago but I have no confirmation if anything changed in 8.9 or 9.x.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Adrian

 

 
Kristian Kirkholt Dynamicweb Employee
Kristian Kirkholt
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Hi Adrian

This is, as you point out, a feature request. So you would have to wait for product mamanger to decide if this goes into the planning for upcoming releases.

Kind Regards
Kristian Kirkholt

 
Adrian Ursu Dynamicweb Employee
Adrian Ursu
Reply

Thank you Kristian,

I believe, if we position ourselves as an soon-to-be enterprise CMS, this type of functionality should not be missing.

Other (cheaper or open-source application) already have something similar. If we want our customers to see the more advanced features, we need to fulfill first the basic requirements.

At least that's my opinion about this.

Of course, Management might have a different view on the subject.

Thank you,

Adrian

 
Nicolai Pedersen
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Hi Adrian

What features do you miss from items to do this?

Just checked out Drupals Taxonomy, and I can do just about the same thing with a simple setup.

See my dumps - a Taxonomy folder and subject item, one or more checkbox fields on the items that needs it, and thats it. Pretty simple.

Capture.PNG Capture1.PNG
 
Adrian Ursu Dynamicweb Employee
Adrian Ursu
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Hi Nicolai,

Your solution works very well when you have 10 options in your list.

But think about having 100 options in there, and try to choose 3 of them, then change your mind and try to uncheck one of them and add 5 more.

It's not the data structure that is missing (that can be solved indeed prettuy nicely with Items and Item lists) but the proper interface to make it usable.

Auto-complete, search as you type, sorting of the selected values etc. Modern stuff that can be done with Javascript in the interface without changing the data source or data storage.

And since the interface is pretty closed for us, I cannot make my own display methods or my own field providers. Unless I am mistaken about this limitation.

Thank you,
Adrian

 

 
Nicolai Pedersen
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Hi Adrian

Thank you for clarifying.

You can indeed extend the UI for Items. Each field is is of a type that inherits Dynamicweb.Content.Items.Editors.Editor - you can create your own. Attached an example of the checkbox editor and the checkbox list editor. The latter is the one from my example, and you can change that to have another UI that allows for another way of editing.

 
Adrian Ursu Dynamicweb Employee
Adrian Ursu
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Hi Nicolai,

That's Awesome! I was not aware that we can extend the UI for Items. This can actually solve a lot of interface issues.

Thank you very much.

Adrian

 

 

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