First, Happy Thanksgiving to the Drupal folks in the Triangle!
At the last TriDUG meeting there was a short discussion on some of the limitations of CCK. One of the limits pertains exactly to a feature I would like to have. A Directory. I have the following (simplified):
Bob's Bank (corp office)
Street
City, State, Zip
Contact: Bob
Phone
email
website
services
(branch)
Bob's Bank
Street
Louisville KY Zip
Contact: Joanne
Phone
email
website (direct branch link or corp site)
services
(branch)
Memphis, TN etc
services
(branch)
Atlanta, GA etc
services
Mary's Bank (corp office)
Street
City, State, Zip
Contact: Mary
Phone
email
website
(branch)
(branch)
(branch)
There may be 100 Companies each with multiple branches.
In addition to a long listing view, I need to be able to filter by several criteria. One important search will be "Located in . . . (State)". This would bring up all banks doing business in NC, with trust services, and an ATM for example.
The discussion at the meeting indicated this was difficult or impossible. Did I misunderstand?
Does anyone have some advice on accomplishing this? Workarounds? Or links to tutorials?
Sorry for the long post.
Steven
Comments
Happy Thanksgiving to you
Happy Thanksgiving to you too!
CCK has few limitations, so I'm thinking you may have come away with some incomplete information based on our discussion of the current problems surrounding multi-group fields, apologies for that.
Your example above should be fairly trivial to implement with CCK and views. I would create two content types, one for the primary business and one for branches. You should be able to use a nodereference field to establish the relationship between the primary company and it's branches, either via a nodereference field on the primary business content type that points to the branch nodes or (for ease of data entry) a nodereference field attached to your branch content type that points back to the primary business node. Either approach is viable as Views relationships and some minor templating should be able to get you the display you're after.
If you need some help getting this worked out ping me after the holiday and we'll get together to work on it.
Thanks
Thank you for the clarification. As a non-tech, I often miss the subtleties. Thank goodness for TriDUG.
Another route
You might also consider CiviCRM. It's meant for this sort of thing. It's also 50x more involved. Def go with CCK and noderef for short and sweet. Check out CiviCRM though just to see if it includes things you may desire in the future. I use it for one of my sites.