Menu sortings and page-splitting

[sgtstevil]

What would make me more flexible in use of CMS Made Simple are the options to split a menu out across pages and to sort them by different fields, say for example the following:

I use menu to list events for a customer of mine (an Event is a page with several fields). At the moment i've made 3 different fields (Date_day, Date_month and Day_year) to display the name of the Event. If this could be a single date-field and I could sort this by date, it would save them alot of work.

For another client (a booking agency) i've made a page with an overview of artists. They'd like to sort this page according to what order of photo's looks best, but in the detailpage for an artist they'd like an alphabetical overview instead of it being sorted in the same way as the photo's. This could simply be solved by sorting the menu alphabetically, but that's not an option in the menu-tag.

If you have big lists and lots of pages it'd also be nice to be able to break it up in pages in the same way you can with the {news} tag...

Just my 50 cents .

[calguy1000]

for this type of stuff it's best not to try to 'shoehorn' pages to do a job its not really meant for.

Use modules.
Like CGCalendar or CompanyDirectory.

You can easily build navigations from the summary outputs of each of these modules, including pagination in most cases.

[sgtstevil]

Hi CG,

Thanks for the response (and your community-work of course ).

I've used CGCalendar (on www.twig-bookings.com for example), and I understand the purpose of modules for these kinds of things, but the second i start using CGCalendar I give up clean URL's for example... If this would be a flexibility built into the CMS (more "block"-types then just text and image and sorting), I wouldn't have to install the modules you mentioned... I've yet to find a CMS that does this in the way I want it to without becoming overly complex, but it'd make things much easier for me.

[sgtstevil]

Also, don't forget that we're not all hardcore-developers, some of us are "just frontenders". CMSMS stood out for me by giving me tools to make technically sane and manageable websites without an absurd learning-curve, and extending functionality to support pagination and sortings per standard would make it alot more powerful for me. Maybe take a look at how MODx CMS combined with their Ditto snippet solve this problem...

[kermit]

I use menu to list events for a customer of mine (an Event is a page with several fields). At the moment i've made 3 different fields (Date_day, Date_month and Day_year) to display the name of the Event. If this could be a single date-field and I could sort this by date, it would save them alot of work.

I've used news module with custom fields and templates for events listings, complete with categories, sorted listings by month and year (optionally 'expiring' past events), and event detail pages. Works pretty well, once you get everything set up.