Creative Reorganization

The Challenge:

Dozens of books are published each year as a result of CSLR projects. The Center asked Cast Iron Coding to come up with a solution for organizing their publication data in such a way that it would be user friendly on the frontend and easy for CSLR staff to update in the backend. Many publication had multiple authors, and each publication could belong to one or more categorys. Furthermore, publication records needed to include a picture of the cover, and CSLR asked for flexibility in terms of editing the look and feel of each record.

The Solution:

Not wanting to limit CSLR's ability to influence the look and feel of publication records, Cast Iron Coding came up with a solution in which each publication was given it's own page in the page tree, which meant that any standard TYPO3 content elements could be used to present the publication. The site-wide sub-navigation element was replaced with a custom plugin that generated a menu of books by drawing upon CSLR defined categories and subcategories. The output in the main column was also handled by a custom plugin, which drew content from publication pages based on the selection in the sub-nav. All output was cached, meaning the publications section could be easily searched using core TYPO3 search functionality.

The most important aspect of this solution was that it allowed CSLR staff to add a new publication to the site by simply creating a new page record and assigning the correct authors and categories to it using custom fields. The end result was a index of publications that was both easy to maintain in the backend and highly usable for the end user.